1. Develop a Strong Value Proposition

Making a convincing value proposition is a key aspect of establishing appointments for businesses operating in the USA. Value propositions are descriptions that explain the distinct benefits an item or service gives its customers and the reasons why it is superior to its rivals.

A compelling value proposition is vital for B2B appointment scheduling as it helps distinguish an organization from its competition. Convince potential customers to select their services.

This article outlines a few important strategies B2B appointment-setting companies within the USA can employ to create an effective value proposition.

• Knowing the market they are targeting and their needs in particular via market research and competitor analysis is essential in creating a compelling value proposition. 

• It is also crucial to concentrate on the benefits the company can offer instead of simply listing the features of the product or service.

• A strong value proposition must be concise, clear, and simple to comprehend. By highlighting the unique selling point of a company, like exceptional customer service or the latest technology, you can help set the company apart from other competitors.

• Using testimonials from customers can help establish confidence and trust among prospective customers. 

• Emphasizing ROI by showing how services can improve efficiency, cut costs, or increase revenue, can convince customers of the value of their services.

• To improve the value proposition by incorporating the feedback of customers and market research to make sure it is relevant and efficient. Your unique value proposition differentiates you from your competitors and will help prospective customers understand why they should choose your company.

It’s crucial to convey your business’s value proposition on your website, social media channels, and any other marketing materials.

2. Leverage Social Media

Social media platforms provide an excellent opportunity to interact with prospective customers and create leads. By posting regular content and responding to messages and comments, you’ll build an audience and attract new customers to your company.

A qualified sales lead has expressed an interest in your product or service and is likely to turn into a paying customer. Social media is a proven method to create qualified sales leads because social media platforms provide an excellent chance to connect with potential customers.

To generate qualified sales leads on social media, you should:

• Identify your target audience and understand their interests and problems.
• Create valuable content that provides solutions to their problems.
• Use social media to promote your content using relevant hashtags and keywords.
• Engage with your audience by responding to comments and messages promptly.
• Run targeted social media ads to reach more potential customers and generate qualified leads.

3. Optimize Your Website for Lead Generation

The website you have created is the primary point of contact for prospective customers. It’s crucial to ensure it’s optimized to generate leads. This means having clear calls-to-action, simple forms, user-friendly forms, and captivating content that catches the attention of your intended audience.

These are the most important tips on how to optimize your website to generate leads:

• Clear and concise messages: The message on the website must be concise, and clear and present a strong value proposition that explains the distinct advantages of the services offered by the company.
• Contact forms must be easy and user-friendly and only ask for the information needed to follow up with the person who initiated them.
• Call to action Effective call-to-action (CTA) buttons must be prominently displayed on the site and clearly explain the actions the user must take.
• Landing pages: Landing pages can be utilized to specifically target a segment of the targeted audience and urge users to take an action, like signing up for a free trial period or downloading an ebook.
• Search engine optimization SEO helps increase the visibility of a site on search engine results pages, which makes it simpler for potential customers to find the site.
• Mobile optimization: Your website should be designed to work with mobile devices since more people are using the internet via mobile devices resulting in an improved user experience. It also makes it more convenient for potential customers to decide on the site.

Utilizing these strategies, B2B appointment setters can improve their websites to increase lead generation and increase the chances of converting visitors into customers.

4. Use Paid Advertising

Paid advertisements on platforms such as Google and Facebook are a powerful method to reach a wider audience and generate leads. By focusing your ads on specific groups of people and their interests, you can make sure that your ads are reaching the most relevant people.

To generate leads, you can use different types of paid advertising, including:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, involves placing ads on search engines or social media platforms and paying each time someone clicks on your ad.
• Social media advertising, allows you to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
• Display advertising, which involves placing ads on third-party websites, can be an effective way to reach a large number of people quickly.
• Retargeting involves showing ads to people who have already interacted with your brand to encourage them to come back and convert.
• Native advertising involves placing ads that blend in with the content of the website or platform where they are displayed and can be less disruptive than traditional ads.

5. Attend Industry Events and Conferences

Attending conferences and events for your industry is a great opportunity to meet prospective customers as well as generate leads. Be sure to carry lots of business cards, and be ready to have meaningful conversations about your business.

To make the most of attending industry events and conferences, it’s important to do some research on the event and attendees. Promote your attendance to existing customers and prospects.

Have a plan for how you will engage with attendees, and collect contact information from people you meet to continue the conversation and move them further down the sales funnel.

6. Offer Free Trials or Samples

Offering free trials or samples is an effective way to convince potential customers to test the product or service and also generate leads. By offering a low-risk method to allow people to test your product, you will establish trust and credibility with your potential customers.

To offer a free trial or sample, you should first define your target audience. Decide on the length of the trial or sample, and promote the offer to your audience through various channels. Collect contact information from potential customers in exchange for a trial or sample.

Follow up with them after the trial or sample period ends to see if they are interested in purchasing your product or service. It is essential to highlight the benefits of your product or service and explain how the trial or sample can help solve their problems to create a compelling offer that resonates with them.

7. Ask for Referrals

Existing customers are a good source of leads. By soliciting referrals and encouraging your customers to recommend others to your company, it is possible to quickly and efficiently create new leads.

Asking for referrals is an effective method of generating leads. To maximize the value of referrals, you need to determine your ideal client and reach out to those customers you already have, offering incentives for referrals.

Follow up promptly with prospects you have referred to, and be sure to thank the people who referred you. In this way, you will be able to develop stronger relationships with your customers and generate leads that are more likely to be converted into sales.

8. Create Valuable Content

Making valuable content such as videos, blog posts, and infographics can help draw in and keep your customers. By providing useful information and insights that help establish trust with your targeted audience and increase leads.

To create valuable content for lead generation, it’s important to first understand your target audience and their interests. Once you have this information, focus on creating high-quality content such as blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, podcasts, and videos.

Incorporate relevant keywords to improve visibility in search engine results and optimize the content for conversions by including calls to action (CTAs) that encourage potential customers to take the next step. Finally, promote your content through social media, email marketing, and other channels to reach a wider audience and generate more leads.

9. Partner with Other Businesses

Collaboration with other businesses in your field can be an effective way to create more leads. By collaborating to promote each other’s companies and services, you can make use of each other’s networks and increase your reach.

The strategy of partnering with other businesses involves identifying potential partners and reaching out to them. Creating a mutually beneficial arrangement, establishing clear goals and expectations, and measuring and analyzing the results.

The first step is to identify businesses that have a similar target audience or offer complementary products or services. Once potential partners are identified, they should be contacted to explore collaboration opportunities.

It is important to ensure that the partnership is beneficial for both parties and to establish clear goals and expectations before beginning the partnership. Finally, it is essential to measure and analyze the results to ensure that they are meeting the agreed-upon goals.

10. Use Marketing Automation

Tools for automation in marketing, like lead nurturing and email marketing software, will help you simplify your lead-generation processes and keep in contact with prospective customers. By automating your marketing process, you will be able to save time and concentrate on other areas of your company.

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for lead generation. It involves setting up lead capture forms on your website or landing pages, creating targeted campaigns for specific segments of your audience, and nurturing leads with automated workflows.

Scoring and prioritizing leads based on their behavior and engagement, and analyzing results to optimize your strategy over time. By integrating your marketing automation software with your website and other tools.

You can collect important information about your leads and track their behavior, which can help you create more effective campaigns and close more sales.

Final Comment

In conclusion, generating leads is essential for small business growth, and these 10 strategies can help you do just that. 

By developing a strong value proposition, optimizing your website, leveraging social media, using paid advertising, attending events, offering free trials or samples, asking for referrals, creating valuable content, partnering with other businesses, and using marketing automation, you can effectively generate more leads and grow your business.

So, don’t hesitate to implement these tactics and take your small business to the next level!

The post Top 10 Smart Strategies for Small Businesses to Generate More Leads appeared first on SiteProNews.

Before deciding which lead generation strategy is best for their marketing campaign, a company must decide what method they will use to evaluate their success: cost per acquisition (CPA) or ad-spend return on investment (ROAS). While ROAS is the simpler — and therefore more commonly used — metric, CPA allows the marketer to gain much more in-depth insight regarding how effectively their budget is being used.

How Live Transfers Can Increase Conversions

One of the most prevalent lead generation strategies marketers will see this year is live transfers. In a live transfer, a company has a third-party vendor responsible for generating leads and pre-qualifying prospects. Once the lead has been screened, they are transferred to the salesperson, who continues the conversation and tries to make a sale. This strategy is valuable and effective because it allows the salesperson to speak with a potentially interested and qualified prospect in real-time. 

The main benefit of lead generation using live transfers is that they focus on qualified and interested prospects. Since the third-party vendor pre-screens leads to ensure they meet all minimum qualifications, salespeople are only talking to leads who have expressed interest in the product or service and are qualified to make a purchase. This will help increase the conversion rate because these leads tend to be warmer and reduce CPA by increasing the likelihood of a successful sale.

When it comes to higher-priced or complex products or services, live transfers can be particularly useful because the salesperson knows the lead is already interested and qualified. As such, they do not have to waste time trying to educate or persuade uninterested or unqualified leads of the value of their product or service.

Using Inbound Calls to Your Advantage

Similarly, marketers have used inbound calls to better utilize their salespeople’s time on interested leads. Many telemarketing regulations only allow companies to call individuals who have “opted in” to being contacted. Since the customer initiated the contact in an inbound call, it is no longer necessary for the salesperson to worry about obtaining prior consent. This is in contrast to live transfers, which are technically initiated by the company and require the customer’s consent before the transfer is made.

The primary benefit of inbound calls is that they allow the salesperson to have greater control over the customer experience. In an inbound call, the sales representative can have a script or set of guidelines they must follow, ensuring they hit all the required beats for the call. Additionally, the company can monitor the call to ensure that the sales representative is performing consistently and providing a high level of customer service. With live transfers, the salesperson takes over after part of the sales conversation has already occurred, giving them less control over how it progresses.

Inbound calls also have the advantage of significantly increasing the salesperson’s credibility. Because the customer actively chooses to contact the company, they are much more likely to trust the salesperson than one who has called them unsolicited. For companies selling high-cost products or services, this feeling of trust is paramount, as these salespeople are asking customers to make a significant purchase.

How Pre-booked Appointments Allow Better Sales Presentations

Pre-set appointments also give salespeople better control over the sales presentation. With a pre-booked appointment, the sales team is given time to prepare for the meeting in advance. As a result, they can tailor the presentation or demonstration to the specific needs and interests of the prospect. With the right screening questions asked during the appointment-setting process, this can significantly increase the chances of successful sales.

