A must read article for all
service based businesses
4 Tips to increase online lead generation
Abstract
Lead Generation is the life blood of service based businesses. The more leads you have from prospective customers, the more business to be earned. Many businesses rely on lead generation companies to purchase leads from only to become disappointed with the poor quality and negative ROI. Lead generation is crucial to the business and should be managed in house. Company branded leads convert about 10 times higher than leads purchased from a company. “If you want it done right, do it yourself” is strong advise. You will probably need the help of some marketing experts and if you are generating leads online, you really need the help from conversion optimization experts.
Tip 1 – Don’t focus on social media just because everyone else is doing it.
Test your social media channels to determine the close ratio’s
Certain verticals will never generate any leads from twitter traffic. Same is true about Facebook and LinkedIN. Funnel Science is managing a family dentist website that has been running a twitter campaign for two months. It has yet to bring in a single new patient. However the same marketing is producing new patients from Google. Just because your competition is on facebook doesn’t mean they are making sales. Test the traffic to see if they convert into leads.
Conversion testing is the only guaranteed way to get more leads out of your marketing efforts. You will also need a robust analytics platform to manage your customer response rates. Google Analytics is a free tool that can install in minutes and give you the insight to correctly manage your lead generation.
Tip 2 – Ensure you are testing the landing pages with A/B split testing or multi-variate testing to increase conversion rates.
Conversion testing measures your customers responses to your web pages. It can tell you what they like and what drives them away. If your pages have very high bounce rates or exits rates, that signals a problem with the page.
Tip 3 – Find out how you can increase your credibility; if there is no trust then there will be no sale.
People just naturally do not trust computers. If you are relying on your website to generate leads, people will only give you their info if they trust your website.
Funnel Science has tested the Verisign Trust Seal and has increased conversions on 100% of websites we added the seal to.
Most internet marketing strategies only discuss generating more traffic to your website. More traffic will not get you more leads. You need more of the traffic to convert into leads. One of the first steps in conversion optimization will test your credibility and trust. Building more trust in your website helps create more leads.
Tip 4 – Also Consider Building traffic to your website from channels most relevant to your audience.
This brings in the most relevant prospects because they are already interested in topics of your industry. A common but flawed SEO strategy is to generate as much traffic as possible from as many keywords “relevant” to your business. There are two types of keywords: information and buying. Buying keywords are those that produce sales, informational does not.
Generating as much traffic as possible from every related keyword does not help; it dilutes your lead generation effort.
A landing page should be built around 1 – 3 keywords only. If you follow the flawed SEO strategy, then it requires you to build hundreds of pages on your site. Then your visitors will get lost in all of the pages and then leave the site because they couldn’t find the information they were searching for.
Again the most important factor is to test the traffic sources for conversions. If you are not testing for conversions, then you will have no idea if the traffic generated is producing leads.
Summary
Many businesses expect that lead generation companies have the ability to produce high quality leads for your business. It has been our experience that the entire lead generation industry is filled with blatant abuses and black hat SEO practices.
Lead generation is crucial to your business and should be managed internally. Company branded leads convert about 10 higher than leads purchased from a company. “If you want it done right, do it yourself” is strong advice for writing content. You will probably need the help of some internet marketing experts and if you are generating leads online, you really need the help from conversion optimization experts.
More traffic will not get you more leads. You need more of the traffic to convert into leads. Focusing on conversion optimization will get you more high quality leads that you can close.
Contact the Author:
Funnel Science Internet Marketing LLC
Alex Fender
Chief Marketing Officer
If you would like to get more information about increasing your Websites Conversion Rate, call Funnel Science at 877-301-0001
