While there’s absolutely no substitute for a strong closer, learning how to increase lead generation is just as important. Providing your sales professionals with qualified leads offers them an opportunity to focus on the sales process rather than prospecting.
Here are eight changes you should implement in your marketing strategy. Through them, I was able to increase lead acquisition 22x in 18 months when compared to the previous period.
1. Design a Customer Journey
This is the first pivotal step to increase lead generation. A customer journey is an ideal path, made of clear, specific steps the average customer will take on the way to starting a business relationship with you.
Think of it as a process that takes two people who are strangers from meeting, then to dating and finally to getting married. Just like dating, prospects might need to feel you out a bit before making the first move. You want to make sure you’re sending the right signals: not too aggressive, but certainly not distracted.
A customer journey will help you visualize how a prospect makes the decision to “slip you their digits.” You’ll want to be prepared and have all the right information along the way to ensure a smooth process.
2. Improve Your Website SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) represents the set of activities and processes that increase the visibility of your website to a search engine. Simply put, it results in your site becoming more visible to Google and Bing, among others. So when people search for specific, relevant things using those search engines, or when they ask questions that are pertinent to your business, your website has a better chance to rank higher in search engine research pages (SERP). A higher position translates to a higher chance your site will receive organic traffic and, if properly structured and populated (more on this below), more people would contact you.
To optimize your site for search engines, you must understand two things:
- What questions your ideal customer might ask Google or Bing when looking for a product or service your organization is able to provide.
- How Google and any other search engine decides if your website has that answer, and what page is ideal to provide it (in other words: if you have relevant content).
If you’ve designed your customer journey properly, you should have a good idea what issues or opportunities your ideal customer is dealing with as they search for a business partner that offers what you offer.
Once you answer the first question, you’ll have a rough idea of what your page content must be. For example, someone shopping for running shoes might be wondering, “What are the most comfortable shoes for cross-county running?” If your page provides relevant, helpful information about that topic, you’re already ahead of the game.
To understand how Google decides if your page is relevant, you have to understand the signals it’s looking for to assess the page. It crawls your site and makes a decision based on the context and size of your content. For example, 100 words are probably not enough to move the needle, but 10,000 words that repeat the same concept over and over, simply to create bulk, are just as bad.
Remember that Google will also look for other signals. How fast does your page load? How many outside websites point to it? Does your content have links to the outside world? While loading the page, do users experience issues such as cumulative layout shift (CLS)? These are just a few of the elements Google considers when deciding if your page is more relevant than others.
3. Improve Your Website Structure
Whether someone arrived to your site through a search engine, an email you’ve sent or some other way, you have to make sure they’re able to find what they’re looking for.
This is another key area where knowing your ideal customer and designing an ideal journey comes in handy. If your objective is for them to reach out to you, make sure they can easily find your contact information.
If it’s their first visit to the site, they might not be ready to contact you right away. They may want to do more research on the products or services you offer, or on your organization and its qualifications.
It’s important to make it simple for them to find any information they need to move to the next step of their journey so they stay engaged. That main call to action might be more visible and prominent on some pages, but not all depending on the page’s content and purpose.
Some of your calls to action might be hyperlinks, while others will be buttons or banners. Often, your most important call to action might be on your top navigation bar. Having a navigation bar that’s instinctive and easy to browse will often spell the difference between a visitor who leaves and a visitor who clicks through and remains engaged.
4. Use Chatbots to Automate Interaction
Prospects often don’t want their first interaction to be with a person. They may want to avoid that kind of interaction because they feel as if they’re committing to something.
Using a chatbot allows your website to be fully interactive 24 hours a day while providing visitors with a low-pressure way to signal that they need more information. Not only could this make them more likely to interact with your site and start the trust process, but you’ll never miss an opportunity to interact.
I use Tidio Chat, which allows me to set up automatic workflows that guide visitors to the right product or service. It can save prospects’ questions and, if they need immediate help and leave a name and email, Tido Chat creates a contact and warns users through email, desktop and smartphone popup notifications. You can even create different workflows for new and returning visitors, ensuring that you’re properly nurturing the relationship.
5. Use the Right Forms at the Right Time
Having an annoying form pop up on every page is the best way to get people to leave your website and think twice before returning. But placing forms within the right pages, or even making them pop up at the right time, is a sure-fire way to boost your form submission conversion rate.