One of the biggest advantages of using pre-booked appointments is that this method allows the sales team to significantly improve the customer experience. A lead may grow disillusioned with the sales presentation if they feel like they are being given the same spiel that has been given to every prospective customer before them. It is important for salespeople to pay attention to kept rates and the internal follow-up process leading up to the appointment to understand whether the appointment is the pivotal factor in their success.

How Form Fills Give Salespeople Greater Control Over the Presentation

The final lead generation strategy  that has shown great potential is the use of form fills. Like inbound calls, form fill leads present companies with the opportunity to bypass “opt-in” requirements. Filling out the form serves as the customer’s consent to be contacted, as they actively choose to provide their information to the company and express interest in their product or service.

Form fill leads also give telemarketers greater control over the sales process, as the company can control what information is gathered from the prospect. Any information relevant to the sales process, including the prospect’s needs, budget, and decision-making timeline, can be collected to allow sales teams to better qualify and prioritize leads.

Marketers can choose from various lead generation strategies to source qualified prospects for their salespeople, including live transfers, inbound calls, pre-booked appointments, and form fills. Each method has its own advantages and weaknesses, but the common qualities marketers should strive for are an optimal customer experience, control over the call, and the ability to focus on qualified and interested leads. With these qualities in mind, salespeople will hopefully increase their conversion rate and reduce their CPA.

The post Lead Generation Verticals and Strategies that will Dominate the Industry in 2023 appeared first on SiteProNews.

Lead magnets are a crucial part of any successful marketing strategy. The term refers to an incentive offered to potential customers for their contact information. It can include email addresses, phone numbers, or social media handles. Lead magnets attract more qualified leads to your business, increasing the chances of making a sale and growing your customer base. This blog will discuss the importance of lead magnets, how to understand your target audience, different types of lead magnets, and tips for creating an effective lead magnet.

Definition of Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are valuable for businesses looking to increase their customer base. They entice potential customers to provide their contact information, which can then be used to build a relationship with them and convert them into paying customers. Lead magnets can come in many forms, including e-books, whitepapers, checklists, webinars, free trials, quizzes, surveys, case studies, and success stories.

Purpose of Lead Magnets

The main purpose of lead magnets is to attract potential customers to your business. By providing valuable resources in exchange for their contact information, you can build a relationship with them and increase the chances of making a sale. Lead magnets can also help you to qualify your leads, as those who are interested enough to provide their contact information are likely to be more likely to make a purchase.

Importance of Lead Magnets in Attracting More Qualified Leads

Lead magnets are a vital component of any successful marketing strategy. By offering value to potential customers, you can increase the chances of attracting more qualified leads to your business. Qualified leads are those who have a genuine interest in your product or service and are more likely to make a purchase. You won’t be wasting precious time or money on unqualified leads who are unlikely to purchase.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is important to create an effective lead magnet. It includes identifying the audience’s needs, determining their pain points, and understanding their behavior patterns. Understanding your target audience can create a lead magnet that appeals to and addresses their needs.

Identifying the Needs of Your Target Audience

The first step in understanding your target audience is to identify their needs. It can be done by researching your target market, talking to current customers, and analyzing data from previous marketing efforts. By understanding the requirements of your target audience, you can create a lead magnet that addresses their specific problems and offers a solution.

Determining the Pain Points of Your Target Audience

In addition to understanding the needs of your target audience, it’s also important to determine their pain points. It can be done by looking at the challenges they face and the obstacles that are preventing them from achieving their goals. By understanding the pain points of your target audience, you can create a lead magnet that offers a solution and helps to alleviate their problems.

Understanding the Behavior Patterns of Your Target Audience

Finally, it’s important to understand the behavior patterns of your target audience. It includes their browsing habits, the types of products and services they are interested in, and their buying behavior. By understanding the behavior patterns of your target audience, you can create a lead magnet that appeals to them and is more likely to be successful.

Types of Lead Magnets

Businesses can use several lead magnets to attract more qualified leads. Some popular options include e-books, whitepapers, checklists, webinars, free trials, quizzes, surveys, case studies, and success stories.

E-book/Whitepaper

E-books and whitepapers are great ways to provide in-depth information about a particular topic or subject matter. They can educate potential customers about your industry, offer tips and advice, or provide information about your products and services. E-books and whitepapers are usually delivered digitally, making them easy to access and share. They can be offered in exchange for the potential customer’s contact information, providing valuable information while capturing valuable lead data.

Checklist/Worksheet

Checklists and worksheets are practical tools to help potential customers complete a specific task or solve a problem. They can guide potential customers through a process, offer tips and advice, or provide a checklist of things to consider when purchasing. Checklists and worksheets are often used to provide additional value to potential customers.

Webinar/Demo

Webinars and demos are a great way to provide potential customers with a live, interactive experience. They can be used to demonstrate your products or services, provide in-depth information about a particular topic, or offer a hands-on experience with your product or service. Webinars and demos are often used with other lead magnets, such as e-books or whitepapers, to provide additional value to potential customers.

Free Trial/Sample

Free trials and samples are a great way to give potential customers a taste of your products or services. They can encourage potential customers to try your products or services without any risk, allowing them to experience the value for themselves. Free trials and samples provide additional value to potential customers.

Quiz/Survey

Quizzes and surveys are a fun and interactive way to engage with potential customers. They can gather information about your target audience, provide personalized recommendations, or entertain and engage potential customers. Quizzes and surveys can be offered in exchange for the potential customer’s contact information, providing valuable information while capturing valuable lead data.

Case Study/Success

Story Case studies and success stories are a great way to demonstrate the effectiveness of your products or services. They can show how your products or services have helped others to solve a particular problem, overcome an obstacle, or achieve a specific goal. Case studies and success stories are often used with lead magnets like e-books or whitepapers to provide additional value to potential customers.

Creating an Effective Lead Magnet

Once you have identified the type of lead magnet that is right for your business, there are several steps you can take to create an effective lead magnet.

Choosing the Right Type of Lead Magnet

The first step in creating an effective lead magnet is to choose the right type of lead magnet. When selecting, consider your target audience’s needs, pain points, and behavior patterns. The goal is to choose a lead magnet that appeals to your target audience and offers the most value.

Creating a Compelling Offer

Creating an effective lead magnet is the next step in creating a compelling offer. It includes developing a clear and concise message that addresses the requirements of your target audience and offers a solution to their problems. Ensure your offer is unique and valuable and stands out from similar offers.

Crafting a Clear and Concise Message

In addition to creating a compelling offer, it’s important to craft a clear and concise message that explains what your lead magnet is, what it offers, and how it will benefit the potential customer. Ensure your message is understandable and aligned with your target audience’s needs. A clear and concise message will help increase your lead magnet’s visibility and effectiveness.

Designing an Attractive and User-friendly Lead Magnet

The design of your lead magnet is just as important as the content. Your lead magnet should be visually appealing and easy to use, with a clear and simple layout that makes it easy for potential customers to access the information they need. Ensure your lead magnet’s design is consistent with your brand and provides a professional and polished appearance.

Integrating Email List Providers

Integrating email list providers into your lead magnet strategy can offer numerous benefits to businesses looking to build and manage their email lists. Email list providers provide a convenient and cost-effective solution for businesses to collect and manage email addresses and typically offer advanced features such as automation, segmentation, and analytics. It can help businesses engage with their subscribers more effectively and track the success of their campaigns, simplifying the process of collecting and managing email addresses and allowing businesses to focus on creating compelling lead magnets and promoting them to attract more qualified leads.

Optimizing Your Lead Magnet

Once you have created your lead magnet, there are several steps you can take to optimize it for maximum impact.

Placement and Promotion of Your Lead Magnet

The placement and promotion of your lead magnet are key to its success. Make sure your lead magnet is visible and easily accessible to potential customers. Consider adding it to your website, including it in your email campaigns, and promoting it through your social media channels.

Offering Incentives for Completing Your Lead Magnet

Consider offering incentives for completing your lead magnet, such as a discount on your products or services, a free trial, or access to exclusive content. Offering incentives can help to increase engagement and encourage potential customers to complete your lead magnet.

Measuring the Success of Your Lead Magnet

Finally, it’s important to measure the success of your lead magnet. Track the number of downloads, your lead magnet’s conversion rate, and your target audience’s engagement. Use this information to make necessary changes and optimize your lead magnet for maximum impact.

Conclusion

Lead magnets are a powerful tool for attracting more qualified leads to your business. By understanding your desired audience, choosing the right type of lead magnet, creating a compelling offer, crafting a clear and concise message, and optimizing your lead magnet, you can increase the visibility and effectiveness of your lead magnet and attract more qualified leads to your business.

Recap of the Importance of Lead Magnets in Attracting More Qualified Leads

Lead magnets are a valuable tool for attracting more qualified leads to your business. By offering valuable information or a solution to a problem, you can capture the attention of your target audience and encourage them to provide their contact information. It allows you to build relationships and increase the chances of converting prospective customers into paying customers.

Encouragement to Create and Test Your Lead Magnet

Creating and testing your lead magnet is a great way to explore the benefits of lead magnets for your business. Try different types of lead magnets, test different offers, and measure the success of each lead magnet to find the ones that work best for your business.

Final Thoughts on the Role of Lead Magnets in Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Lead magnets play an important role in your overall marketing strategy. By attracting more qualified leads, you can increase the chances of converting the leads into paying customers and grow your business. As you explore the benefits of lead magnets, be sure to test different approaches and measure the success of each lead magnet to find the ones that work best for your business.

The post Boost Your Lead Generation with Lead Magnets appeared first on SiteProNews.

Wait, why are we talking about digital marketing, again? Oh yes, James is preparing for his next meeting, and collecting data for it. His new content marketing strategy should be doing great,but his data doesn’t agree.

His data indicates that he simply doesn’t have enough leads from his marketing efforts. But, that shouldn’t be possible, he’s invested so much in his content marketing strategy. Except….it’s very much possible and it happens all the time. But, it’s natural for James to wonder why this should be happening in the first place.

Today, even the biggest companies in the world have to up their marketing game. If they don’t follow the latest trends, they’re likely to fall behind their many competitors when it comes to lead generation. Content marketing is one of the most popular digital advertising trends these days.

This marketing technique involves giving your viewers useful information to promote your products. Sure, this information can be promotional. But, the main idea here is that viewers should find solutions to their problems with your content.

For this, you would need to have a well-thought-out content marketing strategy. But, it’s not easy to craft this strategy if you haven’t done it before. So, here are some of our best tips for leads generation through a content marketing strategy.

What Makes a Good Content Marketing Strategy?

Before we get started with our tips, let’s first talk about what makes a good content marketing strategy. A good content marketing strategy starts with understanding your audience. Different brands cater to different target audiences. For instance, Nike products don’t appeal to those over the age of 40.

