Generating leads is increasingly difficult.
You not only have to create really valuable content to educate, inform and gain the trust of website visitors before they even consider filling in a form on your website – you also have to leverage a number of different lead generation strategies.
There are an absolute tonne of lead generation strategies, and each one will have a different impact on your business’ lead generation efforts. Things like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will have a much more instant impact on lead generation numbers, whereas long lasting blog content will have more long-term success.
While you can’t expect overnight success with content and Inbound Marketing, once it starts working you will continue to generate high-quality leads for your business for years to come.
But if you want what we describe as “quick wins”, you have plenty of tools at your disposal depending on what platform you use. As HubSpot users, we've concentrated this blog on the HubSpot tools that you can use for quick wins - but many of them can be used across most marketing automation platforms.
I must say now that these are not shortcuts to success, and shouldn’t be considered long-term lead generation strategies, but – if you have a consistent and high-quality Inbound and content marketing programme – you can use the following tips to attract more website visitors, increase conversions and generate more leads.
Activate sales notifications for returning contacts.
This is so simple but yet so effective.
By activating sales notifications, every time a lead or customer comes back to your website, your sales team will be notified right away and receive information on what content and web pages they have viewed. How incredibly useful is that?
By knowing exactly when leads and customers are on your website, as well as what pages they are looking at, your sales team will be in a great position to engage and push leads and customers further down the sales funnel.
The best example is if you have a pricing page on your website. Knowing that one of your leads has viewed your pricing page one minute ago puts your sales team in a fantastic position to sell.
You can find out how to set up lead revisit notifications here.
Install Conversations (chat bots) on your high-value pages.
If you haven’t set up bots on your website using HubSpot or another tool like Drift, you’re missing out on opportunities to convert website visitors.
Website visitors have been filling out forms all over the Internet for more than a decade now, and for some people it has become quite tedious. In the past, forms were easy conversions – but now people are much more used to using voice search, messaging apps and chatbots to get the information they want. For example, I can't remember the last time I completed a form to download a piece of content!
According to Ometrics, ChatBots convert 3x better than email. The aim of the game now is to try and get a conversion without a website visitor knowing it’s a conversion. Simply put the HubSpot bot tool on your best-performing pages. You’ll be surprised at how many people start chatting and converting!
Create quick bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) offers.
From my experience, most marketing people are great at creating top of the funnel content, through videos, blogs, eBooks etc. However, we generally aren't very good at bottom of the funnel offers - outside of 'contact us' and 'free trial'. It's incredibly important that we all focus on creating content and conversions for every stage of the buyer's journey.
Have a think about what BOFU offers you can provide quickly without creating anything new. Your sales team probably have lots of sample pricing decks and product brochures, they may be able to offer limited time discounts as well.
If you have an engaged contact database in your contact database portal, every so often you should send out an email with a BOFU content offer – a product demo or brochure, for example.
While the conversion rate of that email will be much less than a top or middle-of-the-funnel content offer that is focused on educating the recipient, there may be those in your contact database who are ready to buy and you just don’t know about it.
Run an NPS survey
Your customers are your best marketers. People today are much more likely to make purchase decisions based on recommendations from those they know and trust, rather than comparison websites - and Marketing Managers can really benefit from NPS results to aid future activity.
With this considered, you want to know how happy your customers are and what they’re saying about your business – and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey can help you with that.
Using NPS…
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If the customer is unhappy, you can find out why and deal with the situation. It’s much better to know and help out then not know at all.
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If the customer is content, you can try and find out what will make their life as a customer of yours better and improved.
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If the customer is delighted, you can ask for reviews and references – they may have a contact themselves that could benefit from your services.
Repurpose your gated and non-gated content
You are probably creating lots of blogs, and also creating lots of eBooks - well you will have been in the past. One tip is to take all of that great eBook and PDF content you've created, and simply turn it into web pages. Why? Well you must remember that Google isn't indexing your PDF's - and such you aren't ranking for those keywords.
On the flip side, you probably have lots of blog content that you can take, migrate, and turn into downloadable offers. Having a mix of content that is freely available, but also available in PDF format is a great way to engage and convert a high variety of leads.
Create meeting links and put them on your homepage
One fear prospects have when they fill in a form on a website is that a salesperson will be calling them within minutes to “find out more”. The prospect might be busy or unable to take that call, so end up not filling out a form.
The HubSpot Meetings tool resolves this issue by making it easy for prospects to book a meeting at a time that suits them, meaning they can speak to a salesperson when they are ready to.
HubSpot even has a free meetings tool you can use, even if you aren't a paying HubSpot customer.
Repurpose your content
One of the main challenges content creators have is having the time and resource to actually create new content. For that reason we try hard to make the most out of every single piece of content we create by repurposing it.
If you have a lot of content on your website already, consider doing some of the following:
- Turn your long-form eBooks into blogs. You might have things like ’ten tips’ or ‘ten ways’ style content – simply divide them up and publish them onto your blog over a few weeks.
- Turn your blogs into eBooks. In a similar way, you may have been blogging about a certain topic for a few weeks. If collate all those blogs together, you could create a really awesome piece of long-form content. All you need to do afterwards is build a landing page for the eBook.
- Turn videos into blogs. Do you have any thought-leadership videos? If you do, upload them to your HubSpot CMS, create blogs around each video and embed the respective video into each blog.
- Turn eBooks and blogs into social imagery. Your blogs and eBooks are full of awesome tips and quotes that can easily be turned into cool images that can be used across platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.
- Turn videos into more videos. Do you have any videos that are over five minutes long? You might be able to cut them up into four or five short videos to use on social channels.
Get budget for Paid Social
Paid Social is a fantastic way to quickly generate quality leads. You might have a new eBook, a new video or an upcoming webinar you want to promote. You can use a relatively small amount of money to promote these assets on social media platforms and generate high-quality leads. LinkedIn and Facebook, for example, have some really granular targeting options for paid advertisements. You can advertise your content assets to specific companies, locations or job titles to ensure they reach the right people.
You can connect your ad campaigns to HubSpot and track them, so what are you waiting for
Get an email out ASAP
This sounds simple, but are you frequently emailing your database?
Simply build some emails in HubSpot, include a relevant content offer and get them out to your audience as soon as you can!
Collate content into high converting pillar pages
Once again, repurposing content is key. As mentioned before, you probably have a variety of content on your website in the form of blogs, website pages or eBooks. If you want to get the most out of your content (and improve the ranking of your web pages) build a pillar page. It’s the best way to build SEO value in 2019, so go ahead and build a 2,000-word web page about one of your key topic areas and link lots of content to it. Not only will a pillar page provide tremendous value to your prospects, it’ll also be seen as an authoritative source of information by search engines.
The HubSpot Content Strategy tool can help you to build out your pillar pages and link blogs to it.
Inbound Marketing doesn’t provide instant overnight success but if you have the content available – HubSpot’s tools are there for you to act quickly and swiftly to start conversations and start selling better.
