We have everything to look forward to this 2020: a more exciting digital landscape, a user-centered World Wide Web, and your very own SEO lead generation machine that we’ve drawn up just for you because we believe that every SEO company needs a boost this coming year.

If you are thinking of how to make this coming 2020 even more powerful than before, make sure that you read our checklist and guidelines, and as always: keep the customers at the center of everything!

Where are we headed?

SEO lead generation, like other B2B leadgen efforts, is dictated by trends. Every year literally brings in something new to all the industries, so it would be best if you have a good idea as to how leadgen has changed this past year alone, so you can plan ahead for the coming year.

One of the biggest changes that has been observed in B2B leadgen is gradual but consistent erosion of the centrality of the marketing funnel.

What this means is that customers are now looking for a closer and more meaningful relationship with businesses, and the old technique of nurturing different levels of a marketing funnel depending on where the customers are in the buying process is simply not enough anymore.

It’s important to realize that if you are not creating any real effort to provide a more personalized experience to customers, they are not going to warm up to your business the way they did say, five years ago or more.

The complexity of doing business online nowadays means the more traditional routes of marketing will necessitate much long buyer cycles. Nurturing your relationship with your customers will ensure that you won’t be stuck with the same tools and tendencies of the yesteryears.

The second big change, which we should definitely not ignore is the fact that a large percentage of personal, business searches now are being carried out with voice search. We’re talking about Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Windows’ own Cortana software.

This becomes an important point of consideration when you look at your old content: how much of your old content has been optimized so that Google can surface them for voice searches?

Natural human language is often simpler, yes, but questions through voice search are often phrased in a looser and more natural manner, which is why Google is always on the lookout for specific pieces of content that it can surface when people ask the search engine questions.

As a business owner, it is imperative that you begin investing in structured data, and your website at this point should already be 100% mobile ready as Google has unrolled its mobile-first policy a long time ago.

Are messaging apps also growing in popularity with digital marketing? Yes, and we may be seeing messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger playing ever more important roles as the Age of the Internet of Things comes closer and closer.

Instant messaging apps used to be primarily for bringing friends and family together. Surely, Facebook developed its instant messaging platform mainly because it wanted to appeal to broadest band of users globally.

However, the ways things have developed this year, we see instant messaging apps as integral to providing fast customer care solutions to clients. Of course, there’s also the angle where businesses can easily push out campaigns to customers easily with a series of instant messages.

Now if you aren’t just that sure yet with using instant messaging apps to connect with your customers, you can test the waters first by using an older platform that is still pretty much rocking it in social media for professionals and companies in terms of locating and generating leads: LinkedIn.

The Leadgen Machine

With so many bases to cover, it can be daunting (to say the least) to create an intelligent master strategy for generating quality SEO leads. That’s why we decided to create an expert and very hands on “leadgen machine” or cheat sheet that tackles a variety of issues and strategies, so your business is not left out.

Email marketing efforts

Email marketing continues to be widely used in the B2B sector, and a recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute has revealed that over 90% of all digital marketers still use email marketing to promote their services and form lasting relationships with customers. Additional statistics are also promising in terms of ROI and basic leadgen efforts:

– Digital marketers on average earn up to $30 per $1 spent on email marketing efforts.
– 86% of marketers primarily prefer using email marketing for pushing campaigns and information to their customers.
– 60% of marketers consider email marketing their number one “go to” for different campaigns.

To create powerful emails that work, make sure that you:

– Create relevant and personalized subject lines so your customers will not ignore or mark your emails as spam. Improving your subject line can boost open rates by as much as 26%.

– Perform the proper segmentation in your lists, so you don’t lump together everyone into just one massive list. There has to be a way for you to message only specific clusters of your list, and you can use factors like browsing activity and social factors to create these segments in your list.

– Be sure to include information and ads that are highly relevant to your customers only. In short, don’t spam them, and don’t make them feel that you are only there to make expensive offers.

We’ve talked about this before in other posts, but the current age of the Internet is highly focused on the customer, and brands that know how to forge a meaningful relationship with their customers are going to be strong finishers.

Mastering the conversion phase

Generating leads, and eventually, prospects, takes time and the process involved is actually both a science and an art. Let’s talk about what could arguably be the most important marketing phase for a business owner who is trying to generate more SEO leads: conversion.

Getting people to visit your website is tough enough: once they arrive, you need to start converting them. During the conversion phase, it’s all or nothing, because if a visitor jumps without really paying attention to what you have to offer, that’s a lost potential prospect. Many businesses have at least one powerful CTA or call to action on their website. This is the major hook, or the big offer that transforms a cursory visit into a potentially qualified lead.

However, what many people forget at this point is that getting just one person to convert takes time and effort. Of course, we’d love it if 50% of your visitors will convert, but in reality, even getting 2% conversion is an accomplishment already.

5%? That’s amazing already. What we’d like to do to improve the chances of conversion is creating a sufficient number of “conversion points” on the website to sort of ‘sweep’ the largest number of visitors.

You can increase your conversion points by rethinking the dynamic content that you offer your visitors through your website.

A one-track plan is simply not going to work. There has to be variety in the available information, so you can convert the highest possible number of traffic. Through consistent testing and distribution of content, you can ‘prepackage’ the process and simply repeat it so you can get the same, consistent results throughout the year.

Some best practices in the industry for heightening conversions are:

– Simplify your website and focus on getting the information to your customers. Websites should be easily navigable, and there should be every effort in making sure that people are able to find what they need when they open your company’s website immediately.

– Your website’s service pages should provide adequate information about all your services, as well as the packages that you are offering. In addition to promoting the services, the experience of reading through your service pages should be easy and informative, and people should be truly enlightened when they go through the dynamic content that you have prepared.

– Don’t forget to add testimonials to your website. The best time to ask for testimonials from past clients is immediately after the completion of a project, because you want to take advantage of their happiness and high emotions.

– Do not underestimate the power of the newsletter. Thought leaders are still creating and distributing newsletters today, and just making that kind of effort to bring your customers into the loop of an ever-changing industry will have such a powerful, positive impact on your branding.

– Be sure to create an effective and compelling sales drip when someone signs up to become part of your list. As we have mentioned before, your list should definitely be segmented, and different sales drips can be employed to improve the chances of landing a sale. The basic parts of a sales drip are as follows:

1st email – The first email is going to be a generic thank you email that provides context as to what kind of company you have and what type of information they can expect from you in the coming months.

2nd email – This email opens the interest in the solution. Instead of doing a hard sell, introduce the product by explaining to them a problem that occurs commonly throughout the industry they belong to.

3rd email – The third email tackles the different resistances or objections that people have to solving the said problems.

4th email – The fourth email still does not directly deal with promoting the product, but instead will provide further context through social validation or testimonials from previous clients.

5th email – This is the final step, and by now your customers would already be interested in finding out what you want to offer them in the first place.