The key question businesses face is How to get more leads. The very same question was posted on a business survey that was answered by 1915 business owners and marketing professionals.
Take a look at the findings, with some in-house experience from the WebMaxFormance marketing activities.
Marketing Sherpa research proves again that SEO is the optimal Lead Generation activity business should do. (Source https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/seo-tactic-lead-gen)
- Content Marketing. As the primary service I offer, content marketing has proved as THE most effective lead-gen strategy (compared to PPC, social, print etc). Referring to the first point of consideration, the greatest challenge my clients face with SEO (both on-site and off-site) is understanding just how effective it is. Know who you market to, build content around your audience, make sure your copy has a killer Unique Selling Proposition. Here’s a post on calculating ROI from content that I did to help my clients see the math https://webmaxformance.com/copywriting/the-top-3-online-activities-that-will-get-your-business-growing-again/
- Email Marketing. Here I can speak mostly from my experience of how email plays a key role in getting clients. My site’s lead-gen funnel starts with a blog post, that points to related posts that point to a product page, that points to a contact form. Once we move to email comms, it’s all about being Understanding, Helpful, Informative. Not being too sleazy here does extend the conversion period, but once they’re sold, sales really flow. I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars of services per client per project. From another Sherpa chart, I wrote up a blog post that stresses the importance of Email https://webmaxformance.com/blog/seo/seo-and-email-the-best-marketing-efforts-you-can-undertake
- Print Marketing. Although “outdated”, it makes a world of difference when a potential client takes the brochure my agency published for our services. The trick here is to use Print as another venue to get people on the website and into the conversion funnel I mentioned earlier. For my business, I did three different approaches: biz card, drop card, and 3-fold brochure. Each has its own QR code, that points to a unique landing page, that is designed to continue the conversation that started with Print. When using cross-platform sales funnels, make sure the design, copy and personality is consistent throughout. Channel Consistency Catalyzes Conversions.
- SEO-friendly and user-friendly web platform. The smart thing to do is eliminate technical problems as far as SEO is concerned. I use WordPress and am a great advocate for this platform. With Yoast’s SEO plugin most of the issues get settled. The rest is just entering all the needed on-site SEO elements. Again, to educate my potential clients, I wrote a post on this issue too, where the key wasn’t to technically prove that WP can handle just about any web need but to offer them an emotional backing to go ahead and make the choice. Bottom line, Conversion is an emotional decision https://webmaxformance.com/blog/web-development/wordpress-is-it-good-enough-for-your-website-need
- Social Media Marketing. With the latest SEO changes Google did, a social signal is an integral part of SEO, and being on more social networks is a no-brainer. Case in point, Steven Burda’s site www.sburda.com that I built gets more clicks from his Twitter account rather than his Linkedin, even though he’s called the king of LinkedIn. The challenge here is to help clients understand that Social isn’t only entertainment. It’s quite a biz too. https://webmaxformance.com/blog/social-media/do-i-really-need-social-media-marketing-how-to-grow-your-business-with-social
