HOW TO OPTIMIZE your LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY
HOW TO OPTIMIZE your LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 2 PART ONE: Creating Content to Generate Leads 3 Optimizing Landing Pages to Increase Conversions 7 Building Effective Conversion Paths 14 PART TWO: Measuring Efficiency 17 Utilizing Marketing Data 23 Conclusion 26 HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY
HOW TO OPTIMIZE your LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY As a smart marketer, you know how important it is to generate leads and keep those potential customers fully engaged as they flow down the sales funnel. This ebook will give you best practices for optimizing your lead generation strategies. If you re in the early stages of building your strategy, start with Part One to learn about optimizing landing pages. If you ve already mastered landing pages, start with Part Two to learn how to implement tracking on your lead generation efforts to measure success. IN THIS EBOOK, YOU WILL LEARN: What type of content you should produce to generate leads How to optimize all the elements of your landing pages to increase form-fills How to build efficient conversion paths to drive leads What tools you should be using to track marketing campaigns How to use the data you collect to improve your marketing strategy HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 2
HOW CREATING TO REGAIN CONTENT to CONTROL GENERATE OF your LEADS BRAND It s important for your marketing team to understand best In practices the real for world, generating you don t leads. have In order infinite to generate resources; leads you don t have and collect a perfect contact product; information, you don t your sell marketing to a growing team market without competition. needs to create You re valuable also content. not omnipotent, so you cannot enforce what your brand represents. Under these assumptions, most companies need all the help they can get with branding, GUY KAWASAKI HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 3
CREATING CONTENT to GENERATE LEADS It s important for your marketing team to collect contact information from potential leads to pass along to your sales team. Site forms serve as a prime resource to collect contact information, since the people who visit your website are usually interested in learning more about your company. But many times, visitors are still in the information gathering stage and not ready to buy. In order to convert leads faster, you should provide visitors with relevant content that they are more willing to exchange their contact information for on your website. Here are four things to consider when creating content : 1. VALUE You want to create content that is valuable to your prospects. A good way to provide value is by creating content that alleviates a painpoint for your target audience: content should solve the problem that brought your site visitors to your resources. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 4
CREATING CONTENT to GENERATE LEADS 2. RELEVANCE Create unique offers that are relevant to the different segments of your audience. When you re building your content strategy, identify the different audience personas that are interested in your product then follow up with those leads using a tailored piece of content. New to audience personas? Access the Bitly Persona Worksheet HERE. 3. TIMELINESS You want to have specific content for your site visitors based on where they are in the sales funnel. If someone is at the top of the sales funnel, they will be interested in educational content like guides, checklists and ebooks. If someone is further along, they will be more interested in content that explains how your company can help them solve a problem. You can target this group with a detailed product demo and case study. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 5
CREATING CONTENT to GENERATE LEADS What can you give your site visitors? Ebooks Guides Checklists Templates 4. UNIQUENESS Don t offer the same exact content as your competitors. Always strive to create content that your site visitors can t find anywhere else. Don t be afraid to get creative! Your prospects will be more enticed to exchange their contact information for unique resources. Live Webinars Recorded Webinars Product Demos Slideshows Presentations Case Studies HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 6
OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS After you have content to offer your prospects, you need to create landing pages on your site to host these offers and collect contact information from potential leads. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 7
OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS Here are some general guidelines to optimize the different elements of your landing pages: 646-678-5610 HEADERS: Headers are valuable space on landing pages because they sit at the top of your form. Keep your headers simple. Always include your company name or logo and steer away from having any navigation to distract visitors from filling out the form. Consider putting contact information in your header - studies have shown that site visitors that directly call your company have a 15% increased likelihood of turning into a customer.* *Linking Smart Marketers to Qualified Leads: bitly.is/linkingsmartmarketers HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 8
OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS 646-678-5610 HEADLINES: Headlines serve as the title to your website and should restate the offer. Strong headlines have a clear hook, use offers like free and include active verbs that provide the visitor with direction on what to do next. If you want to include an additional explanation of your offer add a subhead. This is where you can say how your offer is going to benefit your prospects. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 9
OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS 646-678-5610 COPY: Strong, clear copy is essential for your website visitors to understand what you offer. Avoid dense paragraphs or being overly text-heavy. Studies show that on average, web visitors only read about 20% of the text on any page.* To make your landing page more digestible, keep your copy to a few short paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each, or break up the copy with bullet points. Make it easy for your site visitors to skim the page by bolding the key phrases and benefits of your offer throughout your copy. *http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/ HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 10
OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS 646-678-5610 Always include an image on your landing pages. IMAGERY: Vibrant, strong imagery can help visitors better understand your offer. Visitors rely on images to help understand what information is important to pay attention to and relevant images can help support your copy to increase conversions. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 11
OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS 646-678-5610 FORM: The form is the most important element of your landing page because it s where you collect contact information. While there is no magic number of form fields to include, there are best practices you should keep in mind when creating forms. If your focus is driving top-of-the-funnel leads, keep the number of fields to a minimum. If your focus is higher-quality leads, include additional form fields specific to business objectives. This ensures the HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 12
OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS leads you are generating are the right leads for your sales team. Additionally, you may consider including a privacy policy at the bottom of your form. This will build trust with your prospects, as they will be reassured that you re not going to sell their contact information to any third parties. And finally, always use in-button text that reflects a call to action that is relevant to your offer, like Download Now for ebooks or Save My Seat for webinars. You can raise conversion rate by as much as three percent just by optimizing your button copy.* *http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/ HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 13
BUILDING EFFECTIVE CONVERSION PATHS Conversion paths are designed to catch and convert incoming traffic from your online marketing campaigns. Clear conversion paths are essential in order for site visitors to find your landing pages. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 14
BUILDING EFFECTIVE CONVERSION PATHS After you ve optimized your landing pages, it s important to set up an effective conversion path to ensure prospects can find those landing pages once they are live. Start by linking to your landing pages using calls-to-action throughout your site. Add CTA buttons to your homepage, your resources section, across your blog (including individual blog posts and blog sidebar), throughout your product, and even on your About page. Your conversion path starts with the call-to-action. There are a few things that you should keep in mind when creating CTAs: CHECKLIST ADD CTA TO: Homepage Resource section Blog posts Blog sidebar Product pages About page Keep CTAs above the fold in your emails and forms. Make the CTAs clear and include an active verb. Track all hyperlinks used in CTAs (more about this in Measuring Success) In the conversion path, your CTA leads to your landing page. We discussed HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 15
BUILDING EFFECTIVE CONVERSION PATHS how to optimize your landing pages in Optimizing Landing Pages to Increase Conversions. The second part of your conversion path is your Thank You page. On the Thank You page, you should provide a link to the offer that your visitors signed up for. You can also include social sharing buttons on your Thank You page to encourage your site visitors to share that they ve downloaded something valuable from you, further promoting your content and increasing the number of people who visit your site and your landing pages. By using a Bitlink to track the clicks on your CTAs, you can compare the click-through rate on your CTA to your form fills. The final part of the conversion path is the follow-up email. The follow-up email serves a similar purpose as the Thank You page, but having the offer your website visitor downloaded in their inboxes allows your leads to refer to your offer anytime they need to. A follow-up email allows you to keep your lead engaged for a longer period of time and gives you an additional opportunity to engage with them. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 16
MEASURING SUCCESS It s important to track all the tactics in your marketing plan in order to improve its efficiency and optimize your marketing efforts. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 17
MEASURING SUCCESS PART 1 : THE TOOLS YOU NEED It s important to understand and identify the marketing analytics tools that are available to you and how you can use them effectively to measure success. There are several different tools designed to help you understand and track the activity in the marketing analytics funnel: WEB ANALYTICS MARKETING AUTOMATION PLATFORM At the top of the funnel are web analytics tools that help you track and understand the traffic generated to your website and your owned assets, helping you optimize the content on your website. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT Marketing automation platforms help you analyze and track middle-of-thefunnel activities. These tools allow you to target known leads with content that is relevant to them at the right time. At the bottom of the funnel is your customer relationship management (CRM) database that you can use to tie revenue to your marketing efforts. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 18