‘Does that mean people over 40 won’t be buying Nike products?’, James wonders aloud at the meeting. ‘No’, replies Sheryl. an SEO expert, ‘it just means that Nike doesn’t consider people over 40 its target audience. Its marketing campaigns are aimed towards a younger, more athletic audience.’

Sheryl is right, of course. Nike ads are both engaging and inspiring. If you don’t have the resources for it, it can be challenging to create such content. You can find a content marketing consultancy to make useful content for your audience.

A dedicated marketing consultant can create an effective marketing strategy for your brand. You need to publish regular and engaging marketing content for your brand to stay on top of the marketing trends. Hence, hiring a content marketing consultancy can be the best investment for your company.

These marketing consultants improve your ROI by helping you reach your audience. They are aware of the nuances of the niche and have experience in creating engaging content to design marketing strategies.

Also, it’s helpful to note that the costs of this kind of marketing are less than outbound marketing. Besides, lead generation is better with content marketing than with outbound marketing.

For those wondering, outbound marketing is the conventional marketing method. This marketing method involves using promotional techniques to reach your customers. This is often time-consuming and ineffective in the face of changing trends.

Instead, content marketing will allow you to keep up with these changing trends.

Content Marketing Tips for Leads Generation

Now let’s talk about some content marketing tips that will help you to boost your lead generation.

1. Use Personalized Content as Much as You Can

Engage your audience better by using personalized content. The first step in this direction is to understand the needs of your target audience. This is the key to creating meaningful content for them.

James knows how to make content interesting, but doesn’t know how to make it meaningful. ‘The things I find entertaining aren’t always very meaningful. How can I make content that’s interesting and meaningful for our marketing campaign?’, James asks no one in particular.

Roshan, a display advertising expert, perks up. ‘Understanding how to make meaningful content isn’t easy, but it starts with listening to our audience’, he says.

‘This doesn’t mean that we need to speak to each customer individually. It simply means that we would need to bear their needs in mind for our advertising campaign.’

‘But how are we to do this?’, asks Sheryl. Roshan replies, ‘One way to do this is through user surveys in which you ask them questions related to our campaign. This will help us to understand what they want to see in our ads. We can use Google Analytics to understand what your customers want.’

Roshan really seems to know what he’s talking about! Knowing your customer demographics can help you improve your content. Think about it, content that would appeal to teenagers wouldn’t appeal to an older audience. Likewise, content that appeals to a male audience wouldn’t appeal equally to a female audience.

A fantastic example of a personalized marketing campaign is Cadbury’s campaign in Australia. The brand matched chocolate flavors to elements from Facebook user profiles. Once users connected with the brand, Cadbury used their photos and information to create content.

2. Pick the Right Channels to Promote Your Content

You would need to pick the right channels to promote your content online if you want to generate leads. After all, it doesn’t matter how good your content is if it’s not reaching your target audience. The right channels help you connect with your audience like never before.

This can lead to increased lead generation in the long run. You would first need to research about channel preferences of various audiences. Research would tell you that Instagram is a popular choice for younger audiences. But, Facebook is popular among those aged 25 and above.

‘What?!’, James exclaims. ‘I don’t even use Facebook anymore…I only see my parents and their friends on it these days’. ‘Shhhh. That’s not what the data indicates. Pay close attention to this next bit’, whispers Sheryl.

You need to consider which channels help you connect with the right demographic. Once you pick your channel, think about the format for your content.

Some channels like YouTube run ads in video format only. Other channels like Instagram use video ads and static ads. Music streaming ads run audio ads that are reminiscent of radio ads. A mismatch between your product and ad channel can make your ads ineffective.

For instance, if you’re selling machinery, your first choice for an ad channel shouldn’t be Instagram. You’d be better off using sites or blogs to feature articles on your machinery. You can create a blog for yourself and promote the links online.

Use relevant sites (such as construction-related sites) for link promotion. This will give you a good chance of improving your online lead generation.

3. Find Ways to Optimize Your Conversion Rate

Remember that the aim behind content marketing is to increase conversions. Conversions take place when a user takes the desired action upon viewing your ads. In most cases, these desired actions are clicking your ads and buying your products. But, there are other ways to measure conversions as well.

For instance, YouTube uses Engaged View Conversions (EVC) to measure conversion rate. This rate measures how many viewers viewed your ads for at least 10 seconds. So, it allows YouTube to show you how many users were interested even though they didn’t click on your ads.

‘But why do we care about users that say our ads but didn’t click on them? Wouldn’t it be a waste of time to view such stats?’, James asks Roshan. Roshan has some experience in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising, so he answers, ‘This is a useful measurement method because viewers don’t always take action immediately.

A user might want to check out our website after they finish watching the YouTube video they’re interested in. So, it makes sense for us to measure how many viewers are likely to buy our products.For this to happen, our content should inspire actions in users.’

Let’s tell James A few ways in which he can inspire action in viewers:

• End your content with a CTA (Call-To-Action). These are usually small lines of sentences that encourage your viewers to convert. An example of a CTA would be ‘Click Here to Find out More!’
• Use attractive thumbnails for your video ads. A thumbnail is an image on display before a viewer clicks on your video.
• Allow your viewers the option to learn more about your products after they’re done viewing your ads. For instance, add a ‘See More’ link on Linkedin posts. Viewers interested in your post will click on it to know more about your company.

These methods should help you optimize the results of your content marketing strategy. This is because they help you inspire curiosity in your audiences.

4. Consider Keyword Research

The best content in the world is of little use to companies that can’t reach their audience. And, to reach your audience, you should know exactly what they’re looking for. This is only possible if you take part in some keyword research.

Keyword research deals with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), an important digital marketing technique. It is crucial to use SEO techniques for all kinds of advertising content. Know which keywords will get you a high amount of traffic online.

You can measure your traffic using tools like Google Analytics. This tool can help you understand how your SEO techniques are affecting your traffic. Then, think about how you can optimize your use of keywords.

An SEO expert can help you with your keyword research. And, a PPC specialist can help you use these keywords in the right places to boost traffic. So, you can have these experts design your display ads for you.

Keyword tools online can give you results on which keywords are popular. They also let you know which key phrases are gaining attention online.

Remember to check keyword difficulty (KD) when viewing keywords. This statistic will let you know how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. The higher the KD, the harder it’ll be to bid for it on a Google Ads campaign. Also, you should know that more popular keywords are priced higher than others.

Pay attention to these stats before you design your content around a keyword.

Conclusion

Designing a content marketing strategy should be easy if you follow the right steps. If you use each of our tips, you’ll be able to generate leads in no time. This in turn will help you boost your online conversions.

Remember to mix things up every once in a while. Marketing trends change quickly and your content should be able to keep up with that. Your target audience may display more interest in your competitors’ ads if yours miss the mark.

The last thing you should want is for your marketing efforts to fizzle out with insufficient leads!

The post 4 Tips for Generating Leads through Content Marketing appeared first on SiteProNews.

You’d be surprised to learn that you aren’t the only one facing this issue. One out of every ten writers struggles with the same, actually. 

The problem? 

They try to perfect their content but forget to make it impactful. 

Here, we will help you craft impactful content in 8 simple steps, along with tips on things you need to look out for. 

Digital content remains the undisputed king of digital marketing – and therefore the best way to promote your business. From product manufacturers, service providers or retailers all the way to healthcare providers, home restorers and even if you’re NASA, content plays a major role in enhancing your digital footprint and promoting your business/cause.

However, not all content is created equal. The writing style, search engine optimization and supporting content, all play a huge role in determining whether the content you write is subpar or excellent. How to determine that, you ask? 

Well, take your pick. A recent study shows that globally, the number of leads generated, readers and conversions are what good content is supposed to tackle. However, that isn’t set in stone. You write content for your own goal. 

This article, for example, is to help you learn. Someone else may be writing an article just for the sake of likes or views – not conversions. Here are the results of said study.

If done right, the results of the content you write will not just improve readership, but can also lead to increased inflow of leads, conversions and social mentions.

So, let’s jump right in!

Step 1: Start With the End in Mind

You will have an easier time creating bespoke and engaging content if you know what the end goal is with your marketing campaign. See the graph above? Take your pick and move on from there. 

A good starting point lets you set out a mission statement for your content strategy, defining your marketing goals and the actions you should take to achieve them.

Clearly identified marketing goals give you two main benefits. 

First, they give you a direction to work. This is always useful for crafting content that relates to your business goals. The more streamlined your direction, the more focused you will be when writing. This gives you an edge over others that can help you create high-quality content. 

Second, a pre-defined goal helps you analyse the content to see how closely it was created to meet your goals. It is easier to analyse results from your blogs, articles, web copy and social media marketing if you have an objective to compare them with.

Having a goal makes it much easier for you and your article writers to focus on what’s important and what’s not. This is crucial for a successful digital marketing strategy.

Speaking of ‘beginnings’, keep in mind that people only read the first paragraph of your content before determining whether it’s for them or not. And even then, it’s not as much reading as it is scanning. Readers usually scan content unless they find that it is worth their time, so write a beginning that speaks to them, and then some! 

Step 2: Study Your Audience and Write for Them

It is important to have a good idea about who you’re writing for. The demographics of your site visitors, their numbers, who they are, what they prefer, what device they’re using and even the frequency of visits; all of these will add up to help you create better content.

The more you know about them, the more you can tailor your content and write content that leaves a good taste in their mouths once you’re done. The interesting thing about writing for your audience is that the more you write for them, the more you understand them. The more you understand them, the more you tailor your words and content. The more you tailor content, the more you attract them to your site.

And eventually, the more impact you’ll have on them.

For example, suppose you are into fashion, makeup and beauty tips. You write and publish articles and blogs on these topics on your website fairly regularly. In time, you will attract and build an audience that is interested in similar topics. Okay, scratch that – in a few years, they’ll be interested in what you write on. 

Writing on fashion, your readers will mostly be women between the ages of 12 and 60 who are into fashion and beauty topics.

To retain your audience, you will need to give them more of the content that they want to read. To make it impactful, continue writing regularly and build a fanbase. If you suddenly started writing about truck rallies or high-tech gadgets and robots on your blog, your audience would lose interest.

The lesson here is that any type of website can be successful, as long as you attract the right audience to it and give the visitors what they want. 

Step 3: Create an Engaging Experience

Even the best-written articles and product descriptions can be rendered useless if you don’t engage your audiences. If you fail to engage, how will you influence or impact? What separates average content from great content is the level of interest and engagement that you build with your readers. That rapport you build with readers, urging them to continue; that’s what helps you make an influence. 

Remember, anyone can write an article filled with necessary information about a product or service. But it takes more than just informing your readers about a product that makes you stand out from the rest. Plus, if you really want your audiences to buy something, you need to do more than just inform them. 

