Tag Archives: attracting your target market

How to Improve Your SEO to Generate More Leads

How to Improve Your SEO to Generate More Leads One of the main features of a properly executed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is that, along with boosting traffic, it generates more leads. SEO needs some time work before you can see results. Generate more leads by improving your website SEO.

How SEO Helps Generate Leads

SEO isn’t obvious. Site visitors won’t notice its presence. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, will notice and will rank your site according to how it’s optimized for the search engines. SEO increases your site visibility and improves the user experience by boosting site quality, speed, and ease of navigation.

Because SEO helps your page rise in the ranks, it is a great tool for getting leads. Two of the ways search engines generate leads are:

  • Organic Search –  Results that appear in the search engine because the topic/keyword phrase emphasized on the web page has been searched for.
  • Paid Advertising –  Paid listings at the top or right of search results.

The beauty of the organic search method for generating leads is that is free! There are quite a few ways your SEO strategy can help you stand out in organic search.

Improving Your SEO Strategy

Act Natural

Avoid putting your SEO strategy before user experience. Your customers have little use for content that revolves solely around keyword density. Instead, write as though SEO takes a backseat to providing relevant content to your readers. Find the right balance between SEO and solid content.

Use the Right Keywords

Keywords are a vital component of SEO. The right keywords can bring targeted traffic to your site that is looking for exactly what you’re selling. Select keywords based on relevance, search volume, and competition.

High search volume keywords are the ones many people are searching for. However, you’ll be competing with lots of other brands with those keywords alone. Use lower search volume keywords to stand out more and find a more targeted audience.

Embrace the Locale

If you are a local business, don’t miss an opportunity to use local SEO techniques. Let people know where you are. Highlight your location often without appearing spammy. For example, if your photography business is located in Dallas, Texas, use keywords such as wedding photography in Dallas.

Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

Practically everyone is searching on their mobile devices. Having a site works on mobile as well as desktop gives you the advantage.

Start Blogging

An active blog provides fresh content, keywords, backlinks, and social media opportunities to your site. Publish relevant blog posts that make use of keywords and elements such as HTML tags ( particularly <h2> and <h3>) for easier scanning.

With a good SEO strategy, you can generate more leads and provide better content for your customers. Need help with your SEO strategy? Digital Hill can help! Contact Digital Hill today.

Website Best Practices for Lead Generation

Website Best Practices for Lead Generation

The ultimate goal of an inbound marketing campaign is lead generation. Your site can attract a lot of visitors, but if all they do is browse and leave, then your efforts have failed.

To be successful, think of your website as a series of pages with elements that work together to turn a visitor into a potential customer. Lead generation follows a pattern which begins with a blog post, followed by the homepage, ‘about’ section, contact form, and a ‘thank you’ page. Every page corresponds to a step in the marketing funnel, starting with searching for info and ending with a submission of contact details. Let’s take a look at each one:

Blog Post

The blog post is the front liner of your website. It’s what people most often see first when looking for information on search engines. Traffic can come from a link posted on social media. The job of a blog post is to make people aware of your business. It should contain relevant information your target audience finds useful. It should be optimized with the right keywords to rank on the search engine and shared on social media.

Homepage

If your blog post generates interest, visitors will be curious about your business. They’ll go to the home page to learn more about your business and what it does. Make sure your homepage clearly explains what you do and how you do it to make visitors stay on your site and explore more pages. But what kind of details?

Visitors don’t necessarily know what you do. Provide a clear explanation of what your business does and how they help people. So on this page, share testimonials from satisfied customers and site any media attention you’ve gotten. Visitors will find it easy to see the value your business offers from people who have experienced it firsthand.

‘About’ Section

At this point, visitors already know what the business is, but not why it exists and who’s behind it. They want to know your objectives, your values, your vision, and mission. This should be included in your ‘About’ section. This your opportunity to earn visitors’ trust. Humanize your business by introducing yourself and your staff, talking about how the business started and share your vision for the future. People are careful about who they align themselves with. So if a business seems shady, they won’t trust it. Be transparent and open.

Contact Form

If you’ve filled out the first three pages, then it’s a quick step for your visitors to take action like filling out the contact form and leave their contact details. Once you have these, congratulations, you got yourself a lead. You can nurture your leads through email marketing and convert them into paying customers.

‘Thank You’ Page

Although the process of lead generation ends after the submission of a completed contact form, a new process begins right away — nurturing leads. You can start right away by showing heartfelt gratitude beyond the generic “thank you.” On this page, write a personalized message and offer additional value such as an Ebook download and links to more resources.

