There is just so much at stake when it comes to lead generation that you can’t rest on your past strategies, you need to continue evolving and changing to meet the needs of the market. How do you make your website more competitive, overall? How do you generate more leads this year than last year, with solid adjustments to your SEO lead generation system?
Here is our weekly Rankleads rundown of pro lead generation strategies for SEO companies:
1. Make sure it looks good on mobile
Whether you are tweaking your main website or a special landing page for your Facebook or Google ads, it’s always a good idea to make sure that your pages are loading fast and well on mobile devices.
The reason for this suggestion is simple: you need to be able to tap the 80% search rate that’s streaming in from mobile devices. And there’s the fact that Google has long ago made an essential change to how they display search results.
Google now prioritizes mobile devices, so mobile versions of websites are displayed first instead of the PC or desktop views. If users still need to pinch and zoom every page on your website just to be able to read the text or make sense of those buttons and lead capture fields, there’s something terribly wrong with your UI, and your UX will go down terribly, too.
Pay closer attention too, to how your CTAs look and how you displaying your lead capture forms, too. Anything less than five stars on the scale of readability should be reconsidered.
2. Maximize the impact of exit pop-ups
Believe it or not, some businesses have been able to boost their lead generation by as much as 1375% by designing and implementing powerful and intelligently laid out exit pop-ups. What used to be the sole job of the landing page lead capture form or the sidebar sign-up form is now being dominated by exit pop-ups.
But how exactly can you get such stellar results? The experts have weighed in and they say you can:
– Provide insider information or content that is exclusive to people who sign up using the exit pop-up.
– Provide a stunning offer for a new product or service, and provide an additional incentive to grab the offer through the pop-up.
– If your website has a store that sells stuff other than your SEO services, you can also use an exit pop-up to remind customers that they have purchased something. This can help reduce shopping cart abandonment greatly.
– Guiding customers toward your funnel is always a good thing. Sometimes, all it takes to bring a possible lead back is to offer really hot content. Depending on what type of content has already provided the best A/B testing results, you can offer an article, video, or gift depending on what you’ve discovered that people liked in the past.
To create the best exit pop-up, you should:
– Provide a clear reason why your visitor should stay in the website instead of exiting. There’s no point in literally saying “please stay,” so there has to be a really compelling reason. Now would be a good time to think of a really good lead magnet. However, you also need to devise the lead magnet in such a way that it fulfills the need/s of your target audience. How well do you know your audience? What type of content do they like? Do they even like downloading content to their computers?
– Add a progress bar to let visitors know how far along they are in completing the steps needed to receive the incentive, offer, or download. The progress bar helps condition people to get into the mood of completing a few more steps to get something of value. The progress bar is also an awesome way to confirm with the visitor that he/she is getting a cool upgrade by performing a simple step, like signing up for your mailing list or something to this effect.
– A clean design always works well with visitors in every niche, simply because they look better and the text is easier to read. People don’t want to put too much effort when browsing the Web and anything that’s even mildly hard to read is guaranteed to unhook their interest.
It’s been said that you only have about three seconds to please the brain of the user (subconsciously) and if something doesn’t make sense within that span of time, the user might lose interest and simply move on.
BONUS: Exit Pop-up Layouts
3. Segment your leads.
If you haven’t been doing this already, we’re here to help. Lead segmentation is basically grouping your leads so you know how your audience came to be on your main list. People have different interests and soon enough, as your list grows, so will the different groups in your list. Given, you need to create a proper process for it, but in the long term, everything will pay off.
Through lead segmentation, you can achieve the following:
– It can help you introduce your branding more clearly to your customers and build trust in what you do because you will be able to craft the right type of materials for different types of leads.
– You will be able to discern from lead segmentation how your competitors are engaging with their customers. This way, you can remold how you do things to remove factors that keep dragging your leads (and sales) down.
– Have a clear idea of what your website visitors love about your site in general. Are more people signing up with the free downloads? Is that sidebar sign up box doing well? Are people craving for more blogs? What exactly about your website is attractive to people?
– Be able to see your leads in homogenous groups that are easier to manage, overall.
Leads can be categorized based on the following factors:
a. Demographic segmentation – With demographics, you are going to focus on the personal aspects of your visitors. How old are they? Are they married? What’s their gender? What’s their educational attainment? What institutions are they affiliated with? Where do they get their income?
You might also be interested in the type of culture they have back home, as well as their ethnicity, or the country where they’re surfing from if your business serves a transnational customer base.
b. Geographic segmentation – This is exceptionally important for SEO companies, as many SEO companies are focused on serving specific cities, towns or states. Of course, you can always accept a contract from another state, but if you specialize say in a specific type of business in a particular city, then you’d want to focus most of your efforts there because that’s what you are really good at, right?
With geographic segmentation, it’s important to know:
– Where your leads live
– Are they living in a more or less urban are, or a rural zone?
– What type of land are they from?