The trick is to have a conversation with your readers in articles. You can ask questions, tell a joke, share experiences and even remind your readers about past events or blogs, all in the breadth of a single article. All of this is meant to create a lasting impression in the minds of your readers.

The purpose of content marketing is, after all, to leave a memorable expression for potential customers. A strong piece of content achieves just that.

Pro Tip: Try to communicate with your audience by writing your article in second-person format. The more you talk to them, the more engaging your content is. This way, you’re basically establishing yourself as a friend and an authoritative figure in their subconscious mind. 

Step 4: Go Fishing With a Catchy Title and Strong Headlines

Your content title must be captivating; one that gets users to click on your blog or web page. In most cases, the title is the only thing that users will see and decide whether they want to click on your website/blog or not, so make it something they can’t resist.

Headlines are necessary to organize your content and break it up into meaningful sections. Each headline gives you an outline of what the underlying content is about. Some readers prefer to skip over sections that they don’t want to read and the headlines help them focus on the right information.

Titles should be no more than 10 to 12 words. Headlines are generally shorter and 4 to 5 words long at most. You should always capitalize the title and all headlines as it is standard and makes your content look more polished.

Step 5: CTA – Adding Final Touches Necessary for Feedback

A CTA is your gateway to what audiences are thinking. It helps you identify whether they like what you wrote or not, and whether you’re on your road toward impacting them. 

They allow your readers to interact with you and your business. It should ideally be included twice, once in the middle of the text where you drive the point home, and once near the end of the content.

CTA can be anything from a click to your product page, a purchase order option, a request for feedback or a popup window for an email subscription. If your content has been really good and impactful, it is more likely to get clicked and you will get the desired response from your reader.

You can post content from time to time without a CTA to raise awareness about your business and build goodwill. However, website copywriting, blogs and articles won’t meet your business goals if you do not put a CTA within the text.

The purpose of well-written content is to get a response from your users and you should include it to gauge visitor response rate.

The post 5 Step Guide to Creating Impactful Content appeared first on SiteProNews.

Businesses were happy because they were generating leads and the leads were happy because they were receiving a valuable resource to consume. 

With content overload becoming a real problem, generating inbound leads has become tougher and tougher. The result is that traffic and lead generation is the biggest marketing challenge 65% of businesses face. 

However, you shouldn’t feel discouraged. We recommend you combine outbound and inbound lead generation techniques to have the best of both worlds.

1. Content marketing

93% of B2B companies say content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies. 

According to B2B Content Marketing 2020: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Report, businesses use webinars & online events (16%) and eBooks & guides (13%) to secure leads. You have probably heard the myth that eBooks are dying but they aren’t. Old formats work if you bring novelty to them and combine it with real value.

Let’s consider an example. You probably think no one reads email newsletters these days. However, the question is how you deliver your promise and what your email messages teach. 

Instead of sending the links to your recent blog posts, switch to email storytelling. Send stories that your subscribers can’t read anywhere else. Or interview different authors and send their previously unpublished quotes to your subscribers. A unique approach will work even if the format itself seems outdated.

The success isn’t in finding the best content format to generate leads; the success is in making your content offer unique, practical, and high-quality.

2. Social media marketing 

Here we will focus on social networks, specifically LinkedIn and Facebook, and the ways they can bring quality traffic and leads to your website.

LinkedIn

You can generate leads through LinkedIn via different tactics, from finding business-related posts and engaging with them to publishing thought-leadership articles. However, if you want to scale the process, you should consider using a LinkedIn automation tool and reaching out to hundreds of prospects daily.

Tools like Octopus, Zopto, Linvo, Dux-Soup, Linked Fusion, and others help you to: 

1. import LinkedIn members based on filtering options,
2. send hundreds of connection requests daily,
3. build messaging funnels and automate follow-ups,
4. endorse your 2nd and 3rd level connections for their skills,
5. access messaging templates, etc.

Similar tools might cost a few dollars monthly but they help you build a huge data frame and reach out to targeted prospects on a one-on-one basis. 

Facebook

Instead of discussing theoretical tips here, we will talk about 2 ways you can use Facebook for lead generation with real-life, useful examples:

Influencer marketing

Facebook isn’t just good for influencer marketing. The platform has specific features in place and requires the parties to disclose similar partnerships. 

Mari Smith is a social media influencer and below you see her partnership with Boosted. It’s a video maker app that B2B companies use as well. You also see the small note “Paid partnership” which means Mari Smith is paid to promote this tool. Mari Smith’s followers are looking for fresh ways to boost their social media presence and Boosted’s offer is aligns with their interests.

Events marketing

Facebook’s other feature, Events, is another opportunity to generate leads for your small business. Delibr is a feature refinement tool and they have created a Facebook event to promote their free webinar. 

To increase your webinar reach and generate more leads, make your video live and at least 10 minutes long. Facebook prioritizes videos over text and image-based posts. And, live videos rank even higher because people spend triple the amount of time watching a video when it’s live.

3. Cold calling

People who say cold calling is dead, intrusive or expensive, probably haven’t followed any cold calling best practices. 82% of buyers have accepted meetings with salespeople after a series of contacts beginning with sales cold calls.

Dialing random numbers isn’t cold calling, it’s a waste of time. Successful cold calls happen after the sales rep has already researched the candidates and their companies, is equipped with a guiding script and open-ended questions and has chosen the best time to phone. 

Cold calling is one of the strategies B2B appointment setting services are specialized in. They research the leads before reaching out and qualify them during the call. Then, if they find the lead is interested in their client’s product/service, they pass them to the client’s sales team to close the deal. 

Similar services will be perfect for you if you want to increase your sales quickly and want to pay based on results.

4. Cold emailing

Major mistakes businesses make while cold emailing is being too generic, not sending follow-up messages, and not running any tests. 

If you are using weak subject lines, even the subscribers on your opt-in email list won’t open your message. Subject lines, personalization, and preview texts decide whether your email gets seen or not.

Campaigns with 4-7 cold emails per recipient have a 27% open rate, as statistics show. And, every follow up is an opportunity to add more value to the recipient’s inbox and motivate them not only to reply but also show interest by answering your open-ended questions.

Last but not least, you will never know until you test. Pick a small percentage of your leads and divide them into 2 or more groups. Reach out to them via different emails. After analyzing the stats you will know to which version users respond to more actively and use that one to reach out to your remaining leads.

The post 4 Lead Generation Techniques for Small Businesses appeared first on SiteProNews.

Here are some of the most popular lead generation trends you may want to implement to get the best results:

1. Use Chatbots to respond to customers in real-time

Chatbots are software programs that are designed to resolve the queries of first-time website users and existing customers in real-time. They save costs by answering common customer questions quickly – at all hours of the day and on all days of the year. 

Digital marketers love chatbots because they provide instant information to customers and increase satisfaction levels. They can be personalized and answer all kinds of questions without frustraion or anger. These automated customer support bots are not prone to human errors and are never moody. 

They can handle most queries quite well and help customers reach their buying decisions quickly. Thus, they can not only generate hot leads but also increase online conversion rates considerably.

A business owner can implement chatbots that can handle all the major messaging apps (such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Viber) and also receive online payments through PayPal and other monetizing messaging apps.

2. Develop intent-focused content

Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has deeply impacted search results. Content development in 2020 revolves around it. BERT is a deep learning algorithm that employs NLP (natural language processing) to understand a searcher’s intent. It helps the search engine to understand the nuances of complicated search queries and figure out user context.

It means that content developers now need to produce content that aligns with what users are searching for – whether it is in written text form, a podcast, or a video. Google now matches the intent of the content and the user instead of simply matching the strings of text.

So, in 2020, the use of keyword research tools may fade in favor of interacting with the audience directly to produce better content. It means that you need to develop content for each phase of a buyer’s decision making cycle – from the problem they want to solve, searching for information, comparing alternatives, deciding to buy a product or a service, and providing the after-sale service.

Content development also needs to focus on building an active community where a business provides quick support or information, stays relevant for future purchases, and advocates new opportunities or updates.

It is easier to capture potential customers and convert them when you provide the best answers to the questions they ask.

3. Marketing Personalization is the need of the hour

Earlier, digital marketers were happy with following Dale Carnegie’s advice to include a person’s name in every mail, SMS, or message he or she received. Now, we can do much more. Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify are some of the giants that put accurate data analysis to use and create highly customized experiences for their customers. Their customers receive messages relevant to them – based on what products they have viewed or purchased.

They recommend or showcase what a person might be interested in, depending on what he or she checked out earlier, similar products to the one they browsed, and products that complement their previous purchases. Gartner had predicted in 2018 that 90% of online advertisers will employ market personalization as their strategy by 2020. It also predicted that by 2021, we might see fully-personalized websites for each user.

Personalization can increase conversions dramatically. Campaign Monitor revealed that emails with personalized subject lines had a 26% higher chance of being opened. Experian said that personalized email had six times higher transaction rates. 

Personalized marketing allows you to segment your customers and reach them better by creating more relevant and effective blog posts, opt-in forms, and email campaigns. Brands that send tailored messages can see a boost of up to 36% in their conversions.

4. Write content for Voice Search

The use of voice assistants and voice-powered search is rapidly increasing, especially in smartphones. Google, Alexa, and Siri are all popular voice assistants that play an important role in digital marketing strategy today. We also see that the voice-powered search is mostly used by mobile users and often includes local SEO keywords.

The semantics of searches and the AI (artificial intelligence) for voice searches dictate that online content needs to be optimized for:

• Conversational tone: To rank better for voice-based searches, you need to write engaging and conversational content. You need to use complete, grammatically correct sentences.
• Longer keywords: When people dictate a search, they often use complete sentences or long keywords just as they would do with a friend. For example: ‘Where can I buy pizza near me?’ 

Or ‘How to make a cake without an oven?’ This is a new opportunity for content writers and producers to write content that is more relevant for voice search or voice assistant users.

• Answer what people ask: Most people ‘ask’ Google when they look for information or research something. You need to figure out what questions people are asking and provide detailed answers to them.

When you answer correctly, potential customers start trusting you and are more likely to purchase your products and services.

5. Develop a Martech stack

A Marketing Technology (Martech) stack includes all the tools you need to collect and analyze data, manage digital media, and create innovative customer experiences. Smart Insights, for example, offers a wonderful infographic on essential digital marketing tools that you might use:

Do not forget to add CRM, MAP, and CDP to your Martech stack. Here:

• CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. In business, a CRM is a system or strategy to manage client interactions, develop deep relationships with existing customers, and turn them into loyal customers. Since customer acquisition is not easy these days, investing in CRM software can help you increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, and increase the efficiency of overall sales. Some of the best CRM tools for small businesses in 2020 include HubSpot, Freshsales, ZohoCRM, and Salesforce Essentials.

