The inbound marketing process has failure points. If your business is set up where marketing generates leads and your sales team aggressively calls, then trust can be compromised with otherwise potential sales opportunities.
Inbound marketing has the following conversion points:
- Visitors: These are a high quantity of people that find you from search or marketing efforts. They visit your site and will engage your content if it is relevant and remarkable. If you do not meet this criteria, then you lose visitor stickiness.
- Leads: A lead is someone who chooses to exchange their anonymity for something of value. As trust is built from your content, then their eagerness for a higher level of value means that they identify themselves. They will give you their email address and name when they get access to white papers, video, guides, ebooks and other quality produced items that help them solve a problem.
- Prospects: These are people that move through the marketing funnel and say, “Yes,” to engaging your sales process. They agree to a meeting, a trial of software or purchasing an item. High trust and/or high pain has created this opportunity for your business.
Conversion
Think about when you buy. It is a process which starts with awareness moves through education and then escalates to action based on trust.
If you disrupt the natural buying process by injecting your salesmanship or not providing a logical next step, then a conversion point is affected. In our attention economy, it is difficult to regain ground.
Each of the steps need to be monitored and walked with analytics that reveal how your buyers are moving through the funnel. As you are building your process, it becomes an exercise in refinement and iteration. Here is what to look for:
- Content Interest. Understand what your visitors are looking at specifically and how deep they delve. Their affinities will provide insight into how to create further content which builds upon the initial search.
- Call To Action Value. Your value piece to generate a lead takes up valuable real estate with each content piece. Ensure there is a logical and attractive next step to your call to action. Analyzing the number of new emails you get will determine success. Drive the ratio between Leads to Visitors by carefully reviewing where the drop offs are between the content consumption and the actual sign-ups for your value pieces.
- Nurturing. Continue to build momentum and trust with Leads by delivering ongoing value and nurturing. Timeliness and personal messages which connect based on their behaviors are required. This is an intelligent marketing automation process that has responsive engagement with the prospect. Nurturing is the appropriate strategy where premature sales engagement might otherwise be used.
You may be getting visitors, but converting them to viable sales opportunities requires focus and systems to drive the conversion points. These areas of iteration will be the crux points for making your inbound marketing strategies and systems a continuing asset for lead generation and lead conversion in your business.
What areas can you optimize for helping visitors become prospects? Feel free to comment below.