– From what region do they originate?
c. Customer attitude segmentation – This type of segmentation focuses on what customers do on your website. It can help you measure the following:
– Behavior of leads
– How many times a lead makes a purchase on the website
– The general loyalty of leads as they sign up for more downloads and other services/freebies.
Time to Demystify
SEO lead generation can be confusing at times, so we created a Q&A portion for today’s blog to tackle the most common and pressing questions in this domain.
Q: Are buyer personas important?
A: Definitely! Creating buyer personas and profiles can help you understand who your typical visitors are, what they need, and what they are looking for when they first land on your website. Preferably you should perform this type of analysis at least on a monthly basis, then aggregate your data and take a look at what you have every quarter. Based on your date, you should be able to determine the different groups you have visiting your website.
Q: Should I focus on a ton of content?
A: It depends on what you mean by a ton of content. If you can churn out super high-quality content that is bound to be authoritative, then yes. If not, you may want to reconsider. With billions of pages on the Web, you need to be competitive in the sense that the marketing content that you are offering is miles ahead of the competition. Let us tell you, it is always possible, and it is always a good thing when you get genuinely useful information out there for your visitors.
Genuinely good content gets two things done immediately: it makes your website authoritative, and Google will reward you, and second, website visitors become leads because you put out such good content.
It has to be marketing content that they can actually use to make their lives easier. Remember: people go on the Internet to look for solutions to their problems. This is not going to be changing any time soon. People don’t go online to be amazed at how well designed a website is. No – there is always a need, and if you can respond to that need in the most convenient way possible, then you have winning marketing content indeed.
Q: How important is social media?
A: Social media is EVERYTHING nowadays. Google pays close attention to websites that have high social clout, and getting lots of likes and shares can greatly improve your chances of getting ranked high on search engines. So your content has to not be just engaging, but more importantly, it has to look good enough to be shareable to people’s feeds. When they look at your content, they should be able to say “hey, this is some amazing content; I’d like other people to see it as well.”
Q: How important is lead engagement?
A: Lead engagement is huge in the grand scheme of things because we don’t just want your visitors to sign up and not care about the brand anymore.
A lot of the effort needed to create genuine leads that will be loyal to your company is engaging them in a dialogue through online events, and by educating them, too. Through proper engagement at the very beginning, you are actually paving the way for them to become truly interested in what you have to offer later on.
Why? Because they trust you. We know it can be hard to collect the emails of decision-makers, but by using the right tools, like Prospect.io, your overall workload can be reduced significantly. You also need to weave in the engagement of prospective leads into your existing system.
Q: Is email marketing still relevant?
A: Despite what the naysayers have been saying for years, people still use emails extensively (especially for work), and that makes it one of the most viable channels to get the word out about your brand.
While there has been some decline in recent years, with digital marketers reducing their budgets for email marketing (we wonder why), you can still get pretty great results by sending out email blasts. What’s really necessary at this point in time is to make sure that what you are actually giving your subscribers in terms of content is what they really need.
We want your subscribers to be as engaged and interested as possible with what you are sending through emails. If your emails are deemed a burden or spam, they are going to mark those emails as spam and eventually if enough people do that, your emails just might end up in the trash heap without ever touching your prospective leads’ inboxes. That is a terrible fate for well-wrought emails, indeed.
Q: How do I make my marketing funnel better?
A: Much of what has to be done to improve a marketing funnel has something to do with what is called the buyer’s journey.
Basically, the buyer’s journey refers to the different steps that people go through before they make a sale. The buyer journey for each type of product or service is different, but there are broad strokes that are present in every industry.
For example, it is common for leads to be looking for information for some time before they make a decision. How you lead a customer from one phase to another is completely up to you – but just make sure that the buyer’s journey is aligned with people’s expectations and needs, all the same.
Q: Should I use more than one channel to build my brand?
A: Yes, definitely! Multichannel marketing is awesome in creating brand awareness and building your own knowledge of how people obtain information and interact with brands on different platforms. Each platform, including social media, websites, blogs, and PPC, has its own special language that you need to master.
If you can get into the right mindset with your customers using the right language, too, you can be more engaging as a brand and see a spike in prospective leads. Basically, this is getting people to be interested in what you have to offer from where they are (i.e. what platform they are using). For example – if you want to get more leads on Instagram, it might do you good to create information-rich Instagram posts that people will easily want to like and maybe even share on other platforms.
Q: Are influencers of any help with digital marketing?
A: They sure are. In fact, a lot of large brands are still using influencers to make headway into communities that they didn’t have direct access to before. What social media influencers offer is the ability to speak to people in a way that you are already vouched for by someone whom people already trust. In a big way, social media influencers are like celebrities on a smaller scale, and because they are quite specific, you can take your time in choosing the best influencer for your promotions to get the best results.
Q: Should I still get testimonials?
A: Testimonials are massive in building trust, and they also break down that inner resistance when people meet a brand for the first time. If people feel that others have already benefitted from your hard work, then they would also be ecstatic to try your services to get the same results. So get those testimonials rolling in and don’t forget to post them on your social media and on your website so they’ll be ready when traffic comes in.