• Maps are a new way to interact with data. They help you to relate your data by location. 

Adobe and SalesForce offer excellent mapping tools to filter data by region and gain new perspectives on it. Geospatial files mapping tools can help you find answers to new questions a business might have. Different mapping styles can answer questions like:

• • How does my data look on a map
  • What things can I find nearby?
  • Are things in a region related somehow
  • The demand for which products and services are growing the most in a region
  • Where do your customers come from
  • Which areas show above-average sales or below-average sales of a product or a service
  • How does the timeline of the demand for your product look like

• CDP stands for the Customer Data Platform. It is one of the fastest-growing marketing technologies today. CDP allows for data-driven marketing. It is a bit different from the DMP (data management platform) or CRM technologies though. Ideal CDPs bring together all your customer data in one place to create a 360-degree customer profile. Best CDP tools in 2024 that can grab customer information from online and offline resources (including websites, social media, mobile apps, and email platforms) include Yespo, Segment, Exponea, and Optimove.

A good market technology stack is the arsenal all digital marketers need to generate more leads and achieve higher online conversions.

All those who are in the digital marketing business need to be aware of the new technologies and the changes in the way businesses work. Keep visiting us to know about the latest developments in the field that you can use to produce better results for your clients.

The post 7 Ways to Generate More Leads for Your Business appeared first on SiteProNews.

It took a while to get there. We had a constant stream of leads after the first year and after we fixed our content strategy mistakes. I wrote more about attracting and converting blog readers into paying customers here. 

I was recently reminded of the importance of an on-point SEO strategy precisely by a lead we generated through SEO.

As you can see, this is an article from 2017 and it’s STILL producing results in 2020! That’s what I call long-lasting ROI.

This article underlines the building blocks of an SEO strategy that actually helps you SELL, not just rank. Let’s dive right in!

1. Excellent content is 90% of a successful SEO lead generation strategy

In less than two lines, the client in the email screenshot above mentions the quality of our writing twice. In fact, this is precisely why they reached out. You can’t really sell writing services if your writing is meh.

The Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines are updated frequently. A lot of things change in that PDF but there’s one major constant: the emphasis placed on quality. After all, quality is right there in the name.

There are a lot of factors at play when it comes to how high your content can rank – site speed, UX, backlinks, and mobile responsiveness are just a few of them. But all of them matter very little in comparison to the quality of your writing.

Even if you do manage to rank a page with badly written content, there will be few leads generated by it. People might click on it but they’ll hit the return button faster than you can say “can I have your email address?”

In 2020, people no longer tolerate average content. You have to be excellent at it or choose another strategy to sell your products or services.

Bottom line: if you can’t produce excellent content, it’s better to outsource it to professionals. Poorly written articles and web copy won’t help your lead generation efforts.

2. Keyword research is paramount

Every article we put out on Idunn or Copywritech, my second digital marketing agency, is well thought out and well-planned. The keyword research takes up a good chunk of the entire research process.

Why?

Because we don’t want to just rank for certain keywords. We want to write articles that bring in clients. 

Our formula for this is finding the intersection between our ideal client’s pain points, our expertise and the services we offer.

As I explained in the article linked in the intro, some of our early articles fell short of their scope. We wrote about writing at length and we ranked high. We had a lot of readers. But most of them were other copywriters or content writers trying to hone their craft, not potential clients.

We had to change our strategy. So we started to work backwards. Starting from the client’s needs not from what we were most comfortable writing about. 

Remember the screenshot above? Our lead searched for how to find a rockstar copywriter. That’s as niche as keywords come. We rank on the first spot for it but there are only 136,000 results and the tool our lead uses shows 0 (ZERO!) search volume. 

Why did we use it anyway?

Because search volume matters VERY little. What matters more is user intent. You see, we needed clients who need copywriters. We don’t need thousands of them every month — we’re a boutique agency. But we do need a steady stream.

So even the most obscure of keywords can yield amazing leads. Yes, people use phrases like “rockstar” in their searches. 

Bottom line: don’t shy away from a keyword just because it has a low search volume. In fact, that may be your ticket to higher rankings and excellent lead generation. Remember: you don’t have to attract anyone, just the people who are very likely to buy your services.

3. Start earning backlinks early on

This is one of the worse mistakes I made when I first launched Idunn. I was focused solely on our on-site content and invested very little time in getting backlinks.

Be smarter than I was five years ago and start getting those links early on.

How, you ask?

Well, first of all, stay clear of shady PBN networks. Those do more harm than good.

Do it the right way:

• Publish GREAT, STELLAR content (see point #1). People will want to link to that on their own. Bonus points for your own research reports and case studies – those two types of content earn backlinks very easily.
• Write guest posts. Just like I’m doing here. Choose websites that are relevant to your industry and pitch your article ideas. That helps with both links and getting clients. Every time one of my articles appears on a website that’s not mine, my inbox gets flooded with inquiries. And here’s an even more successful story: Leo Widrich, the Buffer founder, managed to put his tool on the map by writing no less than 150 guest posts in 10 months. That got them their first 100,000 users!
• Use HARO. Short for Help a Reporter Out, HARO is a community of journalists and experts in every possible industry. The system is quite simple: a reporter that needs a quote from a professional in a certain niche asks a question. You can answer it (if you have the expertise). In return, your name will be mentioned in the article and you’ll get a backlink to your website. How easy is that? Do note, though, that it takes some time and perseverance to get your quotes accepted – it probably won’t happen the very first time you try.
• Do email outreach. Did you mention a certain big shot in your industry in your latest article? Send it to them via email and ask if they could link to it in one of theirs or at least share it on social media. See anyone mention your brand in an article who forgot to link to it? Send an email and ask them to do so. You’ll be surprised at how nice and willing to help most people are.

4. SEO can’t do it alone

My agencies sell SEO writing services and I’d love to tell you that if you hire us, you won’t need to invest in anything else but SEO writing. But that would be a blatant lie.

Yes, SEO is a great way to generate leads. Still, you have to work on the rest of the funnel too. A lot of people will come to your website to read your amazing content via search engines. But most of them will leave and will not come back anytime soon.

This is why you need to focus on capturing their email addresses and sending them newsletters and other email campaigns. 

And this is just one thing. A great social media strategy also plays an important part in lead generation and so does PR. Even PPC ads can support SEO lead generation.

Take the example of one of our clients, a leader in the iPaaS industry. We helped them generate 50% more leads through the content we wrote for them. But they didn’t just post it and forget about it.

They emailed every article to their subscribers and they had a great social media presence, too, on top of their other ongoing efforts.

Wrapping things up

Much like any other tactic, SEO is a piece of the bigger marketing puzzle. If done right, it can be your main lead generation engine. For us, it’s what brings more than 95% of our leads. 

But you also have to figure out lead conversion and all the other steps of the marketing funnel. SEO alone can’t do all the work.

Need help with SEO writing that’s proven to generate leads and sales? My team and I can help! Take a look at our content writing and copywriting services and let’s talk!

The post SEO Lead Generation: How to Get Sales through SEO Content appeared first on SiteProNews.

Then again, its most common application is in education. It’s where these convenient tools feel right at home, helping you track knowledge retention rates and improve the learning environment. And need we mention how user-friendly, fun, and cheap they are? 

Across industries and sectors, quizzes will always provide a generous sneak peek into how people learn, think, and feel. This insight is knowledge, and knowledge is power. 

The Immense Power of Quiz Makers 

Quizzes are not only super effective, but they are also efficient. 

Not only are they far cheaper than a myriad of other data collection and analysis tools, but they are also much simpler to use, though just as successful in tracking and measuring. Of course, this is true only if you’re equipped with reliable quiz builder software. But, before we introduce our top picks for the best free quiz makers in 2019, let’s see what “reliable” means in terms of capabilities and features for collecting and analyzing data:

Customization Tools

Because quizzes are so versatile, it’s only acceptable that a good quiz maker should provide the same number of options for creating, deploying, sharing, and analyzing quizzes. This means that it must include a library of templates for those who don’t want to create quizzes from scratch, but also a possibility to design custom themes and questions. 

Mobile Responsiveness 

It also suggests that reliable quiz builder software should enable you to create mobile responsive quizzes that can be accessed across all devices and shared on multiple channels. 

Analytical Features 

There’s no point in using quizzes for data collection if you cannot analyze the quiz-takers’ responses with precision and ease. This calls for robust real-time reporting features. Automated insights and statistics are therefore the third most important capability to look for in quiz builder software. The more comprehensive they are, the better. 

Along with being free and easy to use, the following quiz makers check off all other boxes:

1. ProProfs Quiz Maker 

ProProfs is easily the “World’s Simplest Way to Create Online Quizzes”.

It offers 100k+ customizable quizzes and 1,000,000+ ready-to-use questions, plus more than 15 question types available in more than 70 languages. 

In terms of customization, it allows you to add images, videos, and presentations, as well as to personalize or create your own design themes using your brand colors and logo. 

ProProfs quizzes work across devices and can be shared on your website and social sites or via email. Not only does this maker provides in-detail insights into quiz-takers, but it also enables automated grading and feedback, which is certainly one of its award-winning features. It’s ideal for everything from educational exams and employee assessments to surveys and polls.

2. Poll Maker’s Quiz Maker 

Same as ProProfs, Poll Maker’s Quiz Maker equips you with every important functionality. 

Whether you decide to use customization tools or to deploy template quizzes as is, this software allows you to create and publish a quiz in only a couple of minutes. 

It supports multimedia too so that you can make your quizzes more engaging. 

When it comes to measuring results, Poll Maker’s Quiz Maker boasts custom filters that facilitate data analysis, while actionable insights can be exported in excel/CSV form. 

This quiz builder software satisfies in every other aspect – it’s simple to use, mobile-optimized, and flexible enough to help you with lead generation and student assessment alike. 

3. Free Online Surveys

From quizzes and surveys to polls and forms, Free Online Surveys has it all. 

This quiz maker’s offer includes various question formats, automated scoring, multiple questions and pages, complete brand control, and custom reports – all traits of a reliable quiz builder software. 

Its free-of-charge capabilities allow the same amount of customization and an equally robust analysis as ProProfs or Poll Maker’s, thus amounting to a versatile solution for every industry. The quiz publishing part is just as easy as with our previous contenders – it requires no coding knowledge and only enough tech savviness to copy-paste a short URL to the desired site. 

All this makes Free Online Surveys a great service for every need. 

4. ClassMarker

This web-based quiz builder software is designed with both educators and businessmen in mind. 

ClassMarker allows you to create quizzes with numerous question types – short answers, multiple choices, instant feedback, random questions, and time limits. 

