Archives for December 2015

Everything You Need to Know to Implement Lead Nurturing and Funnel Optimization

Now that your online presence and traffic channels are set up, you’ve finished the first steps towards creating a successful marketing and sales funnel for your business.

Most of the people who come to your website for the first time will not make a purchase immediately, though, so you must go further than the setup.

Rather than looking for the immediate purchase, convert them into leads by letting them give their contact information. Then use their contact information in a lead nurturing campaign.

For lead management or customer acquisition management, ask yourself these three questions:

Who is my ideal customer?
How will I acquire new customers?
How can I reduce the cost of customer acquisition?

A qualified lead is the starting point for your sales funnel or sales pipeline. The idea of your sales funnel is to direct a person who is interested in your product or service (the qualified lead) naturally towards the closing of the sale.

By qualifying your leads, you optimize the entire sales process and help with the lead nurturing. Keep in mind that not every lead is ready to buy your product.

Two factors qualify a lead: lead fit and lead interest or behavior.

Lead fit: Does the lead fit your ideal customer profile, target audience or buyer personas?
Lead interest or behavior: What is the lead doing on your website/app?

A good lead qualifies in both by fitting your ideal client profile and demonstrating interest. That qualified lead is your starting point for your sales funnel. Moreover, when a lead is qualified, you can start nurturing that lead with your lead nurturing campaigns.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is a most crucial step in any marketing strategy; this is where you build relationships and trust with your customers while educating them about the product and its possibilities.

In today’s world, the buyer controls the buying cycle much more than the seller controls the selling cycle and that makes building relationships crucial for sellers. In fact, around 50% of qualified leads are not immediately ready to buy which is why lead nurturing is part of the lead and revenue cycle.

The goal of lead nurturing is to funnel qualified prospects toward the closing of sales by building relationships with them, regardless of their readiness or timing to buy. Lead nurturing uses email marketing but goes beyond email with content mapping and multichannel nurturing.

Funnel Optimization for Your Business

Website

When looking at optimizing your funnel, start with your website. You’ll want your website to be mobile responsive and load quickly. These two things will improve your user experience and even your SEO ratings.

Next, you’ll want to make sure your business goals are transformed into website goals. And have the right goals, that is one of the most important things in marketing optimization. Conversion optimization goals should be determined by your website goals and optimization should be focused as tightly as possible on revenue generation activities.

To go further, add some tools to your repertoire. Get your Google Analytics set up and make sure you create goals, events, and tailor your dashboard to your business and website goals.

Hotjar is another excellent tool that offers heatmaps and recordings to help you better understand your visitors and their behavior. If you want more tools beyond these, check out our article about conversion tracking and optimization tools .

Landing pages

Once you’ve optimized your website as a whole and put into place tools to track user behavior, you’ll want to look at specific landing pages. These pages are the first impression for any visitor to your website. Their job is to capture the visitor’s information to turn them into a lead; you want them to be efficient and effective. Make sure you pay attention to the content on these pages and test your value proposition for each. For more tips, check out our article with tips for landing page optimization.

Campaigns

Campaigns with PPC, social media, and email are your way of reaching out and grabbing people from the sidewalk – those visitors not on your website at the moment. Campaigns are extremely useful in lead nurturing because they remind and guide leads toward the next step on their journey with you.

As we discussed in article on how to set up a marketing and sales funnel for your business, you’ll want to use the AIDA model with your campaigns to create ad groups, ads, and audiences.

Also, don’t forget that AdWords is a great way to test keywords, value proposition and call-to-actions, information that you can use in the future for your marketing strategy.

These basics will get you set up, but you will need to revisit these steps continuously in your journey with your customers. Take these fundamentals and use them to build a successful marketing and sales funnel, one that adapts to you and your customers’ needs.

Everything You Need to Know to Set Up A Marketing and Sales Funnel For Your Business

We’ve discussed the basics and importance of marketing and sales funnel for your business, but now we’ll cover what you need to know to set one up.

What Do You Need to Start?

There are two mains things you need to start your marketing and sales funnel:

Online presence
Traffic

Without these two items, you will only be creating an empty structure.

Once you have an online presence and traffic, use the AIDA marketing model to determine who your customers are, what you have to offer them, and why they should choose you or your product/service.

