Tag Archives: Internet marketing strategies

Lead Generation Strategy

Lead Generation Strategy

What are the goals of your lead generation strategy? The answer to this question is a good place to start, but is that enough? It’s true that no two businesses are alike, and no cookie-cutter marketing solution can be applied to all businesses.However, when it comes to lead generation, there are a few strategies that can work quite broadly across many industries.

These timeless strategies can work for virtually any business, organization, person, or idea as long as it involves an online presence. Read on to find out the strategies you can use to maximize the results of your lead generation efforts.

How many leads do you need to fill the pipeline?

You’re probably saying, “as many as possible!” However, as logical as that seems it’s not really workable. Come up with a realistic number. An exact number could be challenging to determine especially if you don’t have past sales metrics for your products and services. Along the way, you’ll get a better idea of what metrics are important to track, as you calculate your desired number.  Break it down to a monthly basis.  Is it 50?  If you have 50 a 8% closure rate, is that enough good leads in a month?

Capture the attention of your target audience

Understand what your audience wants and view your content from their perspective. Keep in mind, some of your visitors will never return to your website if you fail to capture their attention. Although asking for an email address is essential, many people are not willing to give it away. Sign up buttons no longer work effectively, they’re too common and easily overlooked. In this case, you’ll need to use other ways to capture their information.

One of the best ways to know what your audience wants is to ask them. A survey works well for this. Your salespeople may provide valuable insights as they communicate with your customers on a daily basis. Once you know, you’re better equipped to generate content that captures their attention, and eventually more leads.

Maximize the rate of opt-ins

Getting the lead to a page on your site isn’t enough. You have to develop an effective opt-in strategy. Capturing attention is only part of the battle. You’ve probably noticed the gap between traffic generation and lead generation. Some one-time visitors will ignore any attempts to get information from them.

Your landing page and offerings should be compelling enough to seal this gap. Using lead magnets like subscriptions, webinars, eBooks, bonus tips, free trials, email opt-ins, and training videos can effectively capture the interest of your audience. Your focus should be getting their permission to market to them.

Optimize your landing pages

These are used for single marketing campaigns. Landing pages essentially capture leads and tempt potential clients. They’re important stepping-stones before going further into your sales program. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with promotions or information about your business, but focus on one specific goal. Confirm the promise made by your landing page click source, and deliver the same.

Don’t focus on one method of lead generation, as it may limit the effectiveness of your overall marketing program. Multi-faceted approaches tend to create more buzz in the market, save time, and improve your results.

That’s a wrap on some time-tested tactics to grow leads on your website.  What’s the next step you need to take now to improve your website lead capture?  Needing a tool to make it easy?  You’re on the right website!

How To Use a Survey to Enrich Your Content Marketing

How To Use a Survey to Enrich Your Content Marketing

Any company interested in its consumer’s habits is continuously mining for information. You want to know what interests them. You categorize them by demographics. You care about what they buy and why they buy. You want to understand their consumption priorities. And you’re in a perpetual race to discover the perfect method by which you can gather, analyze, and implement the results of this information.  One area of implementation is to enrich your content marketing.

So if you conduct a survey, we’ll outline the “why” and “what” for using it to help your business results.

Why should your business choose to use a web survey to enrich your content marketing?

  • You want to discover what the market believes about your business, service, or product. Do they use your product or do they prefer a competitor? What factors affect that choice? What could you do to attract new consumers to your business? What could you do to keep former customers loyal?
  • You want to collect external opinions on the internal operations of your business. What experiences have consumers had with your business and what are their opinions of those interactions? Did the consumer have a positive or negative experience with your team members? How have those experiences impacted future purchasing decisions?
  • You want to know your customers. Demographic information can be valuable to almost any business. Many consumer behaviors and trends are predicted based upon quality demographic surveys from reputable data collection firms. When you understand the patterns of specific demographic categories, you can target your choice of groups and sub-groups and plan with those groups in mind.

Now that you have your survey results, what should you do with them?

  • Evaluate the results individually and discuss them as a team. You’ve chosen to do mobile and online surveys because you believe the responses will be more genuine. Now that you have the results, it’s time to evaluate what they mean. What do they say about your product or service? What do the results communicate about the interactions with your team members? What do you need to change to retain customers and attract new ones? These decisions shouldn’t be made in a vacuum. Open the floor and discuss them with your leadership group or team members. Get ideas from your brightest minds. Embrace the best ideas, discuss implementation, and most importantly, don’t fear change.
  • Compare the results with past surveys, with industry-wide reports and surveys that have been published in industry journals. Do your results correlate with others? What factors cause the variations of preference, positive and negative? Is your industry strong and, if not, are you outperforming the competition? What can you do to avoid the negative reactions from past reports?

All companies are looking for an edge, something that will set you apart from an increasingly crowded marketplace. Surveys can be personal feedback. But be specific. Figure out what you really want to know. And why? What are you going to do when you have all the data collected? Be a leader in your chosen industry by understanding every consumer’s wants and needs better than the next business. Treat every interaction personally. Learn from surveys so that your customers will keep coming back.

With Waftio, you can easily create web surveys for your website!  Just create your questions and choose the in-line embed option to add it to a webpage on your site.

