Companies are incorporating inbound marketing to the mix to get high quality leads for a lower cost per lead than other approaches.
But inbound marketing isn’t a silver bullet, and it can take up to six to eight months to develop web traffic and cultivate it into paying customers.
We’ll occasionally speak with companies that are doing inbound marketing in-house, but aren’t seeing the results they are looking for. If that’s you, then it might be time to tweak your approach.
While we’ve troubleshooted the inbound marketing process in the past, there are essentially two ways to get more results from your inbound marketing:
- Get more traffic to your website
- Convert more of the website visitors you already have to leads
It sounds simple in principle, but evaluating these two opportunities in depth will lead you to more detailed actions you can take to get results from your inbound marketing.
Here’s a look at some things our team does (and you can do, too) to drive results from inbound marketing.
If you want to get more inbound marketing leads, you first have to understand the math. Your inbound marketing funnel has its own unique metrics.
You might find that for every 1,000 customers that visit your website, 100 of them contact your sales team and engage in the sales process (a 10% conversion rate).
Therefore, one way to get more inbound marketing leads is to increase the traffic to your website so that your 10% conversion rate yields more leads.
Are You Doing These Things to Get More Website Visitors?
How can you increase the traffic to your website? Here are four top ways:
- Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to identify long tail keyword opportunities. Once you identify the keywords, target these keyword phrases by writing new blog posts focusing on those keywords.
- Filter the results of the HubSpot Keyword Portfolio to identify which keywords in your keyword portfolio rank just outside the top ten results. A simple Google search will reveal which pages on your website rank for a given keyword. You then have a choice: create new pages/blog posts that would rank better than existing pages or optimize existing blog posts or pages to target these keywords.
- Find ways to distribute content, such as guest posting and content syndication. Here, you’re promoting content somewhere other than your website.
- Pay for extra exposure (Facebook and Google Adwords could be good choices). Send those clicks to conversion-focused content offers.
Are You Doing These Things to Convert More Inbound Marketing Leads?
As an alternative to getting more potential customers to your website, you can focus on increasing your conversion rate.
Let’s say that you improve your website conversion rate from 1% to 2%, or 5% to 10%. In either case, you’ve doubled the number of leads that you get from your website.
You can also convert more inbound marketing leads by focusing on improving your lead quality so that your website visitors are more qualified and are more likely to do business with your company.
Here are three things to try that have a track record of converting more website visitors to leads:
- Optimize your highest traffic pages with calls to action. For example, one of our healthcare clients found that web pages about their locations and the doctor’s profiles web pages were their most visited pages. However, they didn’t have any calls to action or engagement opportunities on those pages, so the only conversions they received were from clients who took the time to call during business hours. This is a prime opportunity for inserting lead generation opportunities and capturing leads before, during and after normal business hours.
- Optimize your highest traffic blog posts with calls to action. Remember that calls to action can be text links too. Try embedding them at the beginning, middle and end of web pages.
- Review the most complementary paid advertising efforts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Ads. Consider enlisting retargeting ads to convert traffic that came to the site that but didn't make a decision.
- Use clear customer personas to develop keywords and advertising opportunities, thus increasing the likelihood that the highest quality lead will click through to your website.
If you want to improve your inbound marketing results and get more leads, start with either increasing website visits or optimizing your website for conversion.