By Emma Bentley for Marketing Insiders Group
All customers you get to the bottom of the marketing and sales funnel begin as leads. Somewhere, you attracted their attention and somehow, you propelled them to interact with your brand. Once they do, your company has the information it needs to make contact.
In today’s environment, your digital presence offers the best opportunities for generating leads. Your website and social media platforms are geared for clicks that turn prospects from onlookers to potential buyers. Once they have made that initial interaction, it’s up to you to reach out and launch your strategy to convert them to sales.
How to Determine Why New Leads Aren’t Coming In
But what if you aren’t seeing enough new leads online to give you something to work with? You need to determine why a target audience isn’t making the contact you need. Here are a few reasons why your brand may be missing out.
Your Content Isn’t Hitting the Mark
You have probably heard that content is king in the digital age. But you can’t just throw content out there and see what sticks. Performance content needs to conform with increasingly sophisticated search engine algorithms as well as with your target audience’s expectations.
You know that content drives engagement. Your visitors won’t find your brand if you can’t catch the attention of search engines. No longer can you just smatter the right keywords throughout a webpage or blog post and get noticed. If that’s still your strategy, that’s one reason why you aren’t generating leads.
Keywords are still important. So are URLs, meta titles, descriptions, and headings. But search engine algorithms give considerable weight to other factors. These include experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (a.k.a. “E-E-A-T”); relevant internal and external links; and video, graphics, and other visual media.
Most of all, search engines have become savvy to content for content’s sake. They punish brands who fail to produce content that’s actually valuable and relevant to their target audiences. Think of it as the line where the mechanics of SEO cross over into humanity.
If you’re failing to get visitors to interact with you, take a hard look at your content as a whole. Is it written for people rather than search bots? Is it something your audiences want to or need to know? How do you know?
Here’s where AI can bridge the gap between content strategy, digital marketing, engineering, and data with your human audience. A platform like MarketMuse uses AI to assess your existing content to identify what content you’re missing so you can fill in the blanks in your strategy.
Get found by search engines. Get noticed by potential leads. That’s a content strategy that will find its mark every time.
Your Digital Engine Needs a Tune-Up
There are multiple moving parts involved in the mechanics of your digital presence. Just because a website is easy on the eye doesn’t mean it’s an effective one. If yours isn’t generating a substantial number of leads, you need to take a look under the hood.
Nearly 60% of all website traffic currently comes from people using mobile devices. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you’ll miss that 60% and the potential leads you could get from those users. Your search visibility and positive user experience are at stake.
Various factors make a website mobile friendly. For example, how it appears on a smaller screen and the size of type are critical. Navigation needs to be touch-friendly and download speeds fast. If your website isn’t as responsive on a smartphone as a PC, it will bury the lead.
You also need to ensure visitors aren’t lost in navigation when they pull up your website. That begins with the website’s architecture. Ease, consistency, limiting clicks and scrolling, and intuitive labeling are a few basic structural tenets you need to address.
Keep pages uncluttered so it’s easy for visitors to spot what they’re looking for. Beware of annoying them by distractions like too many pop-ups or overly prominent chatbots. The reason is simple: These take the reader’s eye off the proverbial ball and send them out the door.
Because you want to capture leads, keep forms simple and request minimal amounts of information. This is especially important for visitors using mobile devices. Make it easy for them to give you an email address or phone number. You can take the lead from there.
You probably have dozens if not thousands of competitors vying for leads from the same target audiences. If visitors are confused or frustrated by your website, they’ll simply move on to someone else’s.
You Don’t Have What It Takes to Convert
The marketing funnel is all about conversions. You convert those whose attention you grabbed to leads, leads to engagement, engagement to customers, customers to ambassadors of your brand. The funnel gets smaller as you move down it. You only stand a chance of getting enough consumers to the bottom by converting as many as possible from the very top.
You need to bring your A-game to your website’s conversion rate optimization because it’s a central metric of your ROI. To find out what yours is, break it down by conducting a CRO audit. You can make decisions based on what your visitors see, not on what you assume they do.
Determine what you want a visitor to do and make sure your call to action is clear, concise, and easy. Dive into your analytics, looking at unique visitors, traffic sources, page views, bounce rates, and exit pages. This data will inform you about where you might be losing visitors before they leave their contact information.
Make adjustments according to your analytics too. You might want to implement some A/B testing of your website to figure out what solutions work better than others. By its nature, testing will get you to more effective lead generation twice as fast as muddling through potential solutions.
If you aren’t using well-designed landing pages, add them to your website. These should be specific to social media messages so when prospects click on the post, they land on a relevant page. If you send them to your home page hoping they’ll find what they’re looking for, you’ll lose any lead potential.
Never take your eyes off the CRO ball. Customers aren’t monoliths; they change. Demographics, psychographics, behaviors, interests, and priorities are always in flux. If you stop monitoring your website conversion strategies, your leads will fall off.
Of course, your CRO is a critical metric to analyze from top to bottom of the funnel. But the volume at the bottom is a percentage game. Converting more visitors to leads increases your odds of success.
Convert, Already
Generating high numbers of leads from website visitors means you’re doing something right. But if you aren’t seeing the volume you want or need, take a deep dive into your content, mechanics, and CRO.
These broad areas are critical to SEO, relevancy, and the user experience. Get them right and adjust as needed and you’ll be converting qualified leads on all cylinders. The rest of your marketing strategy can take it from there.
