Lead Generation; How to Turn Leads Into Qualified Customers
As you progress with inbound marketing, you'll want to start thinking about how to convert those visitors and leads into sales. So, since we talked about generating visitors and leads in the last couple blogs, today we'll be focusing on the real meat of the matter: how to engage in effective marketing to generate customers.
To start with, let's imagine a funnel. Website visits go in at the wide top of the funnel, and sales come out the bottom. The more you know about your customers and their buying habits, along with where they are at in the decision making process, the better you can custom design your efforts to get them through the funnel. That's where effective content marketing, or inbound marketing analytics to generate your NJ customers comes into play.
Get Analytical!
There are a number of sources online for analytics tools, ranging from Google's free and high-quality Google Analytics suite to a range of other more comprehensive solutions. The point of these tools, fundamentally, is to track your customers and learn as much as you can about their buying habits and interests here in NJ.
Once you get that, you can start really digging into the data.
Track Your Customers From Search Engine to Shopping Cart
Through a combination of a good analytics package and your own records, you can quickly build a database of customer behavior. Unlike a traditional store, once a customer has entered your website you can track them every step in the way and analyze their behaviors.
You could, for example, watch to see which traffic sources seem to be most effective in generating sales, and use that to inform how to best target your inbound internet marketing. Are you getting most of your web traffic through specific keyword searches? Do you see a high number of searches for products or services you never really thought of as particularly interesting or valuable areas? You can evaluate the effectiveness of each page on your website. You can see which of your blog entries or landing pages seem to be most often visited by people who have entered your funnel.
Then, the most marvelous fun; all of this marketing insight can now be used to make adjustments to your site. If a particular page is great at generating activity, link to it more. Do what you can to nudge visitors onto “tracks” that tend to lead to sales. (I like to compare this to how IKEA makes you walk past all their impulse buys before you're able to order a plate of Swedish meatballs. Dee-lish!)
Tracking Your Marketing's Effectiveness
You can also very deliberately track how effective your marketing is. Remember when we talked about using landing pages to generate sales data? Now is the time to use it! With a good analytics system, you can begin to see exactly how effective each and every one of your marketing efforts are. If you send out an email sales pitch to leads, you can see exactly who responds to it. Who clicks the link, who browses, and who buys. This feedback allows you to carefully fine-tune your emails to get the best responses possible, with a level of refinement that's not possible with older, traditional methods like direct mail.
Every marketing endeavor you engage in can be tracked in this way, from Pay-Per-Click ads to Facebook posts. Even better, once you've got a lead's email address or Facebook friendship, you can even track individual behavior wherever it intersects with you. Rather than sending out one general email to all your leads, you can send micro-targeted messages to a handful of people based on what you know of their interests.
Embrace The Future
The key to effective online marketing to generate customers is to embrace the possibilities that the Internet offers. Gather as much data as you can, and make use of it. You'll increase your sales, and be able to calculate your marketing ROI much more effectively than was ever possible in old-style traditional marketing.
To learn more about inbound marketing for your NJ businesses, click here.