You’re blogging, optimising your website, using Facebook and Twitter – all of which is bringing new visitors to your business website – but what are you doing to entertain these potential customers and bring them one step closer to buying from you?
If you’ve been following our 10-step article series about putting together an inbound marketing strategy, by this point you should have created a blog, optimised your website, perhaps invested in some Facebook advertising, sent out a few tweets – and you’d have started to notice an increase in visitors to your website.
The party has kicked off, but what are you offering on your website to entertain your new guests?
You now need to start setting some goals for converting all these new visitors into buying customers. Here’s a formula you can apply to your website when setting targets, to allow you to track the success of your inbound marketing strategy. Write down the figures are you go, and if you don’t know them just make some estimates:
1. How much new monthly revenue would you like to generate from inbound marketing?
2. How many customers do you need to acquire in order to achieve this amount?
3. What is your current lead to customer conversion rate? What’s your goal?
4. What is your visitor to lead conversion rate. What’s your goal?
For example, say the main product or service you sell costs $1000 and you’d like to see new monthly revenue of $10,000 as a result of your inbound marketing efforts. This means you need 10 new clients per month at $1000 each.
You also know that for every 10 leads you have (i.e. people on your database, also known as prospects), one eventually converts into a paying customer – this means your lead to customer conversion rate is 10 percent. You also know that for every 100 people that visit your website, one signs up for your eNewsletter, making your visitor to lead ratio 1 percent.
The equation is simple: In order for you to achieve your new monthly goal of $10,000 in revenue, you need an increase of 10,000 website visitors each month to generate 100 new leads, 10 of whom will become new customers. Not only can you focus on increasing the numbers, you can also look at increasing your conversion rates, which will deliver a better result.
Offer remarkable content
Now you’ve set your goals, you need to create some compelling offers to feature on your website (like free reports, tips, advice, eBooks and videos) which people will exchange their email addresses for, making them part of your mailing list so you can market to them on a regular basis. This will help to move them through your sales funnel.
Step 1: Choose your offer
If you offer a service, create a free report relating to your service offering your top ten tips or a short eBook that contains your expert insights. If you offer a product there may be an opportunity to offer some samples of your product that can be sent to new subscribers.
Step 2: Call-to-Action
Once you have decided on your offer, make it obvious as to how the website visitor can take advantage of your offer, such as with a large button. You could also include instructions to attract the attention of your website visitor, don’t presume they know what to do.
Step 3: Landing Pages
Once the person clicks on the offer button, they’ll be taken to another page called the landing page. This is where you need to have your sales copy, along with a form where you gather the information you need from them in return for sending them the offer. Try not to ask for too much information, as some people don’t like to spend too long filling out forms.
It’s also a good idea to make it clear what it is they need to do. For example – “fill out this form to register for our webinar.”
Step 4: Test and Measure
It’s best to have more than one offer on your website, to appeal to different types of people and to allow you to see what offers are more popular than others.
Try out two offers at the same time. Perhaps one could be a video and the other a free eBook and after a month you can spend some time analysing which of the offers got the most attention, and stick with the medium that was most popular going forward.
If this all seems like a lot of work to you, remember creating offers that engage your visitors and make them more likely to buy from you is a lot easier and less expensive than many other traditional marketing activities. According to Hubspot research, it’s 62 percent less expensive to generate a lead through inbound marketing.
If you need help with your strategy, I can help you work out your inbound marketing funnel. Just click here and fill out the form and I will be in touch.
