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I'm Devin Asaro, SEO content strategist at iAcquire and today for Cliffs Notes Tuesdays
we're talking about inbound marketing from the guys over at Hubspot. We're talking about
Chapter 10 today, Converting Leads to Customers.
So in past weeks, we've talked about taking prospects and turning them into leads, and
now we're talking about how to actually take the next step and turn those leads into customers.
The authors begin with the criteria of actually talking about grading your leads and figuring
out the quality of your leads because as they point out, not all leads are created equal.
If you have, say, 1,000 leads, not all of them are actually going to be as likely to
turn into customers because some of them may be already ready to purchase, and some of
them may just be in the beginning processes of finding out about your product.
The first thing they suggest is figuring out the quality of the leads that you have. They
have four criteria by which to grade leads; the referral channel, website visits, calls
to action taken, and form responses. The referral channel is essentially where you got the lead
from. Are they coming in from another website that's linking to yours? Are they coming in
from an email campaign, paid search, organic search? Knowing where your leads are coming
from will tell you a lot about what campaigns are most successful for you and which ones
are likely to convert, because you may know that leads coming in from say, a paid search
are more successful than ones coming in from organic search, which might mean that you
want to put more effort into generating those sort of leads. Or it might be that organic
search does better for you.
Second is website visits. Have they been to your website before? If so, what did they
do and where did they go, and what was their behavior like? Because likely somebody that's
just been to your blog is less likely to convert than somebody that's been to one of your product
pages and has already shown interest in the product that you're selling. So figuring out
the past behavior of leads can help you figure out their future behavior.
Third, calls to action taken. A lead that's likely clicked on links that you've provided
and calls to action that you've created, that's filled out forms, is more likely to follow
calls to action in the future, which could lead them towards conversion, so knowing that
you have a lead that's likely to follow a call to action means that they're more likely
to be a prime lead for conversion.
The fourth is form responses. These are forms that you just fill out as part of the process
by which they actually become leads. So you want to tailor those responses for information
that's useful to you about finding out about your leads. If you're targeting customers
in a particular vertical, you'll want to know, are they in that industry? What do they do?
What's their level? Or maybe its students that are more likely to buy your product,
so you want to know if they're a student, how long they've been a student, that sort
of thing. Any useful information that you can glean from form responses can help tell
you more.
The next step is nurturing your leads. Once you figure out which leads are most beneficial
for you and are most likely to convert, you hand those up to the sales team and then the
process of conversion begins. That's the easy part, and unfortunately that's where it stops
a lot of the time because sales people often want to go after the low hanging fruit. But
a lot of times that takes leads that were likely to convert in the future and just forgets
about them. The idea is to not give up prematurely and to put those leads that aren't ready for
a conversion into a lead nurturing program.
So that essentially means a program of communication. This could be emails that are specifically
targeted at giving them more information about your products and about the industry. Not
being overly aggressive with sales but actually becoming a trusted source of information and
developing a relationship with that lead. So that when it comes time that they might
be ready for conversion, you're the people they turn to. Maintaining communication is
huge; otherwise they're likely to go to the other company that's kept in touch with them.
This is all part of broadening your reach, staying in touch with people, building a community
of people that, even if they're not buying your product, might be sharing information
about your product with their friends and continuing to keep that community alive. They
also point out that reaching across all networks. So not just email, but focusing on followers
on Facebook, people you're connected to on LinkedIn, that it's not just about a regular
Rolodex anymore.
The most important part of all of this is to track the progress. Figure out if the way
you're doing all this actually works, grading yourself on your ability to convert leads
and your ability to keep in touch with leads. You want to examine your landing pages and
funnels to see if they're doing a proper job of actually converting those leads.
Like say if you're humoring leads at a particular point in one of your funnels, you'll know
that that's an area of your site that you're going to want to tighten up because that's
where you're losing customers. So maybe the copy isn't compelling enough, maybe you don't
have a call to action, or maybe it's just really confusing about what the potential
customer needs to do next.
You want to track your lead nurturing program. Figure out if the communication that you're
giving is right because, let's say you begin a lead nurturing program and nothing happens.
It's likely that the information that you're sending out to your potential leads isn't
very beneficial for them at all so you'll want to sort of go back to the process of
grading your leads and figure out what you really want to communicate with them. If you
follow those steps, hopefully you should be able to convert more leads to customers. That's
it.