Once again, your customer journey comes to the rescue. If you’ve properly aligned web content with your journey, you’ll know when a visitor warms to the idea of providing their information. Only pages that fit in this phase should contain prominent forms.
Adding some logic to the page layout will provide valuable insights as to where the form should be: at the very top? Next to other content? Below the fold, after you’ve provided reasons to fill it out?
Making the form appear based on behavioral feedback can also be successful. Forms that pop up only when someone has been scrolling for a determined amount of time, or when they’ve interacted in ways you’ve identified as valuable but are about to click the “CLOSE” button, might provide the extra incentive the visitor needs to decide to fill the form out.
Since many of the activities you perform are trial-and-error, it’s important to monitor your progress, understand what action is producing results and edit or remove info as needed.
Make sure you’re not making it difficult for someone to fill out a form. One of the greatest barriers to submission is the amount of information the form requires before it can be submitted. While it would be great to have all sorts of data from the prospect, remember that you’re asking for their time and private information. Sometimes it’s easier to ask for first name and email only if it increases their likelihood of filling out a form. You’ll have more opportunities in the future to ask for the rest of the information, especially if your follow up is flawless.
Another great form technology is progressive field display, which asks for more details as your visitors fill out multiple forms over a period of time. You might have their first and last name already; why not ask for their birthday to send them a discount code?
6. Manage Google Reviews and Google My Business
Just because you have the best website in the world, it doesn’t mean that’s the only place prospects might digitally interact with you. In fact, that’s often not the case in the early stages of your relationship.
The last time you were shopping for something new, you may have instinctively looked for the reassuring star rating for the product or brand. It’s the easiest thing to do to get a first impression of the company’s trustworthiness.
To use our relationship analogy from earlier, you might not be ready to marry them just yet, but a high star rating might make you more likely to smile back if they smile at you.
But Google reviews don’t just happen magically. While some of your customers might provide a star rating or review because they really like you, it’s going to most likely require an effort on your part to encourage them to provide it.
Ask for a review in a way that makes it easy for them to complete. Don’t just send a request, but include a link to the review form to make it easy. Explain that a simple, one-click star rating is better than nothing at all, but you would love a line or two in the comments as well.
Also make sure you don’t send that request to everyone; choose customers you know are happy with your product or service, and time your request with a moment that makes it likely for them to respond positively. A good example is a few days after delivery of a product.
Google My Business requires as much TLC as your website. Make sure the information is correct and relevant, and ensure that you have a list of products and services available, as well as promotions you’re running, if applicable. Are your hours of operation accurate, or is someone going to drive 20 minutes to your store only to find out it closed 10 minutes prior?
7. Invest in Google Ads
Yes, this one will cost you money. But, if done properly, Google Ads can be a surefire investment with positive returns.
Be sure to start small—bid on the right keywords that won’t cost you an arm and a leg, and then continue refining. Make sure your page has relevant information to increase your relevance score. In turn, this will result in a lower cost per click.
Also monitor your interactions to increase bids where you find success and to add negative keywords (this excludes clicks from people who show no interest in your product or service when they land on your page).
Set yourself a revenue on ad spend (ROAS) goal so you know that, once you hit the sweet spot, you can dial up the spend for those ads that are providing the highest performance.
8. Monitor and Improve
Since many of the activities you perform are trial-and-error, it’s important to monitor your progress, understand what action is producing results and edit or remove info as needed. Be sure to monitor Google Analytics regularly; learn how to use it to your advantage and where the most critical information is.
I also find SEMRush to be critical to my success. It shows me how my pages are viewed by search engine crawlers for specific keywords and points out errors or problems in my page that could affect navigation and search engine ranking.
If you want to understand how users actually navigate your website, install a monitoring tool such as Hotjar. You’ll be able to record individual sessions so you can review them to understand if users are dropping off your website for a specific reason. It also provides heat maps with scroll depth and click focus.
Conclusions
Increasing your lead acquisition doesn’t happen overnight and doesn’t happen by pure coincidence. If you follow these simple rules, you’ll be able to increase your business visibility and conversion rate. Make sure you have a plan, deploy it with structure, monitor for improvements—and have fun!