Do all leads follow this simple flow? Not necessarily, but it should give you a general idea of how visitors behave on websites.

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How to Capture the Elusive Lead – Part 3 Capture

How to Capture the Elusive Lead - Part 3 Capture
You’ve attracted new prospects and engaged with them several different ways. Now it’s time to seal the deal and capture the elusive lead. You can accomplish this with lead magnets that give your leads something of value in exchange for their email addresses and other information. Here are a few options for lead magnets to implement for your lead generation campaigns.

Ebooks

An ebook is a long-form piece of content that positions you as the authority on a particular topic or market segment. The information given to your visitors should solve one of their pain points immediately. That way they’re likely to give you their email address in exchange for the offer. One way to create an ebook is to rework a series of 4-5 blog posts into one cohesive “mini-digital book”.  This can work well for business-to-business, and business-to-consumer.

Coupons

People love discounts and couponing, so this is an easy way for to get immediate value in exchange for their email address. Offer free shipping, a set percentage off their purchase or a buy one, get one type of promotion.   This is, of course, a great option for business to consumer-focused sites.

Email Courses

Need to get a lot of information across in a structured manner? An email course delivers lessons over a set time period, “dripping” the information into the visitor’s inbox. You have the advantage of increasing your touchpoints with your lead while giving them valuable information.

In-depth Tutorials

Answer the pressing questions that your audience has or simply make their lives easier with an informative tutorial. Tackle anything related to your product or industry, but be strategic. Create a foundation and educating future buyers with the info they need to make a purchase decision at the end of the funnel.

Buyer’s Guide

A buyer’s guide is another lead magnet that revolves around educating potential customers on their options. Create the most exhaustive guide possible that covers all important considerations when making a purchase.

Don’t just cover the features and considerations that make your product come out on top. Not every lead is an ideal buyer for you, and people will remember if you help them out with the process, even if they don’t buy directly from you at the time.

Free Webinar

A short beginner webinar is a great way to gather email addresses. Start with short live trainings on the basics of your product or industry. Record the training and send the training to your whole list. Or record several short trainings on several topics and bundle them together for a pay to view training series.

Simple Sign-Up

Some companies try to ask for as much information as possible when they’re capturing a lead. They have long forms or even a multiple part process. Prospects don’t have a long attention span before they go to another website so keep it simple. All you need to start your relationship building process is a name and an email.

You can use progressive profiling throughout your future relationship to find out more information. In the beginning, it’s better to treat lead capture as a slow and deliberate “getting to know you” phase.

How to Capture the Elusive Lead – Part 2: Engagement

How to Capture the Elusive Lead - Part 2: Engagement

You’ve made enough of an impression on potential leads that they’re aware you exist and have a basic level of trust in your company. Now it’s time to take the next step and engage them. This stage continues building the relationship and moving one step closer to converting a curious person into a lead.

Answer Questions

Social media offers a convenient way a prospective lead can ask you questions. This offers a prime opportunity for you to position yourself as a trusted and valuable resource. Social media management tools make this process easier, as you can get a single tool to handle all of the people contacting you through your profiles.

Invite Feedback

Market research used to be incredibly difficult and costly to get. Now you can invite feedback directly from your target audience. Polls, surveys, and live chats allow you to connect with potential leads and find out exactly what they think about your plans. You can use this information to tailor your solutions to your ideal customer.

Stay Responsive

Don’t ignore engagement, whether it’s on social media, email or another channel. Focus on the timeliness of your responses with the potential lead. Therefore, if you’re quick, they’ll know that you’ll be on the ball if they do business with you.

Acknowledge Engagement

Sometimes engagement doesn’t come in the form of a question. Your audience may share your content or reach out with an observation. Take the time to acknowledge the conversation, so they know you’re paying attention to them.

Be Social

One of the best ways to improve your engagement strategy is to put yourself out there on social networks. Potential leads will find it easier to reach out if you’re already active on social media. Furthermore, share useful content from your audience, and your own resources for trust building and connect with a wide range of people and companies.

Adapt to the unspoken rules and requirements expected for the social media site. For example, on Twitter, you need to master the art of talking in 140 characters or less and provide topical information. Your Instagram strategy will thrive when you have a strong visual strategy, while Facebook works better for more in-depth resources.

Engagement is a crucial step in getting more leads for your company. You go where your audience does and put yourself out there as a valuable and helpful company.