Instead of a library of templates, it offers the question bank that you can use at need, whether to deploy as-is or to adjust to your specific requirements. Real-time grading and individual question feedback are also included, together with smart filters for narrowing down responses by quiz type, questions, and other categories. 

As it should be, ClassMarker is available for both desktop and mobile devices. 

5. SurveyAnyplace

Survey Anyplace is an online tool to create engaging surveys, quizzes and assessments. 

The use of interactive quizzes is a great way to make your existing content more engaging and increase conversions. According to research, interactive content generates twice as many conversions as passive content. 

Survey Anyplace offers the following features to create a great, interactive experience:

• Gamified and multi-media aspects: Increase engagement by adding gamified and multi-media aspects to your quiz: Everything from videos, selfie-uploads, to a digital scratch card or slot machine, will brighten an often ‘dry’ quiz.
• Text only screens: return feedback or information to the participant and make the experience more conversational 
• Offline functionalities: Collect data literally anywhere with offline quizzes! Store your results locally and have them automatically uploaded as soon as you’re connected
• Custom final screens and scoring depending on the answers or the questions or score of the participant.

An interesting – more recent – feature is the possibility to automatically send a personalized PDF report to the participant. The content in this report is dynamic in function based on the answers the participant gave in the quiz.

Conclusion

ProProfs, Poll Maker’s, Free Online Surveys, and ClassMarker each deserve a place on this list by making quiz creation easier and quiz taking fun. Whichever you choose, you cannot make a mistake.

Whether you need a quiz builder for lead generation, customer feedback, employee assessment, or educational purposes, you’ll find these solutions to be able to meet every specific requirement.

The post 5 Best Free Quiz Makers to Make Quizzes in 2019 appeared first on SiteProNews.

By focusing on your existing customers and improving customer retention, you can generate a lot of money. However, this is only a small piece of the pie.

Those companies that focus on lead generation do not just survive, but they thrive!

Let’s be honest. This is why lead generation continues to be one of the biggest challenges that even the best of digital marketers’ struggle to tackle.

But you don’t have to face such challenges. Below are 10 of the most actionable and results-driven marketing tips that can help you generate leads.

Email marketing

It might sound old school, but email marketing continues to be one of the most popular marketing methods used by online marketers.

Emails provide a perfect platform for personal communication with the audience, which is often lost in other methods of marketing.

When customers visit blogs or other landing pages, they are still prompted to subscribe to newsletters. But monthly newsletters are not a guarantee of lead generation or cultivation. You can accomplish a lot more through email marketing.

You can make use of emails as a medium to send useful information to your target audience like training courses, questionnaire forms, information about upcoming events, discounts, deals and so on. You can learn more about your customers by making use of a good online survey maker. By using this tool, you can get the most of your email marketing campaign.

Podcasts and YouTube Channels

Videos are a fantastic form of engagement. In fact, on average, a user spends about 40 minutes on a YouTube session.

This massive rate of user retention is the reason why LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have started pushing videos to the top of the feed of a user.

Podcasts are also on a similar level when it is about drawing users. Today, more and more users are tuning in their favorite podcasts.

You can create a broadcast channel that gives people information or teaches people ways to solve their daily life problems. You can access more than 4 different channels in addition to your website. The more channels you spread out to, the greater your chances of generating leads and conversion.

Facebook Messenger Marketing

In recent years, Facebook Messenger marketing has emerged as a serious competitor to email marketing.

This is because email marketing is limited in certain ways. For instance, it cannot collect user information before initiating a conversation. Such is not the case with Facebook messenger marketing.

Facebook Messenger has more than 1.3 billion active users and Facebook already has all the information about these users. If you have Facebook chatbot or even your personal account, all of the user information can be easily accessed by you. With so much information already available, customers will simply have to click a button to sign up.

You can leverage this to your advantage by connecting with your customers, via Facebook messenger.

Refine Your Instagram Strategy

A billion people use Instagram across the globe today. This is a platform that essentially caters to a younger demographic. Therefore, if you have already started using Instagram as part of your lead generation tactics, then you are ahead of your competition.

To get the desired results, ensure that you have put your face in the right place that is complemented with a great bio. Share clickable links that lead to a landing page or website where you can capture your lead information. 

Don’t forget to track what’s working or what’s not playing out well for you on Instagram. That way, you can refine your strategies better to get more productive outcomes. 

Make Use of Exit-Intent Popups

Exit-intent popups on websites are special deals that you can offer to customers when they are leaving your website. These pop ups can either annoy customers or save the transaction.

But these pop ups are a saving grace in situations that are dire. Use them as a last resort. Do not make them your primary source of generating leads.

Connect with Thought Leaders

Thought leadership is a wonderful platform where you can direct conversations to your desired direction. You can connect with industry leaders in your niche and seek their insight on various issues faced by your industry.

This will showcase to your customers that you genuinely care about them and are taking proactive steps in solving the problems that they face.

Here too, you can make use of good online survey software to discover the issues that your customers are facing on a daily basis. Combining the survey results and the insight from thought leaders, you can come up with the best solution.

Lead Magnets

While trying to read a whitepaper, have you come across a subscription form? If yes, you have come across a lead magnet.

Lead magnets are incentives that are offered to customers by marketers in exchange for their email address or contact information. Of course, it does not apply to just whitepapers. You could be looking for a survey template in a survey maker and the website might ask you to fill in your details or sign up first.

Use Quizzes

Quizzes are a hot trend in lead generation. They are one of the best ways to collect intent data from potential leads and customers.

Quizzes help to get information in an interactive and fun way. They are not mainstream, and hence, it is best to quickly make use of them before everyone else starts doing the same.

Make Use of Data-Driven Marketing and Heat Maps

Visitors rarely scroll down to the bottom of a website page. This is not necessarily a sign that there is something wrong with the website design. But, since all the information is available easily and visitors have a short span of attention, they don’t generally scroll down to find the call to action.

You can make use of screen monitoring tools to create heat maps that will help you study where exactly your customers are losing interest in your page. You can place the call to action accordingly.

It is considered ideal to add web forms and CTA around a page’s halfway mark to collect leads. You can also keep testimonials of your customers towards the bottom of the page to make sure that the vital information is viewed first by your customers.

Host Webinars or Seminars

Hosting webinars and seminars are one of the most popular ways to increase leads and conversions. It can be about a product-related event, industry-based issues and so on. Webinars and seminars provide an excellent platform where you can interact with your customers and generate leads.

Use Advanced Search Queries of Twitter

Twitter has emerged as a top source of generating leads, but there are too many businesses who are overlooking this platform.

By using Twitter, you can gain a competitive edge. Making use of this platform is simple and there are only two steps:

• Find people who are genuinely interested in your brand
• Engage and interact with those people

So, implement these actionable marketing strategies and enhance your lead generation drive.

The post Top 10 Results-Driven Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation appeared first on SiteProNews.

Today, 67 percent of businesses rely on CRM data to segment and target customers and 64.8 percent of sales reps’ time is spent on non-revenue generated activities. Therefore, B2B brands must prioritize clean data in order to streamline sales revenue and lead generation efforts.

Since the start of the Information Age, people have thought access to information would solve many of the world’s problems. In nearly every case, this optimism eventually gives way to confusion when the access to information doesn’t solve the problems people thought it would.  More information is good, but it also contains more bad information, and a small amount of bad information can drown out the good.  

In sales and marketing, misinformation is usually self-inflicted in the form of inaccurate data.  Companies have always worked with inaccurate data, but the problems created by it were always limited because of the manual nature of the sales and marketing funnels.  With the rise of marketing technology and automation combined with a strong push to automate and scale more personal interactions, the negative effects of bad data are being amplified.  

Before, you might get someone’s name wrong on a form fill.  Now you’re more likely to get their gender wrong, identify them as in the wrong industry, think they’ve been downloading your content and misidentify their political party affiliation.  So, you end up sending a unicorn themed mail piece to the wrong person, talking about the benefits of your CRM plugin designed for sandwich shops.  This person used to own a sandwich shop and is now in sales in the power washing industry.  They haven’t seen any of your company’s emails, but their security did check your marketing email links for potential viruses before sending marketing messages to the spam filter. This highlights how important up-to-date and accurate information is. The more information we have, the more opportunities there are for inaccurate information.   

Most of these examples are high level inaccuracies that show themselves when you do more segmented campaigns. Data inaccuracies can cause campaigns to be ineffective when the whole purpose was to utilize detailed data to deliver more relevant campaign content.  Also, inaccuracies with phone numbers, addresses, emails and contacts that are no longer at the given company cause even more waste in sales and marketing.  

There are many data providers now with massive volumes of company, contact and demographic data for both business and consumer marketing.  Even the best of these companies constantly struggle to keep their data clean.  A company’s sourcing and cleaning practices must be considered when looking for data. However, many of the best-known companies have fatally flawed practices. In some cases, they benefit directly from the misinformation.  

B2B companies think of LinkedIn as a premium source for business contact information.  But LinkedIn data is crowdsourced and with nothing to maintain the accuracy, we estimate up to one-third of U.S. profiles on LinkedIn are fake or abandoned.  It recently came out that hundreds of thousands of Google Maps listings are fake. This inaccurate data ends up making its way into companies CRMs wreaking havoc on the sales and marketing funnel.  

I’ve singled out LinkedIn and Google Maps because they are so well known.  All databases that allow the public to create or alter their data have issues with inaccuracy, especially when they have incentives for misinformation.   Take the case of Jigsaw, which was purchased by CRM behemoth Salesforce in 2010 for approximately $142 million in cash, plus bonus’, and rebranded as Data.com.  Jigsaw used a crowd sourced data model allowing users to upload their sales and marketing data for credit they could use to download new records.  

As a result, Jigsaw quickly expanded the size of their business data. Yet, they did not have a strong mechanism to validate and clean their data, and they ran into quality issues.  Users were also uploading inaccurate data to start with, as well as editing existing records with inaccurate information.  It’s rumored that Salesforce is throwing out Data.com and working with D&B because the Jigsaw dataset became notoriously bad. 

Maintaining information accuracy is a difficult and never-ending task that has overwhelmed even the largest companies.  With easier access to large amounts of information, data companies have found that owning data is easy, but identifying the accurate versus inaccurate data in a large data pool is increasingly difficult. Even large companies are poorly equipped to tackle the issues that arise when managing large amounts of sales and marketing data. Additionally, sales and marketing departments complain about data accuracy, but they have no expertise with data and are not willing to get their hands dirty with it. They are right, that isn’t the job they signed up for.  Even data companies are typically better at selling data than they are at maintaining it. B2B companies do not need to have in- house expertise in data, but in order to sustain sales revenue they do need to make data accuracy a priority. 

