You just helped your customer generate 100% more traffic than they were. Woah, congrats!
But wait up, you still don't see an increase in the number of customers or even all that many qualified leads. You're banging your head against the wall to figure out why that could be. Is it because your traffic isn't high quality? Or is it because your landing pages aren't performing well? Maybe you're not using the right social media platform?
The answers can be endless. But all in all, it can be safely concluded that your inbound marketing strategy is missing some critical components. We'll segment these into two categories - Strategical and Tactical.
Strategical
I want my company to grow
That's great. And I want a pet unicorn. Both have the same odds if your goal in 2019 is to "grow your company". No company has ever seen success without defining SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) goals. Some of you are probably thinking, of course, we've defined that. 100 leads a month is not an acceptable answer. It's important that your entire inbound marketing strategy is built off of an actual revenue or customer goal. We at Znbound like calling it making a growth problem a traffic problem, and here's how you do it.
Step 1
Establish your revenue goal for the year.
Step 2
Calculate how many customers you need to achieve that revenue goal.
Step 3
Calculate how many leads you'll need to achieve that customer goal (Use your current lead to customer conversion rate, 10% is a good ballpark)
Step 4
Lastly, calculate how much traffic you will need to achieve that lead number (Use your current traffic to lead conversion rate, 4% is a good ballpark)The idea is to make sure you're working towards well defined specific goals. You can break these down into monthly or fortnightly goals, whatever works best for you.
I have nailed my buyer persona and buyer profile
Buyer Profile
Businesses and people evolve with every passing year. We initially thought real estate was our expertise and we spent a lot of time and energy prospecting similar leads basis of some success we'd had with real estate. However, as time passed and we worked with a larger bucket of clients, we realized that our real expertise lay with SaaS companies. This might change over the next coming years, depending on how businesses and the industry shapes, however, what's important is to keep revisiting and re-evaluating.
Buyer Persona
We once had a client that was given eight different types of buyer personas by an agency they were working with. That can be grossly misleading. While it's possible that there are a few different types of personas that may have been a part of the buying process, it is important to really nail who your primary and secondary buyer persona is. Buyer personas are the heart of inbound marketing. You can do all the optimization in the world, but none of that will help if it isn't intended towards the right audience. Create a detailed interview questionnaire for your best customers. The idea of this questionnaire isn't just to ask them work-related pain points but to really understand them. What do they like doing in their free time? What does their family life look like? What are their hobbies? The idea here is to understand the persona and draft campaigns that they immediately relate to. It's also important to understand that your buyer persona will keep on evolving. It is therefore important to revisit your buyer person every now and then.
I bought the best marketing automation platform in the market
You can have the absolute best marketing platform there is, but it's really pointless if you're not optimally using it. A marketing platform gives you a lot of power as a marketer, but if you're incorporating every element in your overall strategy, only then can you reap the benefits. I've spoken to clients who've had absolutely no idea what their marketing platform can do for them. Have your marketing team take proper demos (even multiple times if need be). Anytime you're trying to find a solution to a problem, try looking into your marketing software for that solution. For example, say you're using HubSpot to collect all your contact data. Are you using the lists feature in HubSpot to see what page most of your contacts are converting on? Are you sending out automated emails right after contact visits your pricing page? Do you know what's happening with traffic coming in from the United States vs Europe?You'd have known had you spent more time on your marketing platform.
I am generating high quality leads
And that's wonderful! You're already one step ahead. But what good are leads if you're unable to drive them to closure? You're probably thinking, marketing has very little to do with that though. Not true.
- Set up workflows in your CRM to make sure your sales team is being assigned leads systematically. This helps not just in quicker lead response times, but also allows the sales team to prioritize leads based on the source and geography.
- Make sure you have lead scoring set up.
As marketers make sure you're looking at the leads you're bringing in on a regular basis to be able to contribute to the SMART goal we spoke about earlier.
Tactical
Technical SEO
How fast is your page loading as compared to other pages that you're trying to beat on Google's SERP rankings? What is the size of the images on your web-pages? Are they as small as they need to be? Is there an extra unnecessary code on your website that you could be storing elsewhere?
Do something right now. Well, after you're done reading this blog. Compare your page speed with your competition using Page Speed Insights. Google says:“A search result for a resource having a short load time relative to resources having longer load times can be promoted in a presentation order, and search results for the resources having longer load times can be demoted.” If you find that you're ranking below your competition even when you're doing all the right things, your page loading speed might be to blame.
Analyze. Analyze. Analyze
How do you create a good social media strategy? Analyze. How do you create a good content strategy? Analyze. How do you achieve any kind of success in inbound marketing? ANALYSE. Did I say it enough times? It's not enough to do a happy dance when you hit the roof with your lead number, it's important to understand where they're coming from and if they're actually impacting your business.
Conversion rate optimization
This one seems like a bit obvious, but I truly think it's not given it's due. We've seen a client go from 17 leads a month to over a 150 leads a month due to conversion rate optimization. CRO could be anything from changing the color of the CTA to adding another step in your forms. Use heat maps to really understand user behavior. It's important to figure out what works for your audience and what doesn't. And the only way you're going to find out is by analyzing their user behavior. Find out what the high traffic pages on your website are and how you can convert the right kind of traffic coming to those websites.
Overall, it's important to remember that your inbound strategy is not a one-time recipe. It's going to keep evolving and you're just going to have to try and keep up.
