Your Inbound Marketing Machine
Colossal email crusades, outdoor billboards, pop under windows and other frantic lead netting processes basically won’t do much more than piss consumers off. Beseeching other businessmen and general audiences to ‘romance’ your social media profiles, or glorify your hashtags, will only get your business overlooked. What companies need to propel their sales to the next level is inbound marketing that captures leads related to their business, instead of digging for gold in copper mines.
They need, in other words, something which turns inbound marketing inquisitions into lead generation machines, best done through on-site capture forms. Traditional methods of collecting clicks, visitors and hoping for the conversion have historically only cost companies money, watching their ROI virtually disappear.
We’ll talk today about axing archaic domain name lead capturing habits and working towards capturing your leads right from your business website or blog all day long.
Begin With PPC And Organic SEO
The relationship between pay per click and organic SEO is priceless since one can push the other, or lower the costs altogether. To push patrons towards your website, having a comfortable blend of both marketing tactics will drive the demographically correct patrons towards your site. Here’s how we do this:
- Using real-time conversion traffic details from companies like Word Stream, you can find out which keywords related to your niche have historically converted. From that conversion data, you can choose keywords to bid on using broad matching; your ad will then show up for similar keywords and your CPC will generally lower since you’re not bidding on keywords that aren’t converting.
- Blindly purchasing keywords without measuring ROI will cost you more; assimilate keywords to relate with high converting ad copy, again which can be done through Word Stream or similar keyword aggregation sites. Google Trends can also contribute heavily towards keyword choices.
By taking the time to restructure keyword choices, improving your website copy to create exacting advertisements and choosing keywords identical to your business, overall ad spend will lower while collective inbound marketing efforts will work together to lead patrons to your site. Organic SEO drives down costs of PPC and pay per click widens the range which organically pushed content normally covered on smaller scales. The relationship is wonderful, yet is only the first step in driving demographically correct traffic back home.
Analyze Ads After 1 Week
Once you’ve nailed down broad match keywords which will harvest other relevant terms, you should analyze this campaign after one week, checking which keywords are performing better than others. Delete zero impression keywords since they’ll probably not perform very well in the coming months. Work on getting your quality score above 8 so the ads cost less. While this is transpiring, make sure your content is still being optimized for organic domain name rankings, has plenty of useful information and is written to capture wider keywords based off keyword co-occurrence, otherwise dubbed as semantic connectivity.
Keep Social Media Profiles Fresh
Your social media efforts are equivocally important within your inbound marketing strategies because even well-optimized social media profiles are being included in Google searches. Continue to post teaser content which leads to your business landing page, ask challenging questions to engage your following, respond to all friend / follow or connection requests with warm thanks while offering something of value to them like eBooks or white papers.
If running social media ads, make sure you’ve written exacting content which calls potential patrons to immediately act. And always respond to commentary left on your blog as this shows your interest in others’ opinions and feelings. Simply put, making sure to remain socially proactive while working on other funneling methods will ensure the social media angle is amply covered, even if you’ve hired someone to engage people for you.
Tweak Your Landing Pages
Compelling calls to action must be already in place to retain the leads being driven by PPC and organic SEO. Should your message project pushy sales instead of warm welcomes and suggestions, you’ll need to tweak your content so the wrong message isn’t conveyed. Concentrate heavily on giving something of value away in exchange for simple contact information, such as whitepapers or eBooks – perhaps even a 3 day membership to otherwise paid access to content.
Once patrons arrive, you want them to take their coats off and stay awhile – not contribute to higher domain bounce rates. Work diligently to create landing pages which have beefy content and something of value to give away so potential leads turn into converted sales. It also helps you to write better ad copy when landing pages have some sustenance to them instead of “Buy Now” written across the skies.
Ask Questions That Count
Once they’ve received their goodies from landing pages, your site content should already be pristine. If you’ve led them towards your contact page, make sure to create forms which ask questions to gather insight about the visitor. These questions will help future inbound marketing efforts by collecting vital data of what ad they clicked on, what they’re looking for and how you can assist.
Rarely across business contact pages will you find in-depth questionnaires which could potentially increase future opportunity. This step is actually very vital and saves time researching the same information from third-party resources. Some of what could be collected from contact information pages includes:
- How did you find out about us? (drop-down menu of ad titles or other options)
- What is your honest assessment of our website? (feedback can only help you)
- Would you be interested in further information about _____?
- Describe your business needs.
- May we call you at your convenience? (getting permission signals respect for customer)
The more specific your questions are, the better you can cater to the lead and propagate better future inbound marketing efforts.
Continually Nurture The Lead
Remember, your lead was produced from PPC and organic SEO which means they want to be there; cater to this foresight by producing better content, offer contests, invite to chat or even call you personally to see what they seek. Maybe they’ve got needs which your site hasn’t quite addressed yet presumably falling within your niche. By properly nurturing the leads you’ve received, it’s common knowledge you’ve imbued loyalty into their minds and all but guaranteed their return – with someone under their arm.
In Closing: Inbound Marketing is Systematic
Now that you’ve gone through this entire segment, you can take everything you’ve learned and processed for many leads, or just one, and improve your content strategy, pay per click ad copy, keyword selection and landing pages. You can literally capture patrons, nurture them, and allow them to virtually write your next campaign for you simply by paying attention to the patrons’ thoughts. Sure, the ultimate goal is closing deals. Let each lead provide you the framework in gathering future leads.
Taking this systematic yet slow approach to turning your inbound marketing efforts into the lead machine you desire will allow only the targeted leads to arrive where and when you want them to. It will provide tools to continually write better advertisements, produce better content and give your socialization efforts the boost it needs to remain competitive with other sites that have perfected the above standards of inbound marketing lead production.
Roger Klawinksi is a freelance writer and experienced domainer from Indiana. You can follow him on Google+.
