Converting leads into customers is a strategy that aims to make a site visitor take the desired action on your website. Every business today tries to employ this, but everyone has its own level of effectiveness. Having big traffic doesn’t always end up with great lead conversion. You need actionable tips for converting leads.
Digital technologies and human behavior are changing at a rapid pace, and what was once a great lead conversion strategy becomes outdated in just a few months’ time. There is a need to consistently educate yourself and update and optimize your strategy if you wish that your brand stays relevant and successful.
Lead conversion action consists of two distinct parts: The current position of your visitor in his buyer’s journey and the website experience and content you created for him. Thus, it is critical that you create an experience that enables movement through the buyer’s journey from awareness, to examination and ultimately to decision making. Here we will share with you several actionable tips to achieve this and finally convert leads into customers.
Converting Leads Through Content
Content represents an easy way to drive traffic to your website without appearing overly aggressive. The core of the content needs to be appealing to your customers. It can be something simple that helps them resolve issues or deal with the challenges they are facing. Content marketing creates three times more leads while costing 62 percent less.
Unlike the television and radio channels of before, today’s consumers choose where to spend their online time and what content to watch. Hence your content must offer some value to them – a way to solve their problems in a manner that is easy to follow. It is exactly this content that attracts visitors to a website and encourages them to take action.
The kind of content that is needed depends on the position of the visitor in the buyer’s journey, so always build content with such a journey in mind. In their awareness phase, content should consist of guides, checklists and cheat sheets, while in the examination phase case studies and webinars work wonders. For the last, the decision-making phase creates consultations, free trials offer, vouchers and estimates.
Content offers need to attract the target audience. In the ideal case, content would be of such value that the customer would gladly pay for it. The more valuable the content is, the more likely the visitor will leave his details. Collecting such details result in the creation of the groundwork for inbound marketing – a path for nurturing new leads through the buyer’s journey.
The Dominant Force In All Consumer Behavior
The brain is accountable for all of our consumer behavior. It doesn’t understand language and complex messages and seeks pain avoidance over pleasure. It’s also attracted to visuals, which is why we prefer experiences over explanations and pictures over words. You can use this hidden motivation as a trigger in your marketing efforts by understanding what your target audience associates with pain and pleasure.
In their buyer’s journey, your customer wishes to get from point X, where they are now, to point Y, where they wish to be. And like when they were cavemen searching for food, you need to ease up this journey for them as much as possible. For example, if they don’t have the money upfront to pay for the product you can use fee financing that lets them pay for the product through monthly installments while you receive the invoice immediately. New customers get attracted because they get to experience the pleasure – your product – instantly while the pain, paying for it, becomes disseminated and smaller.
Or you can show to your consumer all the threats on the road from X to Y and how your product is the tool they need to eliminate those threats. The so-called “negativity bias” and our reptilian brain will always try to avoid pain more than to gain pleasure. Discover what problems and pains your customers experience with yours and similar products, then try to solve them. And don’t be afraid to charge for it.
Be Careful What Metrics You Track And Act Upon
Most of us get distracted by the so-called “vanity metrics”. Things like downloads, impressions, followers, raw page views and registered users. They appear relevant at first, but are easily manipulated and don’t automatically correlate into the numbers that are really important – engagement, cost of new customers, active users and in the end profits and revenues. The latter are truly actionable metrics. The only important metrics are those that help you make decisions, and the only ones you should spend your energy in obtaining.
Track metric that enables you to concentrate on leads, and then coax them through to conversions. Start with SEO keyword data. While SEO isn’t simple, keyword data is even more complex. Every keyword stands at the center about some lead. Search for what kind of data leads want by finding out the intent behind their keyword. This gives you knowledge about actionable data that converts leads into customers.
Next, are funnel metrics – the whole conversion funnel process that creates customers from leads. Track different numbers as a lead goes through the funnel to find out what needs to be changed and in which manner. Then set up Goal tracking in Google Analytics. While most of the Google Analytics data is garbage, with the right goals, set in to place it can become a gold-mine.
Metrics That Improve Lead Conversion Into Customers Are As Follows:
- Audience – insights about their interaction and satisfaction with your website and product.
- Cohorts – to understand if and how your consumer groups respond over a period of time.
- Lifetime Value – the complete value of a single customer through his whole relationship with your company.
- Marketing Attribution – to determine how and when leads become customers based on their frequency of visits.
- Events – to access the customer’s place of origin, what they did before and after they come to your website.
There are many other key tactics we didn’t have time to put in this article, like increasing conversions through the use of color in website design or using novelty to convert leads. Become aware of what drives leads into becoming customers, learn something new every day, and in the end, converting leads into customers will become a second-nature to you.
Guest Bloggers Bio:
Raul Harman is the editor in chief at Technivorz blog. He has a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. You can chat with Raul about all things digital marketing on Twitter.
