Your website can generate leads - here’s how

Brand marketers and business owners, especially SMBs, are drowned in the deluge of information on digital marketing. My heart especially goes out to the little guys with littler budgets who subscribe to RSS feeds, read tech titles religiously, always looking for help to unleash the, supposedly unlimited, power of the internet.

I am attempting to simplify it for these guys.

Before I explain how, let me share why should you follow what I am telling you to do?

Your consumers no longer want to be marketed to. They want to exercise their option of entering your virtual shop without being nagged. Think of internet as a mega mall. You are one of the stores. You are selling service A but then this mall has 1000 other stores, also selling service A.

Therefore your two primary challenges are to attract consumers into your store and buy from you without you accosting them. And I can tell you, “this mall is busy”.

More than half of all Singaporeans and more than ¾ of all Singapore adults are found in this mall. One third of them spend at least three hours online every day; browsing products, getting news, having fun, meeting friends and so on.

The first step to make your store sparkle is constant Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is absolutely critical to any online lead generation activity. Ranking high on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, is half the digital marketing battle won. If your business is not ranking well for the words that describe your products or services, then you’re not getting found by potential customers either.

According to Search Engine Land approximately 88,000,000,000 searches are conducted on Google alone per month. 46 per cent of daily searches are for information on products or services. 75 per cent of users never scroll past the first page of search results. Think of SEO as those essential 6 Km runs to remain attractive and be spotted. You stop it and you are invisible.

Number two is blogging. Blogging improves SEO. Before your shrug off its importance consider this; blogs reach almost 60 per cent Singaporeans as per SRI a non-profit research Institute, B2C brands that blog generate 88 per cent and B2B companies that blog generate 67 per cent per month more leads than those who do not.

Not blogging frequently enough or in a way that maximizes SEO does not bring the right results. A website without a fully-optimized blog is poorly positioned to drive traffic and leads.

Prospects, customers and search engines have reasons to love your blog: prospects understand what your customers do; customers stay up to date with your offerings; and for search engines, each post represents another page that they can index and feed to others searching that phrase.

Third is creating an attractive social media presence and its management. Think of social media as your own media outlet where you can print what you wish. There are more than enough readers; 82 per cent of Singapore adult internet users are on Facebook.

Marketers who spent six hours a week or more using social media and engaging/sharing content on it saw 52 per cent more leads than those who did not. Companies using Twitter average double the amount of leads per month. Both B2C & B2B companies are acquiring customers through Facebook.

Do tell your friends that you heard this one here first; the crucial fourth tool to have ‘Call-to-Action’ buttons that link to attractive offers. If you do not have these then your website doesn’t stand a chance at generating leads.

Content offers on a website educating your prospects, and helping them get smarter about what they need are a great draw. This advice will draw your customers who will come back to understand how your goods and services could potentially fill that need.

Last and the most important step is Lead Nurturing. Turning the leads your site generates into sales, bringing in the dollars. Lead nurturing campaigns help you further educate and build relationships with non-sales ready leads in a scalable and effective way. According to an MIT study done with InsideSales.com, 78 per cent of sales that start with a web inquiry go to the company that responds FIRST! Forrester Research companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50 per cent more sales-ready leads at 33 per cent lower cost per lead.
Hope this list of simple ‘Digital To Dos’ will help you and give you a good restart!

Himanshu Verma, CEO, Like Minds Consulting Pte ltd