How to Capture the Elusive Lead – Part 1: Awareness

How to Capture the Elusive Lead - Part 1: Awareness

Are you on the hunt for the elusive lead? The prospect’s journey from your first interaction to the conversion can take place through many channels and goes through 3 stages: awareness, engagement, and capture.

What is the Awareness Stage?

Your potential lead has a problem that they want to solve. However, they don’t know much, if anything, about the solutions available, the relevant brands or how to choose the option that works best for their needs.

During this stage, the prospect is seeking out educational resources. They want to gain a better understanding so they can make an informed decision. You can start the lead capture process with a resource designed to give each visitor the information they need to move forward in the lead conversion process.

Channels to Use for Building Awareness

A mix of channels gives you the greatest opportunity to reach your intended audience with this informative content. When you put together your lead capture strategy, incorporate these channels into your plan.

  • Website
    Your website can act as a content and resource hub for your educational assets. You can put together a resource library featuring guides, ebooks, videos, and tutorials.
  • Blog
    A blog is an easy to set up channel that you can fill with helpful resources, topical information and curated content that’s relevant to a prospect’s needs. While the information may be similar to the resources available in your library, blogs tend to have a more informal approach. Blog posts also frequently have more visual content, so incorporate infographics, charts and other visuals into the content.
  • Social Posting
    Social media sites give you access to a wide audience and help you build awareness. You can target relevant hashtags, participate in Twitter chats and promote your educational content.
  • Email
    Email newsletters and e-courses help you reach prospects on mobile, as many people check their inboxes on their phones. You can deliver the right content to people in the awareness stage so they learn more about the way they can solve their pressing problems.
  • Forums and groups
    Niche specific forums and groups give you a lot of access to your potential audience. By sharing relevant, valuable content in this channel, you improve your visibility, so prospects find you during the awareness stage.

Once you position yourself in the right places to attract potential leads at the beginning of their journey, you move on to the next step: Engagement.  Stay tuned for this in a next post!

How Lead Capture fits within Social Media Lead Generation

How Lead Capture fits within Social Media Lead Generation

Many business owners believe that social media marketing is only about brand awareness or updates to let followers know what’s going on with the business. What they don’t realize is that social media has some serious lead generation power.

To get started generating leads, think about your opt-in freebie or lead magnet. This is something you create and offer to potential customers for free to get them to sign up for your email list. This can be anything from an ebook or white paper or video education series to a free consultation or a discount/free shipping.

Once you’ve decided how you’re going to lure potential customers onto your email list, you can set up your lead captures on social media.

Step 1: Landing Page

Your landing page should include a brief bit of information about the lead magnet, graphic, and a signup form. Plain, and simple. On a lead capture landing page, you don’t want to distract the customer from what they’re there to do: sign up for your email list. You can include a First Name field, but you should only have your Email field required to make signing up quick and easy.

Step 2: Facebook Ads

There are 2 types of Facebook ads you can use for lead generation. The first is the basic lead generation ad that gathers emails directly in Facebook. When your ad is finished running (or every week or so if you have your ad running continuously), go into your lead ads library to download the most recent signups and upload them to your own email marketing platform.

The other option is conversion tracking. You’ll set up a conversion tracking ad that leads to your landing page. You’ll need to insert a pixel on your website’s home page, your landing page, and your thank you page to track conversions.

When setting up your Facebook ads, create a caption that makes your targeted audience want what you’re giving them (in exchange for their email address).

Step 3: Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards are interactive tweets that give more info on a link, app, or video. Twitter also has a lead generation card for ads. To get access to the Twitter Cards, you’ll need to create an ad account and run an ad.

Create your lead generation Twitter Card in the same manner, you would create your Facebook ad. Twitter Cards also allow you to collect email addresses directly through Twitter, without the customer navigating to another website. The cool thing about Twitter Cards is that you can promote them, but you can also organically tweet out a lead generation Twitter Card. Pin it to the top of your Twitter profile to increase views. This is a great way to organically collect new leads.

Step 4: Promoted Pins

Design a Pinterest graphic that leads to your landing page. Create a Promoted Pin campaign with the traffic objective, so you pay for clickthroughs. If you don’t have graphic design skills, outsource this project. Pinterest relies heavily on visual aesthetics, so your pin graphic is important.

These are the top 3 ways to capture leads on social media. Want to move potential customers through your sales funnel? Try using these 3 lead capture methods.

