The main reason why entrepreneurs around the world are spending a seemingly excessive amount of time and money on their digital marketing strategy is that it is the only effective way they can generate solid leads. Your ability to generate leads is directly proportional to the quality of your digital marketing strategy.
There are four major components that your digital marketing strategy must contain in order to drive leads. These include content marketing, paid promotion on social media, use of local SEO, and segmented email marketing. Essentially, these four components each cater to a very specific portion of a consumer’s buying journey. Cumulatively, they result in the most effective lead generation marketing strategy for the internet.
Let’s break these down one by one.
Content Marketing
The presence of compelling content that is both relevant and useful to the visitor is essential to convert your website’s traffic into qualified leads.
Research has shown that, before making a purchase decision online, over 90% of online shoppers prefer to read content from sources that are perceived to be thought leaders in the industry, and almost half of all online shoppers prefer to read around 3-5 articles about a particular product or service.
Your readers probably visit your pages because they are faced with a particular need, one that can potentially be solved by using your product or service.
Instead of creating content that promotes your offering directly, your content should focus on the need itself. For example, for someone selling healthcare products online, blog posts about health problems can be very effective. The goal is to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and regular delivery of valuable information to your customers is a great way to do this.
Make sure you track the content being consumed by your readers as this can help you deliver more tailor-made content to them in the future. Also, it is important that your content reaches the target audience.
A great way of doing this is by employing effective SEO techniques, as ranking high on search engines results in more organic visitors and, according to a survey, such visitors have a higher chance of converting into high-quality leads.
Paid Promotion on Social Media
Social media has made your job of generating leads much more manageable, thanks to all the sophisticated algorithms in place that allow you to reach your target audience instantaneously.
However, your job is to choose the most appropriate social media platform for your business that is most preferred by your audience.
Facebook has the greatest number of users among all social networking platforms on the internet, and this fact makes it the preferred choice among many digital marketers for paid promotions.
Through paid promotions on Facebook, you have two goals: drive more traffic to your website and generate leads directly on Facebook.
To achieve your first goal of increasing traffic, you need to make sure your ads contain a link to your website. The viewers who would be clicking on the provided link and visiting your website are already convinced of your offering and, hence, a large portion of them should be considered as good-quality leads.
Another way of generating leads on Facebook is through the Facebook Lead Ads format, and this should be your second goal on Facebook. Building ads on this format allows you to collect data from the ad viewers directly on Facebook, generating leads that you can use for future remarketing campaigns.
Use of Local SEO
There is no particular strategy you can adopt to ensure your website ranks in the top 10 spots on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). But, you can definitely localize your SEO efforts to generate the best quality leads.
According to statistics revealed by WordStream, 72% of searchers on the internet for a particular product or service preferred visiting stores within a five-mile radius to buy them. This makes it crucial to tap into that local market with localized SEO efforts.
As a starting point, make sure all your pages, including the website and social media pages, all contain updated name, address, and phone numbers of your business. Another great way to engage the local community is by requesting reviews from customers, especially on third-party review websites.
Most importantly, make sure the Title Tag of your website contains the name of the locality you are targeting. Such local keywords can also be incorporated throughout your text to give you a good ranking on SERPs.
Segmented Email Marketing
Email marketing has been successfully used by businesses to convert leads into sales or to reach out to existing customers to reinforce your marketing communication.
Remember, not all your customers are at the same stage of their buying journey. Hence, it is important to tailor your email communications according to the quality of your leads.
The best way to deliver
targeted marketing messages through email is by using marketing automation.
This can be done once your email system is synced with your
While your
Digital marketers usually use follow-up emails to communicate with leads, delivering quality content that is relevant to them. Such email messages also contain a call-to-action, such as a button to subscribe to future promotions or a button to visit the website for more details.
Whatever content you include in your email correspondence, keep in mind that the goal is to help your leads travel through the sales funnel until they are ready to make a purchase.
Research conducted by Forrester Research has shown that companies using this funnel approach make better use of their leads at a much lower cost compared to those with a less-targeted approach to sales generation.
With a targeted lead generation methodology, you can get through the clutter on the internet and reach your customers. By effectively nurturing all high-quality leads, you can exponentially increase your selling potential.