What You'll Find In This Guide:
Before we dive in, let’s just define what we mean by ‘lead gen’. In short it means ‘Lead Generation’, the process of generating interest in your products or services and often with some sort of data capture (email, phone, address...etc.).
Then we have levels of leads, such as:
- Qualified, where the business has confirmed they are ‘keen’ rather than just ‘interested’
- Dead, which isn’t a bereavement, rather just a conclusion that they’re not the right fit for us
-Closed, which sounds negative but is actually positive! They’re now a client or customer
Lead gen is often defined where a potential customer or client has filled out a form on your website, walked into a shop, phoned your sales team, spoken to you on livechat...etc. There’s been a solid ‘engagement’. We’ll come on to this in more detail at the end of this guide, as it should define a lot of your design and UX (user experience).
The Basics.
Just before we dive into the marketing strategies, I just want to leave a note that these may or may not work for you. A lot depends on your services, your industry, some can be seasonal, and most importantly, YOUR WEBSITE.
To learn more about this side of things, either have a look at our digital website audit service or have a chat with your web guys. A simple question of “What could we do better?” goes a long way.
Targeted free web traffic, all the time!
Something of a specialty to us is optimising websites for users who are looking for your services. This can be a long-term exercise and if done properly, can deliver a regular flow of leads for many years to come.
The process:
1. Conduct some keyword research into what people are looking for, specifically where your services, tools or product(s) would be a perfect solution.
2. Improve the relevance of your content. This could be as simple as changing the name of a few services, right through to a complete re-position of how you present yourself around a customer messaging strategy.
3. Prove you’re the best solution through reviews, white papers, case studies and social proof.
A good place to start with this, is looking at the opportunity in Keyword Planner:
https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/tools/keyword-planner/
If you want to hear more about generating leads from SEO, give us a ring!
Realtime activity, controlled by you.
As well as SEO, there is also another method of attracting customers who are currently looking for your solutions. It works on a ‘pay per ‘click’ methodology and you set a daily cap to keep costs under control.
Some top tips from us to make this a success:
Too often, blog content is just 'left out there', and it doesn't really deliver anything. You have the power to change that!
So many businesses blog and write news, but who actually reads it? Try something now… Go into your Google Analytics, go to ‘behaviour’ on the left and then click content. At the bottom right of the page you can expand the list to 100 or 250 lines, and try to find your most viewed blog posts.
Wish those numbers were higher? Well, we’ve got a process for that:
a) Research who you can reach on LinkedIn or what people are interested in on Google
b) Write some content around those people or that theme
c) Do your basic SEO on the post itself and create a ‘launch plan’ (our new few steps)
d) Map out who in your CRM/network you could send your new post to. Past client, potential clients, leads you didn’t sign, companies you know and partner businesses who could send it on to their clients for you
e) Run your PPC campaigns to your previously outlined audiences on LinkedIn & Google
f) Monitor your keyword rankings and learn which posts ranked well, and learn why
Ever noticed how high Google Maps appear on Google’s Search results? Yes, they’re great and they’re free. It’s also a great way to leverage that expensive office address you feel is so important to your customers, to create some digital lead-gen success. You can also integrate them with your PPC activity to give locality to your users.
Our top tips for Google Maps:
We run events and they deliver a big percentage of our new client acquisition. Here are some top tips from our experience:
Overall, you want to focus on where the value is in the event. Meeting attendees is one thing, but you have the opportunity to do a lot more on a wider scale from the event itself.
On LinkedIn, you have the ability to target very specific people in a business capacity. How you do it, though, is the real question.
My advice is always to write out what VALUE you are offering people before starting any kind of campaign. I called this a ‘value filled’ CTA (call to action). Simply telling people you or your service exists, is unlikely to yield any significant results.
Here are three examples of a campaign for each channel that can work well:
Another use for LinkedIn promoted posts would be brand awareness of either your solution or a reason to use you. For example, lots of telecom companies have been busy explaining that PSTN lines (old phone lines) are ending soon, so you need to move to VoIP (which they offer!).
It’s well known that most of your revenue opportunities are currently right under your nose. This is both found within current clients or from something historic, like a past client or old lead you didn’t convert.
Some ways you could do this:
I’m going to say it - Does your website even explain what you do?
We’ve spent a lot of time working on what we call a ‘customer messaging strategy’. This is where we grab our SEO keyword and it’s learnings of what people want & know, to then go through the entire website with a fine tooth comb.
My Game: ‘what do they do?’ It’s quite simple… you open a website and start a timer until the person next to you can correctly identify what they do or what their deliverable is.
Once we’ve checked the customer side of this, we begin editing all the content on the website and even address the UX and design of how it all fits together. The big problem we encounter is that businesses get so stuck in internal thinking and talk about their benefits, such as ‘fast, effective, flexible’. Rather than simply stating “we provide the best hosting platform on the planet, and it’s extremely cost-effective”.
This sort of exercise starts to address things like low conversion rates, high bounce rates and lack of overall lead generation. If it’s not clear, people’s attention span will disappear very quickly.
Another element of Google’s PPC platform is the ability to send ads via two very interesting methods:
Google also has a display advertising platform, shopping and YouTube. All of which, we’ll save for another day as they can get a little complicated!
So, you’ve got a website and you’re getting leads. You know roughly what marketing activity they are coming from, but can you answer me these questions?
If you fail to answer 1, or more, perhaps we should have a chat! Without the above it is very difficult to really pinpoint what’s working and, therefore, what should be done to grow things. What you really want to end up with is a detailed contact record in your CRM system for every new client which tells you EVERYTHING. Once you’ve got the data, use it wisely.
p: 0208 1333 633
e: team@spec.digital
Write to us:
Spec Digital Limited
86-90 Paul Street
London
EC2A 4NE
United Kingdom
Here at Spec, we are passionate about growing your business with PPC and SEO consultancy. We work with brands all over the world, from high street retailers, hotel chains and rail operators, to boutique stores and startups.
Get in contact to see how we can help your business grow, through insightful digital consultancy.
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86-90 Paul Street
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