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Targeting Your Ideal Client with Facebook Ads to Grow Website Leads

Targeting Your Ideal Client with Facebook Ads to Grow Website Leads

Successful inbound marketing is knowing who your customers are, and targeting them carefully so that you get maximum ROI for your digital marketing spending. Sounds great, but once you know who you want to reach, there’s still the small matter of figuring out how.

Fortunately for everyone, there are online tools designed for just this purpose, and Facebook’s laser targeted ad services are one of the very best.

What Are Facebook Ads?

Facebook ads range from those that show up in your news feed, and look like posts from friends, to those in the sidebar and elsewhere. Some look like ads, while others (usually called boosted posts) are actual posts that have been “sponsored” to show up in news feeds.

How Do Facebook Ads Work?

Facebook ads work (basically at least) like most PPC ad types. You set up the ad, set a budget, and pay per click or action. There’s a dashboard, where you can see what’s happening with your ad set, and you can have more than one at a time.

How Much Do They Cost?

Like most PPC advertising systems, there’s a cost per click or action for your Facebook ads, but since you can also set a total or per day budget, you can control your spending at a granular level.

So far, so good. Now, here’s how you really get more from Facebook ads.

Facebook Ad Targeting Tools

The thing that sets Facebook apart from most other advertising systems is the targeting options available. Because Facebook knows so much about their users, there are almost endless options you could choose, to reach only the people you want.

Choose geographical areas, languages, gender, and age. Then select from thousands of interests. Make your choices broad or very specific. Then choose when your ads will run, and where. Exclude people who already like your page, or add a tracking pixel, to track actions on your site.

In most cases, it’s best to start your Facebook ads a little broader, and then narrow it down over time, so that you spend less for clicks, views, and actions.

Creating Great Ads

The final step in Facebook ad success is the ad itself, and while targeting is very important, it’s the ad itself that will be driving traffic to your page or website.

Make sure that the image is relevant and interesting, and that you have rights to use it! Choose a clear, simple image, and remember that Facebook doesn’t like loads of overlaid text, so keep it simple. Write a great hook, and add an action button.

If you’ve chosen the right target audience, and crafted a great ad, you should soon see traffic to your site, blog or page spike.

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Make Sure Your Content Attracts Your Target Market

Make Sure Your Content Attracts Your Target Market

The first step to attracting your target market with content is knowing what they want. If you can’t give them what they’re looking for, they have no reason to go to your site.

But how? Here’s how you can know what your target market is craving:

  • Create buyer personas.

    Before knowing what your target market wants, you’ve got to know what you want first and foremost. To identify your ideal buyer, create profiles and make them as detailed as you can. Let’s say you have a travel agency. Are you targeting millennials who want to spend on budget travel? Or do you want to attract retirees who are ready to splurge on cruises? You decide.

  • Go where they go.

    Visit the forums and online groups where your target market hang out. You’ll find what hot topics they’re talking about and what problems they’re experiencing. If you can offer a solution, then voila! Instant subject for your next content!

  • Check out the competition.

    Unless you’re in a unique niche, chances are there are more successful players in your chosen industry. So take a look at the content they post and figure out what’s popular and what isn’t. This isn’t about copying — it’s about determining trends.

  • Ask for input.

    The comments section of your blog or social media page is a place for engagement, so make use of it. Invite users to share their opinions, feedback, suggestions, and even criticism. When you listen to your target market, you’ll be better equipped to address their needs.

  • Make content interactive.

    Questionnaires, quizzes, and surveys are content in themselves if you present them well. At the same time, they serve as tools to collect information from your target market.

  • Explore more than text content.

    Many people are on their tablets or smartphones, so you’ve got to consider optimization for mobile devices when creating content. Make content suitable for mobile by using subheadings, photos, and other visual dividers. Better yet, present content in a visual format like infographics, posters, or even short video clips.  Video is getting great attention for good reason.  People DO watch short videos!

  • Share in strategic cycles.

    No matter how awesome your content is, it won’t get the attention it deserves without promoting it. Fortunately, there are many channels you can go through. You can share links to your content on your social media pages, ask family and friends to share it, tap influencers within your niche (and hope they like your content enough to share it with their many followers), or pay for sponsored posts. The great thing about advertising on social media is that you can work with a small budget, unlike with traditional media such as radio, print, or TV.

These steps won’t guarantee virality, but they can guarantee you a solid following — as long as you are consistent. People, regardless of their interests, want a regular source of reliable information. This is how loyalty forms. Once you create a relationship with your target, focus on sustaining the ties by always delivering content they enjoy.