6-Ways-to-Use-Technology-for-Lead-Generation

6 Ways to Use Technology for Lead Generation

by

These six ways to use technology for lead generation all work to get the most out of your website and personnel. Incorporating all these elements into your larger strategy can create a self-sustaining model that builds your client base for years.

Landing Page Contact Forms

Adding a contact form to your website landing pages, including your home page, is one of the more effective methods of capturing leads from organic search results. Contact form conversion rates vary by industry, though research from Form Stack indicates that national averages hover between 10 and 14 percent. Don’t think that a phone number on your website is just as effective as a form. Many website visitors simply don’t want the hard sell experience of phone interaction, preferring to send their information in what they feel is a lower pressure situation.

Leverage Your Content: Contact forms are a passive form of lead gen that capitalizes on your website’s engaging content. By driving visitor eyes to your intelligent, thought-driven copy, you can highlight your business strengths and problem-solving capabilities in a way that increases the chances of visitors converting into leads.

Marketing Automation Software

Marketing automation tools help your sales teams advance leads through the funnel without manually performing every task necessary to trigger their buying actions. Automated tasks, including contact form notifications and lead scoring, allow sales people to hone in on those potential customers who are close to making a purchase, while the system continues to nurture those who need a little more incentive or time. Your team can also tune marketing automation tactics to target potential leads across multiple channels, including email and relevant social platforms.

Advanced Workflow Automation

Advanced workflow automation supports higher levels of operational efficiency in the lead generation process by auto-piloting content delivery. Potential leads can receive content, including special offers, discounts, and new product announcements, at key times throughout the year, which can help increase conversion. For example, send a promotional offer to visitors that features discounted products during times of the year when need among your potential business clients for those items is at its highest.

Customer Relationship Tools

Managing the customer relationship process demands both automated communications for effective nurturing and analysis of buying habits to anticipate future product or service needs. CRM data can help your sales and marketing teams analyze campaign lead generation stats in real-time, adjusting converting elements as needed to garner more calls, email opens, or contact form fills. Through direct communication with current customers and visitors via CRM tools, your business can get real feedback on your current products and what clients would like to see from your company as you grow.

Customer relationship management also makes sure your sales team doesn’t drop the ball by failing to contact leads that come in through all monitored channels. Employees contact leads faster, which gets them into your sales funnel sooner, and begins the process of moving them through to conversion. In one case study conducted by Software Advice (a site that provides lead generation software information), a web solutions company with offices in multiple countries throughout the globe increased their conversion rates by 30 percent when they implemented CRM software to their lead generation and capture systems.

Paid Search Networks

If you’re still building your organic search engine or need leads fast, you can still turn to paid search networks to boost lead generation numbers. Paid search can also supplement lead gen during your company’s early days when you may not have enough brand presence or search ranking across your key terms. There are multiple channels you can leverage:

  • Display Network Ads: Using the Google Display Network can place your company’s ads across all the search giant’s participating websites. You can choose to use text, image, or interactive ads, targeting sites where you believe potential leads are likely to congregate or on site’s that offer products or services that are complimentary to your own.
  • Remarketing Tools: Ever notice how the shoes you found on one website follow you around the web for days afterwards? That’s remarketing. You can set up your remarketing campaign to send special offers to website visitors that foster lead nurturing. Ads could even show on your competitor’s sites if they happen to take part in Google’s Display Network.
  • Traditional PPC Advertising: Pay-per-click campaigns depend on text ads placed in search results and landing pages optimized to convert visitors. Bidding for PPC keywords can get expensive depending on your niche. The cost to serve your ads prominently in search engine results pages can exhaust your monthly budget in just a couple of days, so consult a PPC professional before funding your account.

Track Visitors and Conversion Rates

If you can’t track visitors and conversions on your landing pages and contact forms, you’ll never know just how many leads you’re generating every day. Install analytics tracking code on your website, PPC landing pages, email marketing campaigns, and goal completion URLs. Google Analytics gives you a free means of conversion and visitor tracking, though there are other platforms you may need depending on your lead referral channels, including social media networks. Here’s what to watch when the data starts coming in:

  • Organic Visitors: These people come to your site from search engines. Continually rising organic search numbers is a prime indicator of strong SERP rankings.
  • New Visitors: Is your site bringing in new visitors every week or the same users? This stat will tell you.
  • Bounce Rate: This percentage is a signal of user behavior on your site. A high bounce rate could show that you’re not serving content that visitors find valuable.
  • Open Rate: How many people are opening your emails? Open rates vary by industry, but if you find a campaign sagging below 15 percent, that’s a sign that your content doesn’t speak to users, according to Mail Chimp.
  • Conversion Rate: This percentage represents the numbers of visitors to your homepage or individual landing pages who submit contact forms or otherwise do an identified conversion action.

Optimizing for conversion and sustaining lead generation figures over time takes the continual and joint efforts of your marketers, web development team, and sales staff. Incorporate the technology that makes this process easier and more intuitive, and you’ll soon see a comprehensive approach to lead capture and client retention.

If you’re trying to find the highest quality marketing and sales technologies at the lowest cost, give us a call today.