MEASURING SUCCESS PART 2 : THE ASSETS YOU SHOULD TRACK In order to build a comprehensive understanding of your marketing efforts, you need to identify and track all the assets of your campaign. Example Search Engine Marketing All paid search efforts Display Ads assets include: Website Your homepage Any in-product CTAs Blog Blog post announcing your offer The CTA in each blog post Your blog promo Social Media Paid social media efforts Organic social media efforts All channels - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc Offline Print Ads OOH (Out-Of-Home) Direct Mail Email Invitation email Reminder email Follow-up email HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 19
MEASURING SUCCESS PART 3 : HOW TO SET UP TRACKING By implementing tracking parameters for all the assets we identified in Part 2, you can gain important insight into how your marketing efforts are resonating with your audience. Here s a brief overview of how to set up tracking parameters to measure success. STEP 1 Install Global Website Tracking Scripts Tracking begins with global website tracking scripts. Your web analytics and marketing automation platforms will have global website tracking scripts that need to be installed on every page of your website. Global website tracking scripts allow you to analyze the traffic on your site and learn how your site visitors are interacting with it. By understanding what resonates with visitors, you can further optimize your content. <script> (funtion(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i[ GoogleAnalyticsObect script, // www.google-analytics.com/ analytics.js, ga ); ga( create, 34-2ff3455621-11,.org );ga( send, pageview ); </script> HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 20
MEASURING SUCCESS STEP 2 Install Tracking Pixels If you re using paid search and display advertising, be sure to install tracking pixels. Tracking pixels help you keep track of how many users see your advertisements and clicked through to your landing page. You should also install tracking pixels on your landing pages to keep track of when visitors have successfully converted and what advertisements drove the most traffic to the landing pages. <img src= //http://bit.ly/1njxuyg height= 1 border= 0 > Name: STEP 3 Add Hidden Form Fields Job Title: You should also consider adding hidden form fields to your forms. Hidden form fields capture information from your links and pass it through to your marketing automation platform and CRM. Hidden form fields give you deeper insight into lead tracking such as where your site visitors are coming from and the specific channel that drove them to your form. Driver Campaign ID: Hidden: URL Parameter: Driver Campaign HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 21
MEASURING SUCCESS STEP 4 Create Appended Links Appended links are links that include the tracking information for your analytics tools. Appended links include parameters associated with your CRM and your web analytics. http://bitly.com/webinar/html?drivercampaignid=7000000000wwww& utm_campaign=webinar Baselink CRM tracking Web Analytics Tracking HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 22
UTILIZING MARKETING DATA Once you begin collecting information from your leads and tracking all of your assets, your marketing team will be armed with insightful and actionable data that can be utilized across all your marketing efforts. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR EMAIL MARKETINGSTRATEGY 23
UTLIZING marketing DATA You can use this data for: Lead Nurturing: Just because a site visitor has converted into a lead doesn t mean they are ready to buy your product. Through lead nurturing efforts, you can educate and build a relationship with all of your prospects to help propel them through the sales funnel. You can use the data you ve collected on your leads - such as demographic information, industry, title and more - to create strong, relevant content to their needs, as discussed in Creating Content to Generate Leads. Sales Enablement: You can use the information you ve collected from your leads and pass it along to your sales team. Since you re tracking all of your assets through your CRM, your sales team will be able to see what your leads are interested in on your website. By knowing detailed, specific information about these people, your HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 24
UTLIZING marketing DATA sales team will be more knowledgable about the needs of your prospects and can be prepared to talk about how your product will solve their problems. Marketing Strategy: You can use all the data you re collecting to optimize your overall marketing strategy. Through this data, you can identify which channels perform the best and allocate resources accordingly. HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 25
OPTIMIZE your LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY After reading this ebook, your marketing team will be armed and prepared to create an optimized lead generation strategy that you can track its success to drive conversion rates, leads and company objectives. Interested in learning more about how Bitly Brand Tools can help you fully optimize your lead generation strategy? Visit bitly.is/leadgeneration to learn more about Bitly Brand Tools. Since 2008, Bitly has been committed to the power of the link. Privately held and based in New York City, Bitly shortens nearly half a billion links per month as an integral part of social, SMS, email efforts (and more) from publishers, brands, marketers, government organizations, educational institutions, non-profits and individual users. Processing more than eight billion clicks on those links per month, Bitly remains the leader in an optimal sharing experience, and continues to unveil new products while generating one of the most valuable proprietary datasets in the world today.