In fact, MountainTop Data’s internal studies have shown 50 percent of a B2B marketing database goes bad every two years. The largest cause of this is people changing jobs, but it also includes company mergers, domain changes, promotions, new hires, company and contact relocation, and email and phone changes. 

Maintaining accurate CRM data for sales and marketing can also be looked at with the 1-10-100 rule.  This rule says it costs 10 times as much to clean data after you purchase it and 100 times as much to do nothing.  So, what is the cost of dirty data? Consider at least 50 percent of your sales and marketing budget wasted.

The post Data Inaccuracies Harmful for Sales Cycles and Lead Generation appeared first on SiteProNews.

What is Email Hygiene?

Of course, the reason for your company’s email campaigns is to garner the most customer engagement. Delivering email successfully is just the first step in the process. Engagement is vastly improved and ensured by regularly ensuring email hygiene. But what is email hygiene?

It is a process by which email addresses are verified, and where invalid ones are removed from your email list. Email hygiene is also known as email scrubbing. Studies found that from 1,000 random email contacts, 4.5% will have become invalid in only less than a month. In addition, other researches on email deliverability showed a 20% failure in emails reaching their intended prospects’ inbox, which instead gets blocked or dumped into the spam folder. You should therefore always strive to keep your email list up to date, accurate, clean, and target consumers you actually want to deliver your message to. 

Maintaining email hygiene may mean removing cold or inactive subscribers from the roster. A warm list contains the addresses of people who are actually interested in your products and messages. In addition, regular email hygiene maintenance will help ensure that your messages avoid being marked by users and email service providers as spam. 

Email hygiene is thus considered to be among the most critical and important components of a successful email marketing campaign. Endeavoring to have a clean and fresh email list should be the first step to ensure that your emails go to your target audience.

The Consequences of a Poor Email List

Maintaining a hygienic email list helps your business personalize your relationships with your target audience, and engages them better because your message resonates with the right people. Today’s email service providers have evolved to regularly introduce tricky and complicated algorithms that are always changing. These security measures determine how email is delivered to the inbox – they screen out spammy messages and determine the fate of your emails. Many times these algorithms even prevent your audience from getting to read your emails at all. They calculate click rates, opening rates, spam reports, unsubscribing emails, inactive addresses, and the like. 

It is incumbent upon you to regularly track your prospective audience’s email activity along with your data hygiene efforts. If you fail to have a clean email list, your reputation and KPIs can be seriously affected, and audience engagement severely hampered or halted.

Some Reasons Why Interest Drops 

Loss of interest from subscribers is not uncommon. As a business, it is crucial for you to make sure you keep up interest and not let your audience slowly decrease and disappear. Some common causes of a decrease in engagement are the following:

• Inactivity – you lost your audience’s interest because you have been silent and not kept them satiated with regular content
• Selling without value – you are full of promotions in your emails but did not give your audience any substantial meat to chew on; there should be value in what you put out. Content is King.
• Missing your mark – not only should there be content, but the content should resonate with your target audience
• Too many, too mundane – you swamped your audience with too many emails, thus invalidating any positive impact your message could have brought

Improving your Email List Hygiene

To make it easier to maintain a hygienic email list, it may be smart to acquire the services of a lead generation professional. One of the first steps you can take is to hire the services of a reliable email verification and validation service. Such a service ensures the verification and validation of emails and helps keep your list warm. 

An email validation system reduces bounce rates, subscriber complaints from inaccurate or invalid data, and spam trap hits. Proper validation gives you an assurance that you are only sending to deliverable email addresses.  With such a system, you can remove bots as well.

Make sure you clean up your list prior to sending in order to avoid getting blocked and improve your inbox rates and sender reputation. You should also avoid inconsistently formatted data. Such a validation system ensures a consistent format for addresses.

Once you get your intended audience to subscribe to you and join your email list, you need to make sure to track and monitor their online behavior with time. It is well to remember that the permission they gave you to send your emails is not a one-time thing or is considered valid indefinitely; even those subscribers who are most active and engaged can and do lose interest eventually. This makes them a liability instead of an asset.

Regarding cold and inactive subscribers, you can send a re-engagement message through these approaches:

• Ask those subscribers who opened your emails within the last 6 months to take a moment to click a link that confirms that they are still onboard with you
• Give them different options for their subscription. An example of this would be an option to receive each email separately or as a digest containing several emails
• Have them confirm that their address is active and current and that their email preferences will not be updated 

Also, keep in mind the following best practices for maintaining email list hygiene:

• Make sure you have credible and highly reputable email sources
• You may opt to remove inactive or cold subscribers
• Take steps to avoid spam folders
• Segment your lists in order to prevent complaints and irrelevant messaging
• Create suppression lists in order to maintain a good sender reputation

Engaging and Re-engaging Your Audience

A simple way to make sure you do not miss your mark is to ask your audience what they want. Ask what content they are interested in, what insights they want that you may be able to offer, and other reasons why they signed up. You can also conduct surveys to get such information. It is also a good idea to offer personal, one-on-one consultations to selected subscribers while also asking them about the content they would most want from you. Use research to find out about what your target market wants and what your competitors do not have, in order to customize your content and make sure you capture your audience.

If you want to reconnect with your cold emails, it is a good idea to give before taking. Create an event that is laden with useful content with massive value, in order to reactivate your dormant audience. A Facebook live event or a free webinar that delivers material that is of good use to them will make you relevant again. Use all resources at your disposal such as multimedia in the form of videos, charts, short ebooks, and even exclusive content. You may also make your webinar a series so that your audience goes back again and again for more content. Each episode can focus on a specific element or expertise that your audience needs.

Always remind your audience why they should keep on going back. Personalize your content. Make sure it is packed with value. Using videos catches more subscribers and retains the old. And don’t forget to include that call to action. Employ sound marketing programs in terms of discounts, special offers, and other deals. Don’t sell yourself short. Give it everything you’ve got; use social media and other platforms, and make your offer so enticing that your audience cannot help but subscribe and stay. This is an important aspect of keeping your email list warm and clean.

Ensuring a clean email list involves many factors, but these are easy to follow and understand. Aside from making your list hygienic, also make sure the emails in your list do not become cold again. Make sure you maintain their attention by under-committing and over-delivering. Make sure your content is continuously updated for value. Having the best content you can give in your field of expertise, as well as being a consistent provider of content, will ensure that you will retain your captive audience.

The post What is Email List Hygiene and How it Impacts your Lead Generation Processes appeared first on SiteProNews.

It would be fair to say that the principles for B2B Demand generation are differently approached by several sets of demand generation marketers from around the world. A lot of inexperienced marketers are weaving their B2B demand generation strategies around myths that have taken shape in recent times. In order to really implement effective, full-funnel B2B demand generation strategies, these myths need to be busted. 

This blog post is here to guide you with the right approach to your B2B Demand generation strategy by addressing some widely implemented B2B Demand Generation Myths. Let’s check them out. 

Demand generation is a cakewalk

If you are new to the term, Demand generation simply comes down to all the marketing efforts made in engaging and exciting customers about your products and services. This might sound like a very easy thing to do, given the availability of sales and marketing campaign strategies. Demand generation is about engaging them at various points on multiple channels.  

However, Demand generation is easier said than done. It’s a fully integrated approach that aligns your company efforts with what your prospects and customers really need. Having this measurable strategy in its holistic, fully integrated form is quite a task where heaps of marketing and sales activity data needs to be analyzed and personas need to be targeted. This is why there is a need for a dedicated Demand Generation department and continuous testing and optimization.

There’s no difference between demand generation and Lead generation

What one must understand is that demand generation is more than lead generation. On one hand, Demand generation is about focusing on opportunities in the form of targeted marketing programs to drive interest around products/services, accomplish customer acquisition, and create space for further footing. 

On the other hand, Lead generation is as simple as getting contact information from people who might be interested. People use the term interchangeably, but the fact is that Demand generation generates interest for further Lead calling.

An Inquiry is equivalent to a Lead

Probably the biggest myth of all is that an incoming inquiry is considered as a Lead. However, in order to be a quantifiable lead, an inquiry needs to be positioned in the middle of the flow. Only when this inquiry is closed successfully, can it be regarded as a true lead.

A report says that over 80% of generated leads are never followed up on, or just go missing in action. It is obviously true that lead volume is important, but if they are not high quality, your business is not going to thrive. It is very important to deliver accurate and interested leads that are high-quality in order to fill the pipeline with promising opportunities. If an inquiry is able to help you contact the prospect and convert them into potential leads, it is going to be worth the value. 

Buyer’s journey can be controlled

The buyer’s journey is a very vital step in the overall progression of the buyer. It comprises of the stages where the buyer begins with the realization of a particular problem/need. The second step becomes about the buyer’s consideration where they define their problems and start looking for options that fit the bill. These steps are all research-oriented and they eventually culminate into a specific buying decision. The last stage of the buyer’s journey ends with the final purchase decision. 

As per a report by Forrester and Gartner, 80 percent of the buying process will occur without any human contact, by 2020. The myth revolving around Buyer’s journey is that marketers think that they can craft a buyer’s journey for their audience. The truth is that the audience is the one who drives this phenomenon. They can move about just the way they like even after going through an impressive sales pitch by your salesperson.

Anyone can be a Demand generation marketer

The B2B marketplace being a fishpond filled with opportunities, more and more Demand generation marketers are finding a way into the market. Racking up a high volume of everything that needs to be done, the ideal Demand generation marketer will help fill the pipeline with promising opportunities for the sales team.

It is a common notion that being a Demand generation marketer is an easy task, given all the readily available information. However, having this data at hand doesn’t make it easy to intercept. In fact, classifying, clarifying, cleansing, and organizing heaps of information can be a real task for industry performers. A competent Demand generation marketer has to create content around the product/concept, probably start blogging about it, come up with webinars/seminars, press releases, etc.

Attracting new customers is the only aim of demand generation

The aim of demand generation is simple, to churn the interest of the audience. However, it’s just not limited to that. It is about building awareness around the company or its peculiar product and services. It is not just an initial step, it is present in the steps that follow as well. 

Social media is an ineffective means of generating quality leads

Though not a very popular myth, this one holds a special mention because, in spite of all the credibility of the platform, some contemporary businesses fail to identify social media as an effective means of demand generation. 

In fact, according to Research, 64% of B2B marketers generate leads via LinkedIn, 49% through Facebook, and 36% through Twitter. This holds true for demand generation as well. For people who still believe in the opposite or have had futile experiences, we recommend using and investing in the right media networks tools in order to accomplish lead generation. 

