Don’t over think it. There are no new ideas in marketing, there are only best practices and degrees of execution. Execute well and consistently and results (leads) appear. Execute poorly or underfund your marketing and results will be illusive. It’s that simple.
4 Steps to New business:
- Attracting the right Traffic
- Convert your traffic into engaged suspects
- Demonstrate relationship value aka “Nurturing”
- Convert your engaged traffic into customers
1. The “right” traffic
We see folks looking at traffic volumes all of the time as the “gold standard” metric. The issue with this approach is that all traffic is not created equal. The The “right” traffic will engage your pages longer and not bounce. Many marketing companies get traffic to your site but it is low quality in that they have no need for your products and services and are merely coming in from a “stray” keyword that has an association with your site. Bounce rates should be less than 50% and on page duration metrics should be over 1 minute per page.
SEO is the key to aligning your products and services with the “right” traffic and is an ongoing process due to the hundreds of search engine algorithm changes that Google, Bing/Yahoo institute every year.
PPC campaigns can be successful in attracting traffic but can easily be lost to competitors with bigger budgets. To us the ROI from SEO and organic seach traffic is much better and longer lasting than PPC. Targeted marketing 1:1 campaigns can be effective.
2. Capture and Convert leads
Websites need to have strong conversion functionality. Downloadable whitepapers demonstration your firms thought leadership work well as do on-site calculators that provide some high level assessment of the visitor’s environment.
Arranging content on your site so that you can identify companies and more specifically business functions within that company is very useful in direction sales resources in their prospect calls. However having compelling content that drives a fair amount of conversions (downloads or form submissions) it how you need to grade your site. Invest in content if you are not converting a good portion of your visiting traffic. Make sure you are tracking inbound calls to the company as well to get a true picture. Some visitors prefer to reach out directly when they make a decision to engage your firm.
3. Thought Leadership and Nurturing Prospects
A recent study across multiple industries showed that 50% of leads will buy within 18 months. 85% of those buyers will make the purchase 3 – 18 months after expressing initial interest.
Repeat:
85% of the people who are going to buy from you will not purchase until 3 – 18 months AFTER they first get to your website.
That means if you’re not nurturing your prospects via email, phone, and/or direct mail then you’re missing 85% of the potential buyers. Now that is truly mission critical.
4. Sales Relentless pursuit
It can take months to convert a visitor to a prospect through digital marketing and if sales does not follow up in a steady, reliable manner these prospects will go elsewhere. Realize that you are being compared to two or three other companies and do not have an exclusive. You must out-think, out-serve, and out deliver your competition. Don’t blow it! Deploy a sales powerhouse!