Next, determine your business goals and metrics. If you use these while creating your online presence strategy, they will transport your business goals onto your website, landing pages, social media channels, ads, and lead nurturing campaigns.

1. Online presence

If you have a website with a blog and social media channels, you have an online presence. Social media channels can include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, Periscope and many others, but at the beginning, you’ll want to focus on only one to master.

Leave other channels for later, after you’ve mastered your first social media channel.

TIP: Ask Yourself

Who are my customers? Create buyer personas. Use the AIDA model to explain how you will advertise and present yourself to each buyer persona at every stage of the AIDA marketing funnel.
How can I fulfill my customers’ needs? Do keyword research to see how many people are searching for solutions that your product/service provides. Determine how large your competition is. Then use this information while creating and designing your website, landing pages, campaigns, ad groups and ads.
Why should they choose your company and product/service? How are you better than your competitors? Brainstorm ideas and create value propositions to use later for your website, landing pages and ad copy.

TIP: Online Presence Essentials

Local business profiles (Yelp, Foursquare, Google) – if you are a local business with a brick and mortar, rather than just e-commerce, these profiles are extremely helpful in your online presence.
A responsive, well-designed website with copy that converts. You want your website to be appealing with its copy and responsive to your user’s device to push your visitor toward conversion.
Unique and useful content on your blog. Focus on your target audience and things they find interesting or needed. Having this focus will improve your SEO results, provide quality content for your social media, and add value for your visitors to increase conversions.
At least one active social media channel. Engage with your followers and convert them to customers by reaching them where they are on social media.

2. Traffic

To get traffic to your website, you need to create a plan of how and where you’ll raise awareness for your company, product or service. To raise awareness, you can go through this basic channels:

PPC: Pay Per Click ads

Pay Per Click ads are usually found on social networks and search engine results pages (SERPs) like on Google or Bing. You’ll see them strategically placed for view-ability.

With these ads, you pay for each click on the ad. On Facebook, you can pay for a reach or number of people to whom your ad will be shown.

PPC targeting

With Pay Per Click ads, targeting is very important. It is crucial that you know your target audience to reach them more efficiently.

With Google, you “create” your audience using keywords and ad groups. You’ll want to target them using their location and language, based on their searches.

With Facebook, you can target an audience using their location, age, gender, languages, connections, and their behavior.

Knowing what your target audience and what they need or search for is essential to reaching them effectively with Pay Per Click ads.

SEO and Content Strategy Combined with Social Media Presence

Combining your SEO and content strategy with your social media presence can increase awareness, traffic, and conversion. Good SEO will increase your organic traffic.

To utilize good SEO, though, you’ll need quality content. That same quality content can then be used on social media to gain more followers, likes, shares, and leads.

Moreover, by focusing on keywords relevant to your business and niche, you can build a community of followers AND customers on social media.

By combining these strategies, you’ll increase traffic and visitors that you’ll then want to convert and move further down the marketing and sales funnel.

PR/Media Outreach

While PR/Media Outreach is not a stable way of getting traffic, it can be a great way to earn valuable backlinks and improve your off-site SEO results.

With reputable mentions from other sources outside of your website, you’ll gain authority in your online presence and possible referral traffic as well.

How to Use AIDA Marketing Model to Get More Website Traffic

The three methods above are not only used for raising awareness, however. These methods are also used for the other elements of the AIDA model: interest, desire, and action. You can create campaigns in each of the three methods to guide your customers through each stage.

For instance, pay per click ads can be used to rouse interest just as much as attention, focusing on a certain aspect of the product/service that satisfies customer needs can filter them into the desire stage, and promoting a sale could easily draw them into action.

Using keyword research to target your audience in each stage and designing a campaign geared toward the specific stage will guide your customer through the AIDA funnel.

TIP: Use PPC to Test the Water

PPC is a great, cheap way to test which keywords and value propositions are working and bringing you relevant traffic. Use this information while creating landing pages, content strategy, or (re)designing your website.

Conclusion: Online Presence & Website Traffic

Once you’ve set up your online presence and traffic channels, you’ve completed the first steps towards creating a successful marketing and sales funnel for your business.

Keep in mind that most people who come to your website for the first time will not make a purchase immediately. You’ll need to guide them through their journey.

To convert those first-time visitors into leads, gather their contact information and then use that information for your lead nurturing campaigns.

