Digital marketers tend to focus on acquiring traffic to a website. This is where marketing budgets are usually spent.

Yet, making the most of that traffic you acquire is a much smarter (and a more effective) marketing strategy.

First of all, it doesn’t require huge on-going budgets (unlike building traffic). In most cases, on-site tactics are either free or much less expensive than trying to drive new clicks from outside. All you will definitely need is time.

Secondly, investing in generating and nurturing leads allows you to understand your target audience better and accumulate your own data, which will help your marketing strategy in the long run.

Here are five ways to generate and nurture more leads from your existing traffic.

1. Start Building Sustainable Customer Relationships

This is the most fundamental step here, but it is also the one you need to handle first. Unless you have a well-defined customer relationship management system and marketing automation platform, there’s no point in acquiring new leads.

The moment a new lead comes in, your team needs to start developing on-going relationships with them. Otherwise, you will lose those leads, which are so hard to get!

Investing in a customer relationship building software is almost always a good idea here. You may think that your sales team will be able to handle it manually, but you will really see the difference when you empower them with a solid tool.

Featured tool: Super Office is one of my most recent discoveries because it makes the process very well organized and consistent. For each lead out there, you know exactly:

• How and when a lead was acquired
• How many touchpoints were there (and when)
• Which touchpoint are still coming (and when)
• Which sales managers were in touch with that lead so far

On top of that, you will have a detailed customer profile (the company they work for, their budget, their contact information, etc.)

Of course, there are more CRM solutions out there, including Freshsales and Zoho CRM, so do your own research and pick the one that best fits your needs.

2. Match Your Content to Customers’ Expectations

Building a site that attracts already pre-qualified leads is key to your lead generation success, especially when it comes to organic search traffic.

Imagine someone searching for something that has a direct relation to your business. More often than not, it is pretty obvious what they need to find. And this is not just the actual answer they were looking for.

It is also about the format and the action they intend to take when finding what they need.

For example, if they are searching for [best CRM software], they are shopping for one. These searchers are very close to a sale. But if they are searching for [CRM examples], they are likely to be at the very start of their research. They need answers.

Now, if you are selling a CRM solution, you will want both of those groups of searching, but you may want to refrain from active selling to the latter one. So, in this case, you need two types of landing pages matching both of these searchers, their expectations and their closeness to a sale.

This is the fundamental search intent optimization we already talked about in much detail. The fundamental step many businesses are still missing.

Using your own common sense and trying to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes is the first important step to optimizing for search intent. Searching Google is another great idea as Google offers a lot of clues as to what its users are seeking.

Finally, using intent optimization tools is another great idea.

Featured tool: Text Optimizer searches Google for your target query and applies semantic analysis to identify related and underlying concepts to help you meet searchers’ expectations when creating your copy.

3. Customize Returning Users’ Experience

As SEOs, we tend to get obsessed over attracting new visitors to our sites. In many ways, our returning visitors are often neglected, which is a shame because people who chose to come back to your site are generally likelier to convert into leads or customers.

• They already know your brand (and likely trust you)
• They already know what they want

Unsurprisingly, historically returning visitors have always converted better. Back in 2017, Barilliance published a research study claiming the conversion rate of returning visitors was almost twice higher than that of new site visitors.

Do you know how you can make this number even higher?

Try on-site remarketing.

Basically, a remarketing (or retargeting) strategy means customizing your site users’ experience based on their past interactions with the site. For example, if there was a dedicated campaign on Facebook and one of your leads came to your site twice as a result of it, it is very likely that that person came back for what they initially saw in the ad. So, customize your CTAs to match that old campaign of yours.

This increases your chances to catch their attention and finally get them to convert.

Featured tool: Finteza can help you set remarketing campaigns catering to returning visitors based on their past interactions with your site. Simply set up your goals (visited pages, email sign-up, etc.) and then define banners and CTAs you want these site users to see when they come back.

The beauty of the tool is that it is very easy to use, so you may need to invest in third-party services to set your remarketing campaigns up.

4. Create and Market More Videos

Videos have long been found major conversion boosters, and they are only becoming more effective:

• Using a video on a landing page can increase conversions by 86%.
• In a survey, CharityDynamics found that 60% of millennials prefer watching videos over reading newsletters. This survey was done in 2017, so the number is surely even higher. Not to mention the younger generation, which operates almost entirely through video.

Featured tool: Editing doesn’t have to be a hassle either. Tools like InVideo are full video makers with a low subscription price and will help you along the way. Simply select a template and customize it using their visual editor to add your text, images, branding elements and transitions.

Hosting your video is also free. Both Youtube and Vimeo provide free video hosting, and I’d recommend using both.

5. Create More Engaging Landing Pages

Finally, here is a super simple test that can give you a peek into your audience interest in your content: does it catch the eye in five seconds or less? Headlines are incredibly important in online content because they are all you have to hook your readers right away.

Email newsletters, blog posts, and even social media posts need to make an impression in those 5 seconds, or the person will just keep skimming. Just think of all the content they have to choose from, all the stimulation and distractions. Without a catchy headline, you don’t stand a chance.

While headlines are what make your landing page stand out, social proof is what persuades visitors to act. In fact, 37% of the most successful landing pages on the web have testimonials.

However, remember that your customers’ testimonials should showcase how your customers or partners have benefited from working with you. What exactly did they love about your product or service?

Only use the testimonials that are descriptive enough to reveal essential benefits. Otherwise, they won’t work. For example, take a look at this website’s main page where you can find the following section with testimonials.

Featured tool: Try Five Second Test to see what people immediately associate your landing page with. It’s a great way to generate immediate user feedback.

Conclusion

Lead generation takes time and effort. You should always fine tune your process and test new tactics. Hopefully, the above tips will give you new ideas and allow you to convert more of your current traffic.

The post Five Steps to Generating & Converting More Leads in 2021 and Beyond appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.