Wrapping up:

In all terms, marketing for either of the two (i.e. Demand Generation and Lead generation) is filled with myths and misconceptions, which people are trying to work with. However, only the right approach can attract strangers who become visitors, and successfully generate a huge amount of traffic to your website. With our listicle of the most common Demand Generation Myths above, we hope that we will be able to help you create a better B2B Demand Generation strategy.

The post How to Deal with B2B Demand Generation Myths to Improve your Strategy appeared first on SiteProNews.

When we talk about copywriting and its ROI, these are the metrics that we should be looking at. Unfortunately, they don’t always say what we want to hear.

So we divert our attention to vanity metrics like traffic and social shares.

But this doesn’t fix the issue at hand – why isn’t your page doing what it’s supposed to be doing? Why isn’t your page converting?

It’s one of the questions we get asked most frequently by our copywriting clients. And, quite often, one (or more) of these is the reason why you don’t get enough conversions:

1. You ‘we’d’ all over the page

• We are the best (of course, aren’t we all?)
• Our products are top quality (who would say otherwise?)
• We sell ‘it’ very cheap (who needs profits these days?)

If you recognize this tone of voice, then you need to take another stab at your landing page.

I’m sorry to say but no one really cares about you. Sure, a short blurb about yourself at the end of a landing page is fine. But when you make it all about you, no one is going to buy.

Try this instead:

• You will get excellent results by working with our dedicated team
• Your ROI is safe for years to come because X product is designed to last
• You can’t afford to pass up this offer – a price like this will never return.

See what I did there? I turned everything around to make it about the customer. It’s about their needs and their pain points, not about your need to sell.

2. You Speak about Features, not Benefits

• Our smart watch has an incorporated GPS
• This floss has a peppermint flavor

Good to know. But how does this help ME, the potential buyer?

Let’s rephrase:

• Track your runs with incorporated GPS
• Enjoy super-clean teeth and a cool peppermint aftertaste. 

Here’s the catch: yes, you have to brag about the features and amazing services you offer. After all, that’s why you worked so hard to develop a product, right?

Right! But you didn’t develop the product for yourself or to simply brag about your innovative approach. You built it for humans. Other humans need to buy it. So tell them why it’s great for THEM. If you tell them that, they will understand that you’re awesome for creating something they really need. You don’t have to spell it out.

3. You don’t know the stage of awareness your customer is in

You can say that sales pages are for people who are ready to buy. People who already know the type of product you are selling and are now trying to make the best choice in terms of brand and manufacturer.

Sure, but where does this leave actual innovators?

I’m talking about brand new products that people don’t know they need yet.

Let’s take the smart watch for example. We are now accustomed to the concept, but it hasn’t been that long since they were first introduced to the market. This means that not everyone who might buy a smart watch knows exactly what they are and what they can do.

So where do you start in this case?

Well, first of all you analyze your buyer persona. You establish whether they are aware that they could use a smart watch or not.

How does the difference reflect in your copy?

In the first case, where the user is aware of their need, you emphasize on your products benefits when compared to your competitors’. Example: “Get insights into your health with the most advanced heart rate tracker and analyzer on the market.”

In the second case, where you still need to educate your audience you focus on introducing pain points and their solution. Example: “Did you know that your resting heart rate is a health indicator? You can now easily track it 24/7 with our smart watch.”

4. You don’t explain why

Throwing statements and CTAs is easy. Claiming you’re the best is even easier.

But today’s consumer knows better than to believe everything they read online. 

As marketers, we are so accustomed to making statements that we often forget people need additional explanations.

A few examples:

• 50% discount. Buy now! Why and why? Why can you sell so cheap and why shouldn’t I wait until tomorrow?
• You can’t cancel your order. Why? Are you robbing me for clicking in the right place?
• You’ll sleep better on this new mattress. Why?

Now the right way to do it:

• Clearance sale! We’re making room for our autumn collection, so the summer one is 50% for three whole days. Buy now! [This explains that the sense of urgency is not just a marketing ploy.]
• Your order is prepared as soon as you place it so it can reach you in no time. You can’t cancel your order after more than 30 minutes. [Now I know you’re not robbing me; you actually have a process in place.]
• You’ll sleep better on this mattress – extensive studies by [Authority Name] have confirmed that foam mattresses are better for you. [Cool, gimme three!]

5. You don’t have a clear goal

I’ve seen a lot of sales pages trying to sell two or three things. Here, we have this great product – you like it, don’t you?

But while you’re at it, why not download this white paper, subscribe to our email list and check out some similar products?

Every one of these things needs a separate landing page. Sure, you can add your social icons to any page and even a small opt-in form. But don’t make either of them the center of attention.

Every landing page needs to focus on a single product. The fewer distractions, the better. You don’t want to confuse the reader. You want them to think about nothing else except buying what you’re selling.

And if your writing has a clear flow that takes them through pain points, solutions and benefits, you’re half way there. Leave the bells and whistles for Christmas, OK?

6. You DIY landing pages and you’re not a copywriter

Everyone past the fourth grade can write. Well, sure they can. But copywriting is a skill in itself. And you need more than four grades to master it.

The cost of copywriting services has soared in the past few years for a very simple reason: GOOD copywriters make sales. In other words: you can’t afford NOT to pay for professional.

Not convinced? Make an experiment: DIY a landing page and test it against one written by a GOOD copywriter (not the cheapest one you can find on Upwork, OK?). If you make the right hire, your ROI should be sky-high.

Final thoughts

Having a good product or service is only half the battle. Yes, it’s an important half, but if people don’t learn about it the right way, how are you going to sell it?

The era where a website, just any website was enough is over. Today, every word on your website matters. And it can make or break your sales goals.

If you need help with copy that truly sells and is in line with your business goals, my team of expert copywriters and I are just a click away. Check out our copywriting services and let’s talk!

The post 6 Copywriting Mistakes that Kill Your Conversion Rate appeared first on SiteProNews.

If you create marketing and advertising for a business that doesn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on ads, your goals are probably very simple: you want more leads, more sales, and more customers coming through the door of your brick-and-mortar location or visiting your website. Because of this, you need a different approach to your marketing and advertising. 

If you want results from your marketing, you need to be able to measure these results. The only way to measure results is to have offers in your marketing pieces. With offers, you will know for sure where the leads are coming from and which lead responded to which offer. 

Two main types of offers are an offer to buy something and a free offer. Typically, in order to buy people need to have trust and believe that the product or service they are about to buy is right for them. Building trust takes time, which is why direct sale offers on the Internet typically have very low conversion rates. When a visitor comes to a website, sees an offer to buy, doesn’t buy and leaves, the website is losing money because getting traffic is not free. Some ways of getting traffic, such as search engine optimization, may seem free, but in reality, they are not because optimizing websites for search engines and doing link-building is a lot of work. 

This is why instead of sales offers it makes sense to have free offers. Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate leads quickly because leaving an email in exchange for a book, a white paper or some other piece of content doesn’t carry any risks such as talking to a pushy salesperson or disclosing sensitive private information during a free consultation. This article will introduce you to five ways to generate leads from your content marketing.

1. Write a book/whitepaper/how-to guide

Writing is one very powerful way to have your prospects discover you and your business. It is also one of the best ways because it brings the best clients. 

Typically, there are several types of customers in every business. There are those who do not want to learn more about their problem or learn more at all. They just want a solution. They want a magic pill that will solve their problems without them having to do much. The problem with this type of customer is that many of such customers live their lives in the mode of constantly searching for new magic pills, jumping from one shiny object to another. 

On the other side of the spectrum, there is a customer who is determined to find more about his or her problem. Such a customer starts the buying process looking for information and doing research. This type of customer is usually worth more to a business in the long-term because he or she is not likely to be seduced by a new shiny object. Even if such a shiny object appears on the market, this customer will want to do some research. 

The best way to attract these customers is to write books, articles and white papers. By providing valuable information, these written materials will turn you into an expert. People will be reading your books and then seeking you out. If you were to look for them and put the same information in front of them, this would not have the same impact that occurs when they discover you on their own.  

2. Record videos

Different people prefer to consume content in different ways, which is why you can use the same information to write books or white papers and shoot videos. Videos can be very powerful because they allow you to communicate with your prospects not only verbally, but also non-verbally. Psychologists have established long ago that only a small part of human communication is verbal. Most of the communication happens on the non-verbal level and video allows you to communicate on this deeper level. With video, you can enhance your message by how you look, how confidently you talk, and by what is happening in the background. For example, if own a retail store, you can shoot a video of you with a lot of customers shopping in your store in the background. This will have the same effect as does driving by a restaurant with a parking lot full of cars. You immediately start assuming that the restaurant is really good because it is popular because you are seeing all the cars on the lot. This is something that printed media can’t help you accomplish as effectively as video can.

3. Host webinars

The most effective way to deliver content is to communicate it in person. This is why to this day most of the children go to regular schools. Scientific research shows that online education simply can’t replace live interactions between teachers and students. When you interact with someone live, you can see their body language and face expression as you are delivering content. You can go slower or go faster depending on the audience. You can stop and answer questions if your audience gets confused. You can’t do all of these things with pre-recorded materials, yet you can accomplish them with live webinars, which is why webinars can be a very effective mechanism of content delivery. In addition to that, webinars can also be a very effective sales tool because you can link expiring offers to them. This is not something you can do with a book or a YouTube video. 

4. Build follow-up funnels

No matter how good your content, people today are very busy. Also, it is very likely that when looking for content online, a person would have several tabs open in his or her browser. For these reasons, you want to capture the contact information of your content consumers as quickly as possible and then follow up with them via email, phone, ringless voicemail and other methods. In a follow-up funnel you can tell more about your company, you can introduce prospects to your products and services, share useful information and tips about what you offer. If you have a lot of experience in your industry, you most likely have no problems separating quality from the absence of such. This is not the case with most people. Most people do not know how to choose quality in an industry that they are not familiar with. This is especially true when it comes to services because the quality of service is always subjective and what is great service for one person can be terrible service for someone else. This includes everything from dentistry to choosing a new cellphone to going to a restaurant. Your funnel is a place where you can not only talk about your products and services but also educate your prospects about choosing what’s right for them and being able to identify low quality. 

5. Offer experiences and live events

When you are delivering any kind of information to a person via the Internet or printed media such as books, you are dealing with one person at a time. It may feel that you are sending one email and thousands of people read it simultaneously if you have a big list, yet in reality, it’s one subscriber reading one email at a time, even if this is happening at the very same time. No matter what you are selling, when a person is separated from you by a screen, the degree of trust is lower. Also, the person may be thinking that he or she is alone with the problems. When people come to an event and see a lot of people around them interested in the same subject, having the same needs, wants and desires, they have a very different experience. When they see someone speaking from the stage, the experience is very different from watching a video. These are the reasons why live events can be a very effective way to deliver content and create a bond with your prospects and customers.

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