I generate a lot of leads, but how can my business increase conversion?
Turning more leads into sales is a common pain point for marketers in any industry. Sales conversions are the power source that drives revenue and contributes to the overall return on investment for the company.
Without a lead conversion strategy, your marketing team will waste valuable time, resources and marketing dollars investing in campaigns that don’t generate high-quality leads. Your sales team will waste valuable time, resources and marketing dollars chasing down low-quality leads who don’t convert.
Keep reading to learn 5 actionable steps your business can start today to increase the lead conversion rate.
1. Publish Quality Content
Very few people are ready to make a purchase the first time they encounter your brand. In the beginning stages of the buying process, new customers are looking for products and services that solve their problems. Once they find your brand, they’ll still be gathering research, reading reviews and determining what sets your products and services apart from competitors.
Targeted content can help your brand build trust, gain authority and remain top of mind to prospective leads. Create your content offerings around the pain points, concerns and questions that each of your buyer personas have. Aim to produce a range of targeted content that hits every stage of the conversion process:
Awareness: Educational content that outlines the features and benefits of your products
Research: Solution-focused content that outlines how your products will solve specific problems your customer is facing
Alternate seeking: Side-by-side comparison content that outlines how your products measure up to your competitors’ products
Blogs, social media posts, videos and infographics are all engaging forms of content that can help you educate prospective leads and gain their trust to increase lead conversion. Content marketing can also help you find new leads. Make sure your content is optimized to appear in search engine rankings for people who are searching for keywords around your products and services.
2. Use Lead Scoring
Not all leads are equal. Use lead scoring to identify prospective leads who are more likely to convert and weed out the ones who are less likely to convert. Lead scoring uses a numerical point system to assign value to new leads based on demographic features and actions they’ve taken on your website which will allow you to increase lead conversion.
For example, new leads who match your buyer personas for age, occupation or interests are assigned more points. So are leads who take an intentional action like filling out a form or downloading a piece of content from your website. Your company can decide which demographic characteristics and actions are the most important and rank them accordingly. Leads who are scoring in the upper ranges of the point system are more likely to convert because they’ve demonstrated more interest and intent in learning about your products and services.
By emphasizing quality over quantity, your marketing reps will be better equipped to target, identify and nurture high-quality leads before sending them to the sales team. Your sales team will waste less time and fewer resources on leads who don’t have a high chance of converting which will increase conversion.
3. Practice Lead Nurturing
Too many marketers make the mistake of trying to jump directly from lead generation to a sale. But on average, it takes 6-8 touchpoints with your brand before customers are ready to make a purchasing decision. Today’s customers are more discerning than customers of decades past. They spend more time researching, gathering information, reading reviews and comparing products before choosing a provider. And they are increasingly turned off by traditional sales and advertising techniques.
Your brand needs to nurture prospective leads as they travel through the customer journey. Lead nurturing is where your brand builds relationships, trust and credibility with potential customers. You can do this by providing multiple touchpoints where leads can interact with your brand and learn more to increase lead conversion.
Create posts on social media, publish fresh content like blogs and send personalized email campaigns. Remarketing to leads who visited your website but didn’t make a purchase is also a great way to keep your brand top of mind and encourage re-entry to the conversion process.
Lead nurturing helps you increase conversions for prospective leads who aren’t yet at the purchasing phase, but could be with the right nurturing. If you force a lead to make a sales decision before they’re ready, you run a greater risk of losing that lead for good.
4. Provide Multiple Opportunities for Intentional Engagement
As you’re nurturing leads through the customer journey, present them with multiple places where they can engage with your brand and show intent to purchase. Aim to capture contact information through:
Landing pages
Lead magnets like free content downloads
Upgrade or promotion offers
When prospective leads take actions that show intent — like filling out a form — it helps you understand where they are in the buying process. And gaining a prospective lead’s contact information allows you to send them more targeted content and continue nurturing the lead.
Make sure everything you publish has a strong call-to-action that directs customers to take a specific step. When customers are ready to convert, they should know exactly where they need to go or who they need to contact to handle the sale.
5. Encourage Marketing and Sales Cross-Collaboration
Marketing and sales teams must act as a cohesive unit to effectively drive more leads to conversions. Individually, each team plays a valuable role in the conversion process: marketing teams attract and engage new leads, while sales teams build customer relationships and close deals that secure revenue. Together, marketing and sales can help the other reach a common goal of increasing conversions.
Marketing should be using sales representatives as a valuable resource to determine what makes a quality lead. Because sales reps spend their days talking to real customers, they can offer insight into common customer questions, biggest pain points and what customers are looking for from the products and services you sell.
Marketing teams can use relevant customer information to create targeted content and launch targeted campaigns more effectively. Cross-collaboration helps marketing teams hone in on the qualities that make up a qualified lead and only send relevant, sales-ready leads over to the sales team. This ensures that sales reps aren’t wasting valuable time and resources on leads who are less likely to convert.
NewGen Marketing Can Help Guide Your Marketing Efforts
At NewGen Marketing, our executive team has spent decades driving marketing and sales initiatives for industry-leading health care brands. Our strategies are based on performance marketing; we analyze the data from marketing campaigns to determine where we can allocate resources most efficiently into channels that are generating leads and conversions. We make sure you’re not wasting a single dollar that you’re putting into marketing spend.
Ready to hear more about how performance marketing can drive more to your bottom line? Contact NewGen Marketing today for a free consultation.