Getting leads is the main objective for the majority of businesses that have a website. When first building an inbound marketing funnel, especially for newer businesses and getting your first success of lead acquisition can be very difficult.
In this blog article, we’ll be addressing several ways you can develop more traffic and potentially acquire more leads for your business.
What are Leads?
Leads are the lifeblood of most modern online businesses. Leads are people that visited your website and supplied their contact information to learn more about the products or service your business offers.
Businesses need leads because it is a lot easier to sell to someone familiar with your business in comparison to having to cold call or cold email people unfamiliar with your business. Cold calling or cold emailing often has a very bad response and conversion rates as opposed to inbound leads generated through marketing funnels which have a much higher conversion rate.
What is the Acquisition Stage?
The acquisition stage of the inbound marketing methodology is the top part (TOFU) of your marketing funnel where you actively attempt to get visitors to your website and drive them to become leads.
The lead acquisition stage includes the following characteristics: a traffic source, a landing page, a call to action, and a website form.
The traffic source is simply put, where the traffic is coming from. Typically, you can divide traffic sources into two categories. The first category is organic traffic and the second is paid traffic.
Organic Traffic Defined
Organic traffic is traffic generated from users’ interest in a brand without being influenced by paid advertising. Website visitors organically visit your website on their own by entering queries in search engines that trigger your website listing to show up and clicking on the search listing. They can also land on your website through finding a link on social media, emails received, or simply word of mouth.
Paid Traffic Defined
Paid traffic is generated through acquiring web sessions through paid efforts. To acquire paid traffic, you run cost-per-click or cost-per-impression campaigns that display an ad with a link to your website. Paid advertising is a quicker way to get traffic to your website compared to organic methods
Paid campaigns can be run on search engines like Google and Bing. They also can be put on display networks like YouTube or Yahoo.
In the last ten years, paid social media ads have grown in popularity. Social networks like Facebook, Snapchat, Quora, and Reddit all have versions of paid advertising that you can purchase and link to your website.
Landing Pages & Call To Actions
Landing pages are specific web pages whose main goal is to convert website visitors into leads.
Instead of showcasing an elaborate website with links galore to distract potential converters away from the task at hand, landing pages have one clear and concise call to action.
A call to action is the main course of the direction you want a website visitor to take. Examples of call to action include a button on a landing page that says “download an ebook” or “sign up to learn more”.
After a visitor enters their information in a landing page forum to take advantage of a call to action, their information is sent to your CRM where you can begin to take further action in getting the lead ready for conversion.
Three Strategies to Increase Lead Acquisition and Traffic
Creating quality search optimized content
One way to generate organic traffic is by getting your website to be found on search engines. If your website shows up in the top 10 search results when a person uses the search engine to solve their problem, you are in a great spot to get lots of traffic.
You can accomplish this by creating search-optimized blog content that provides value to the reader. If you target long-tailed keywords, like “best ways to change a car’s oil” and create content revolving around the keyword, in this example a blog post titled “5 effective ways to change a car’s oil in 2022” you will have a better chance of ranking higher in comparison to writing a blog targeting general terms like “oil change”.
Find out how to find long-tailed keywords that your website already ranks for in Google Search Console.
Creating a content marketing strategy starts with taking an internal SEO audit. After that is completed, take a look at your competition and perform a content marketing audit on them. Determine what they are writing about and the keywords they are targeting. Is the content they are writing good content? Does it do a good job of solving the user’s question? Once you get an idea of the landscape, write better content than them!
Running Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn Ads
If you have sufficient funds budgeted for running paid advertising, that is another good way to get traffic to your landing pages. However, just know this tactic is not for beginners. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch and reaping the results of the campaign.
You first need to identify what platform your audience uses the most. If you have a B2C business, you more likely want to look at using Google Ads or Facebook. If you deal with getting B2B prospects, you might want to use LinkedIn instead of Facebook. The platform you use is something you need to address when you create your buyer persona.
When running paid ad campaigns, you should allocate enough time and budget for the platform’s algorithms to know what a lead conversion looks like for you. Typically, a budget of $3000 is the minimum to gather measurable learnings from a campaign you run.
Your ad creative and landing page need to communicate the same call to action. Your call to action should also use a compelling lead magnet like a free whitepaper or infographic download.
Building an email list
Once you establish a flow of traffic to your website through either content marketing or paid advertising, you should consider building an email list to capture the audience.
What’s great about having an email list is that now you have a captive audience. Instead of putting time, effort, and money into trying to get traffic to your website, you now can send a message directly to the individual’s inbox that can link back to your website.
Since the email recipient is already familiar with your brand, you can expect engagement rates to be much higher than someone visiting your website for the first time.
This tactic is great for businesses that are in a niche or very competitive industry. In these particular scenarios, acquiring a large amount of volume organically is very difficult, and obtaining it through paid methods can be very expensive. Ideally, the audience that does make their way to your website needs to be captured so they don’t go to your competitors.
Key to Lead Acquisition is a Willingness to Conduct Tests
Being open to testing is a great way to know for sure if a tool or strategy is right for your business. You can do a quick Google search and find thousands of best practice guides on Search Engine Optimization or running paid advertising and follow them to a letter and still get no results.
No two cases are the same in digital marketing. You need to actively search for an acquisition strategy that works for your business.
The best advice for testing is to devote enough time and resources to conduct a valid test. If you run a social media ad campaign with a budget of 10 dollars a day for a week, you may not generate enough volume or results to get good learnings from. If you are running AB tests for email marketing and only have 15 people on your list receiving the email, the results you find will not be statistically relevant.
Whatever strategy you are testing, a good number to keep in mind is 3000. To accurately measure the effectiveness of a paid media campaign, you want to have a test budget of around $3000. If you want to test your email campaigns, a sample size of 3000 contacts is the minimum to start a test with. You’ll need 3000 sessions to your landing page to find out one version of your landing page is better than the other.
Even if your number is not 3000, just make sure you’re consistent and give yourself enough wiggle room for a test to be conducted.
Conclusion
Lead acquisition requires great resolve and proper strategies. Strategies like capturing a captive audience through an email list, paid advertising, and creating search-optimized content will allow initial bursts of traffic to your website or landing page. The main idea is to be open to testing any strategy to find one that works for your business.