Use analytics data and best practices to optimize your marketing and sales funnel.

Read more about nurturing your leads and funnel optimization in our next article.

How to Create SEO and Content Strategy and Boost Your Social Media Presence Using AIDA Model

The AIDA model is one of the most basic ways to describe consumer engagement with your marketing campaigns.

AIDA stands for:

Attention
Interest
Desire
Action

You can use this model with any marketing campaign, but if you apply it to your online strategy, it can help you create an SEO and Content Strategy to boost your social media presence.

What is SEO and Content Strategy?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content are both focused around keywords. It’s important your keywords are relevant to your product, service or business. For your basic keywords, you should start in your company’s mission and vision statements.

While developing your list of keywords, try to focus on developing long-tail keywords: try for keywords like “indoor trampoline park” instead of just “park”.

While the focus is keywords, SEO and Content Strategy using the AIDA model should cover all four stages: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. You already know your audience, business goals and how to connect them with quality, useful and informative content.

Now you need to take it to the next level. SEO strategy is about optimizing your content and proactively answering questions real people will have – during all stages of the AIDA model.

Your content should be easy to discover, and it should easily convert your potential customers at any stage of their AIDA journey – it should fulfill their needs.

On-site and Off-site SEO

Internal / on-site SEO

Internal or on-site SEO is about following SEO guidelines, publishing great content, and making that content conversion-friendly using growth hacks.

For this type of SEO, you’ll want to brainstorm core topics related to your business and brand. Extend your research beyond the basics, dig into your niche, and make sure to form long-tailed keywords from your basic keywords.

When developing your keyword list, help yourself out by organizing them in at least two groups: product keywords and business/niche keywords. This will help organize your content strategy better.

TIP: Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for research. Pinpoint relevant keywords with low competition for your content strategy – people are searching for those terms, but there isn’t much content found for them.

External / off-site SEO

External or off-site SEO focuses on optimizing content for referral sources, republishing, and distributing. You want your content to be easily found and also attractive so others will want to share, publish and distribute your content.

Writing relevant and quality content towards topics people are searching for is one of the most important aspects of this type of SEO.

SEO and Content Strategy Execution

To execute an effective SEO and Content Strategy using AIDA, you’ll want to use marketing project management. Ask yourself:

What are your goals?

For example, do you want to: grow traffic, get more subscriptions, get more customers? Choose your goals and use those to choose your keywords. Some keywords are more important for your goals than others. Prioritize those keywords in a list and choose the easiest ones to start with and get rankings.

What are your content types?

Will you be creating blog posts, landing pages, ebooks, white papers, templates, e-commerce pages? Decide which content types appeal to your audience the most and what would be best for your visitors – not necessarily what you can do in-house.

How will you launch it?

What channels will you choose to promote it? Know where your audience is and what they are reading, sharing, consuming. Find the channels that your audience uses.

Share on Social Media

With the AIDA model in mind, think about:

Who do you want to attract?
What is your target audience’s want or need? Alternatively, what gets them excited?
How can you fulfill those needs and get them excited?

Answer those questions and direct your content towards those answers, then make it easy to share. Be sure to share your content more than once on your social media channels and use email distribution for your content.

Keep in mind that in social media, AIDA is a little different and translates more to ADIA: Acknowledgment, Dialogue, Incentivize – encouragement or motivation, Action.

With this model, you need to create quality content; then you need to listen to your target audience and make them talk/engage with you.

SEO in Advertising

Although we’ve focused on AIDA’s use for social media feeds and SEO efforts, it does not need to be isolated to those. Use AIDA for copywriting, landing pages, and ad designs to ensure you are covering all four stages to experience better conversion and strategy with your advertising.

AIDA is a model or guideline to use with your marketing campaigns in any medium, but it can be extremely useful to outline and create a strategy for your SEO and online content efforts.

Using AIDA to create your SEO and Content Strategy will provide value to your customers (recurring and new) while boosting your social media presence and showing a return on your efforts.

From AIDA to Startup Model: How to Setup Your Funnel

In today’s world, where customers are inundated with text sales, emails, tweets or Facebook ads, figuring out how to grab the attention of your customer can be overwhelming.

Where do you even start? This is where a purchase model or funnel comes into play.

You need a model to be more efficient

Continue →