If you’re responsible for sales at your company, the idea of generating leads online is an exciting one. It promises less cold calling, easier prospecting, and improved sales. You hear incredible success stories and wish you had a lead‑gen system like the ones you hear about. However, you know such a program can be involved and expensive, and you’ve heard as many stories of failure as success. What is the critical difference between success and failure when it comes to generating leads online? Often, the difference is foundational rather than a secret recipe. While digital tactics can sound like alphabet soup (SEO, PPC, SEM, CRO, and so forth) the foundation of converting traffic into potential sales leads isn’t complicated. It’s good marketing and sales—just in a digital format with quite a bit of testing. Ready? Let’s dig in.
Create a powerful positioning statement and value proposition.
Your positioning statement and value proposition are essential elements to your lead generation success. If you can’t explain what you do, why it’s valuable, and to whom, no amount of marketing and sales will make up for this gap. You may get by, but sales and lead generation will always be challenged.
Value proposition is the number one element that determines whether visitors will read more about your product and choose to opt‑in to your sales process. The better your value proposition, the higher the chances of your company being chosen by buyers.
Your value proposition has to answer the following questions clearly:
• What service or product does your company sell?
• Who is your offer for and why does it matter?
• What are the benefits buyers can expect?
• Why choose your company instead of competitors?
Using your value proposition and positioning statements, you create a compelling case for “why you” that is easy to understand. Use this information to create copy for any product, service, or solution pages on your website.
Know thy target audience and ideal lead profile.
If holy commandments existed in marketing and sales, this would be one. If you don’t know to whom you are speaking and selling, anyone is a prospect while no one is a prospect. The exercise of creating your positioning statement and value proposition will shine a light on your audience and ideal lead profile. You’ll want to document this discovery somewhere because you’ll return to it time and time again.
Marketers use personas to help define the audience, starting with the decision makers. Personas make it easier to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Then a list of lead qualifications enables you to identify what attributes can help you recognize a desirable lead. Using these two items, you can plan quality content on landing pages, along with offers and forms, for your audience on your website.
Here’s an example of how to do this:
• Using your personas and ideal lead profile, review the pages and sales offers on your website. Which pages align to which persona? Do these pages communicate your positioning, value proposition, and offer well?
• Check your forms. Do visitors fill them out? Are you asking for too much too early?
Design digital sales funnels that convert.
Depending on your business and the products or services you sell, your sales process will vary. It’s helpful to map out your sales process to help you design digital sales funnels. Your digital sales funnels are “doorways” to your sales process. By understanding the buying experience for a prospect, you can create effective entry points to sales, set proper expectations with buyers, and improve your close rate.
The digital sales funnel is where everything starts to come together—knowledge of your audience, the ideal prospect profile, your value proposition, positioning statement, and sales offers.
Think of the digital sales funnel from the entry to your sales process backward toward the person’s first visit to your website. Imagine you’re leaving a breadcrumb trail, leading them into your sales process. What will you ask, and when, to qualify the anonymous visitors as a potential lead?
Digital sales funnels vary but often have elements like:
• Offers for prospects early in the buying process, which will lead them into your sales process.
• Well-designed and written product, service, and solution pages.
• Case studies to support claims.
• Dedicated landing pages for content offers (e-books, webinars, videos, and so forth) with forms that progressively qualify a contact into a potential lead.
• Effective calls to action on other website pages that target the ideal prospect.
• Follow-up email sequences to surface content and offers to prospects.
• A process to hand leads who meet initial qualification off to your sales department, along with a process to hand leads who need nurturing back to marketing.
Most importantly, put yourself in the shoes of the prospect when designing your digital sales funnel and test the experience periodically to ensure it’s working as expected.
Final Thoughts
Now that you have the foundational elements in place, you’re ready to start promoting. There are a lot of ways to promote your company online; it’s a mix of art and science. Your marketing mix will likely include social media marketing, paid advertising, content marketing, and SEO. Don’t forget to include your offers in other channels and mediums too.
Diona Kidd is cofounder and chief operating officer of Knowmad Digital Marketing. Knowmad is a Charlotte-based boutique digital marketing agency with a national client base. Diona enjoys exploring new digital marketing ideas and sharing her findings. Learn more about online lead generation, digital sales funnels, and promotion strategies at knowmad.com/blog. And read further about online lead generation in Knowmad’s eBook, How to Turn Your Site Into a Lead-Generating Machine at knowmad.com/resources.
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