Back in the day, the goal was just to drive traffic back to your site.
However, today’s buyers expect to be able to become educated and informed before talking to one of your sales reps so they can ask more efficient questions. This ends up saving them time, hassle and confusion—which means it shortens your sales cycle.
Keep in mind the “research” often isn’t the decision maker: they are there to do the research and report back to the right person. So simply having a website isn’t enough anymore. It has to be a damn good, sales-driven website offering these website content written in the style of professional SEO copywriting.
BEWARE: there are MANY writers out there claiming they can do this but have little to no training in the specific style of writing, and training is required. Anyone who is claiming to be a copywriter should be expected to show their certification.
Once your website content is awesome, you will already see an increase in the conversions you expect from your inbound marketing—just like so many of Tangible Words’ clients, like Topsy Farms for example.
But your website is also not the place to stop. Once you’ve invested into a website design, CMS and professional SEO copywritten content, you want to make sure you do the following things to keep that investment continually working for you, by using more Lead Generation tools.
First Fix Your Website. Next, use Effective Secondary Lead Generation Tools:
- Niche E-newsletter
- Build your list: make sure you don't lose inbound inquiries by having users request to join your newsletter on their first visit to your website.
- Try Aaron Ross’ Cold Calling 2.0 outbound sales technique to see if it would be a good use of their time to join your inbound list. When properly targeting that answer is often “yes!”
- Use your newsletter to nurture leads through their purchasing decisions. Recognize that they have to move from “awareness” of you, all the way to “opportunity for business” to become a true prospect, and your emailed content can help them move through that process if your content strategy is set up correctly. Offer emailed content that: informs; helps decisions; solves problems; highlights opportunities; and provides incentivized offers.
- Use a Company Website Blog Function to Build your SEO credibility.
- Make sure you have a content strategy in place to have SEO rich and question-answering rich titles on your blog to serve your customers’ needs.
- Use Social Media Marketing as your tool for disseminating your blog posts and making connections with Rivers of prospects. Your social media marketing should (for each tool) be designed to service a specific Audience. For example ,here’s a basic example of how you might use the following Social Media Tools for different content strategies:
- Facebook – educated family and friends on what you do so if a need arises in their network, they think of sending business your way.
- LinkedIn – use for credibility building in your industry. Connect with Professionals, Verticals, Training so you prove your efforts to stay at the top of best practices in your industry.
- Twitter – Create specific lists of relationships you want to foster and engage with them. Engaging does not mean “broadcasting” your blog posts – it means taking an interest in what other people are saying – not just talking about yourself.
- Develop your Niches and find out where they hang out.
- Geoffrey Moore taught us that your company will wind up meandering thirsty and eventually dead in the “Valley of Death” if you don’t figure out who your early ‘niche’ markets are. So do what he says and establish your ‘Beachhead’ markets early.
- More targeted networking – you need to be able to identify who your ideal client is from across the room, and confirm it within 1-2 minutes of your first conversation.
- Use the 3 hours and 15 minute sales cycle: back to Aaron Ross, spend 15 minutes assessing talking to the person you think is a perfect prospect to see if working together is a good fit for you both.
What are your most fruitful methods of Lead Generation?