The Art of Using Coupons and Discounts to Boost Your Email List

The Art of Using Coupons and Discounts to Boost Your Email List

Like a love letter sent to a special someone, you really want your subscribers to open your email. If it gets trashed or just floats to the bottom of their inbox, you haven’t reached them with your message and the value of your brand fades. An increasingly popular way to drive engagement with your email marketing is to include a coupon or discount.

Consider the following two headlines:

  • “It’s Springtime, so order our services and enjoy this great weather in style.”
  • “This Spring, take advantage of our 25% off deal and be prepared for Summer.”

The second one has more appeal doesn’t it? The first one is telling your customer what to do and asking for a sale. The second option is more suggestive and demonstrates a willingness on the part of your brand to offer value.

If you can put yourself in your customer’s shoes, you have to admit that you’re far more likely to open an email that is offering you something for nothing, rather than one that is asking you for something. If you’re ready to try coupons as part of your email marketing, get creative on different ways to incorporate the offer.

Clever ways to use coupons as part of your regular email marketing

  • Take advantage of seasons and holidays. Add seasonally relevant coupons to your regular email marketing schedule. Think of how your customers can use your services in the context of Springtime, Valentine’s Day and other relevant cultural events.
  • Get repeat business. Once you’ve sold a customer, offer a special “thank you” coupon 30, 60 or 90 days after the conclusion of their first purchase encouraging them to return by sweetening the pot with a special discount.
  • Tie-in coupons with social media. You can offer a progressive discount for using a coupon while also taking some action regarding your brand’s social media platforms. For example, 10% off for simply using the coupon alone but 15% off if the customer is a Facebook fan and 20% off if they are a fan and share one or more of your Facebook posts in the week prior to redeeming the coupon.

Email marketing has a long-standing track record of driving value for brands by creating a captured audience of individuals who have expressed loyalty or affiliation with your brand. If you fail to deliver value to your list, you’ll see a decline in subscribers. You want to make sure that your subscribers stick around, and you attract more subscribers.

You can use coupons or email list exclusive discounts as a means of driving signups.

In the call-to-action on your site or social channels, encourage your audience to sign-up for your list in exchange for an immediate discount. Make sure to continuously seed your list with new coupons and discounts, so they don’t lose track of the value in their original choice to sign up.

Coupons are an excellent way to provide value to email subscribers, but they shouldn’t be the only method you employ. Ultimately, selling is about conveying value, not discounting price. While everyone loves to save a buck, you should also always be looking for new and creative ways to provide value to your audience by the way of engaging and informative content creation relevant to your brand’s value proposition.

It’s easy to offer coupons with Waftio!

Simply create a simple form web visitors must complete to get the discount and be added to your list, and then either offer the coupon as a discount code or link to a printable coupon. Integrate your Waftio form with Mailchimp, Aweber, and more to have them added to your lists automatically!

Are you using coupons in your email marketing?

The Waftio GoToWebinar Integration

The Waftio GoToWebinar Integration

Webinars, a cross between offline seminars and the online classrooms, allow people to interact with experts they normally will never meet. In return, marketers get a captive audience, interested in their specific industry topic, that has already self-identified when they signed up for the webinar. This makes webinars one of the best tools in the marketer’s toolkit for lead generation. While many other Internet marketing strategies can drive traffic to your website, webinars have an additional advantage of identifying who it is that has visited and gathering their contact information.
Here’s a few ways to craft a webinar that will draw plenty of potential customers straight to your doors.

Pick a Killer Topic

Have you noticed how many people are asking you to reveal some of your secrets online? Do your customers all seem to have one unique problem that reoccurs that you happen to excel at solving? Explore topics with large appeal. Check trending topics in social networks or search engines. You’ll get massive interest that way. Announce your topic on social media channels and send them back to your website to sign up for the webinar.

Make It Exciting

You can limit the attendance to give it a more intimate feel or make it a massive two-hour event with multiple speakers. It’s your choice. To set a webinar up with multiple presenters, offer to cross-promote their products and services. Add video and slides to your solo presentation to make it juicier. Include some Q&A. Many people sign up for seminars in the hopes of getting their questions addressed, instead of buying personal consultation time. In this way, you can serve these people in a public venue while creating more lead generation opportunities for yourself.

Do Double Duty with Seminars

You can create marketing material from a seminar, as long as you have permission to use the materials this way from your attendees and presenters. Just take a short clip of a speaker panel, answering one question, or the demo of a specific product or service and publish it to video on Facebook or YouTube. Use snapshots for Instagram. Create transcripts from the webinar and include it in ebooks or as promotional material. Create a survey to find out what types of future topics your participants want to hear more on. Don’t let the end of the seminar be the end of your interaction with attendees!

Keep Them Wanting More

To make sure they stay in their seats for the whole seminar, add a drawing at the end for a big prize for attending the seminar to be given to someone who is present at the end of the random drawing. This can give people more reason to participate and stick around, leading to more opportunities to market other products and services while in the seminar.

Why Waftio Is Ideal for Webinars

Waftio can let you customize your registration and signup form with your design and style. You can collect as much or as little information as you want upon signup. With its integration with your GoToWebinar account, you won’t waste time duplicating effort across multiple systems. It’s all very seamless to the user and you, the business owner. Watfio also has a survey app that you can use after the webinar to help you get some ideas of what worked and what didn’t and how to improve future webinars.

Next time you are thinking of setting up a webinar, use Waftio and watch your marketing leads skyrocket.