Tag Archives: lead generation

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.

How to Make Your Website More Visible to Google

How to Make Your Website More Visible to Google

By now we all know that Google is king, in fact, your Google ranking can make or break your business no matter how good your website is designed. Google has nearly 70% market share on search engine searches!  Due to that face, you want to focus on how to improve your site in Google search results and there are a few proven Google suggested steps you can take to make your website soar higher in the search rankings. Some of them are simple, and others may take some time to show improvement but by taking the right steps to make your site more visible to Google, you’re setting your business up for more traffic and growth.

Top steps to take to improve your search ranking:

1. Optimize your site

Keywords are one of the most important factors that will determine your search ranking. Google’s algorithms pick up your site pages and shows them in the search rankings according to how relevant your keywords are to the user’s search. Where you place the keywords on your site is almost as important as the keyword itself. The most important areas for the keyword per page are as follows:

  • In the Web Page URL
  • In the Page Title
  • The H1 or heading of the page
  • As part of the Meta description- the snippet Google displays in the search results page on Google
  • Body of the page itself- this also includes alt tags in pictures and subheadings. Your keyword should appear in the first paragraph of your body copy and in sub-headings

Be careful not to be spammy, Google’s algorithms are so advanced they will pick up on this right away. Google can tell if you are trying to “stuff” words and go beyond natural keyword density! Your best rule of thumb is to design your site pages for your users and not for Google. Put out content that you feel is resource rich, relevant and helpful to your target audience using keyword terms your ideal audience would search.

2. Use the Google Pages

Of course, the more involved you are with Google pages, the better you are. There are several different pages you could take advantage of to help increase your visibility. Google My Business is an easy and great place to start.  When you type in a search for something that would have a physical address, such as dry cleaners in South Bend you’ll notice the highest results are from Google Maps.

By updating your information with Google My Business, a map to your business will show in relevant searches soaring your business to the top of the search results.
Another important and sometimes overlooked page to use is Google+. This social sharing site is great for increasing your awareness, growing traffic to your site and increasing your visibility with Google. The best part is all you have to do is update and share posts like you would on other social media pages. Google+ posts often rank quite high in search results on Google.

3. Domain Authority

Your domain authority is another important determining factors in how visible you will be to Google.  The higher your Domain Authority, the more visible you will be. You can use free tools to check your Domain authority such as Moz.  One of the more important factors to improve your DA are links on other quality sites to your site. You can check your backlinks using Google’s free tool Google Search Console. Google Search Console shows you how many pages are linking to your site, how it shows up in search results, if Google had any errors while crawling your page, and more.  Ideally, you want quality and quantity but know that a link from a top site like the Wall Street Journal Online is better than 100 links to junk directories and yellow pages online.

To get more links to your page, you will need to produce high-quality, relevant content that others in your niche would want to share. This is more than just your products and services. A blog on your site would be the best place to share content with your target audience and ultimately have others share your content as well.

The best answers could be found directly from the source, Google itself. Google wants your business to succeed because ultimately their goal is to provide the most relevant sites in a user’s search results.   There are more tips I could cover, but start there to get a jump on improving your search rankings!

Why is Web Traffic So Important to Get Your Website Found

Why is Web Traffic So Important to Get Your Website Found

So, you have a website, and you’re wondering how to get noticed.

The question quickly becomes how to set your site apart from the rest. When it comes to getting traffic online, search traffic is paramount to success. Google is and has long been the top dog of search engines and their rules matter most in the area of optimizing your site for repeat and new visits. Wouldn’t it be nice if Google simply published a guide to winning in the search engine ranking realm?

If Google released specifics on how to get the best results in their organic search, they’d quickly have hoards of opportunistic webmasters trying to manipulate the search algorithm for the better search engine exposure. Instead, Google has been rather hush-hush about what specifically will get you to the top of a search page for any given search term or phrase. They want the naturally best sites to rise to the top.

One thing they have made abundantly clear is that if your site is getting traffic already, they’re more likely to send additional traffic your way.

If you’re not getting traffic, Google is less likely to take a chance and send you some of their precious search engine users. Here are a few of the most successful methods of gaining some initial traffic to your site. Once you’ve capitalized on some or all of the methods suggested here, you’ll have sent up a flare into the sky of the web, letting Google and other search engines know that you’re serious and have a site worth visiting.

Great, original blog content:

If your site doesn’t have a blog, start one immediately. If you have a blog and don’t publish regularly, start doing so. If your blog is well-populated with content but it isn’t getting traffic, you’re either not promoting your site well enough, or you have unoriginal content. It may pay for you to find some capable writers either from within your organization or in the freelance market. If the content is engaging, and people come back regularly to check for updates.

Social media:

Perhaps the notion of using social networks as your first means of building traffic seems obvious, but just like with blog content, originality and persistence matter. Don’t use every possible social network but use the networks your target audience is using and double-down on building a strong presence on those sites.  Share your content not just once, but multiple times and multiple ways (as an image, link, and intro posts with video etc)

Paid traffic:

Paying for traffic should be seen as a last resort if neither of the first two suggestions bears much fruit and time is of the essence. If you have a marketing budget, there are paid traffic networks including Google’s own, AdWords, and Facebook Ads, which can help you target specific keywords and audiences.

Email List building:

This method won’t start working fast out of the gate unless you’re already sitting on a massive pile of captured email addresses. If not, create a free opt-in offer to collect addresses.

In the early phases of launching a site, it’s easy to get caught up in the basics such as deciding on a platform, a hosting method, and design. Once you have your site online, the question then becomes one of making your site valuable, and worthy of receiving traffic. Content matters!  Regular, new, resource-rich content is needed!

If you’re diligent with the basic approaches, you’ll soon see noticeable results.

How to Effectively Use Free Opt-in Offers

How to Effectively Use Free Opt-in Offers

Your small business may have an excellent website. Yet it might not be enough!

A site with great design and well-written descriptions may not get you the clients or followers you need to have a successful business.  Why?  Lead Capture is missing.

You need to market your website to get the maximum number of visitors and make sure you keep in contact, so they end up as customers, not just one time visitors on your site.

They don’t often buy the first time!

Most site visitors don’t commit to buy your product or use your services on their first visit.

Thus, it’s critical you make sure you have a way to capture their contact information when they DO visit!  With consistent interaction after the capture you may convert your visitor to a customer over time.  A well-designed opt-in offer to capture the email address and open two-way communication is an excellent way to engage your visitor. Their first visit is the best chance you’ll have to make that connection, so you need to choose your offer wisely and deploy it well.

The Offer Must have Value!

Research shows that free offers in exchange for an email address are effective.
Your visitors have a chance to try something without cost or obligation. They get to know you better and learn that you have something beneficial to offer. You’ll need to provide something of real value related to your products/services in exchange for their email address. It might be an eBook, a webinar, a product sample, a coupon or a highly informative video or newsletter. If you have a service, you can offer a free trial to “try before you buy.” It must be of enough value and compelling to motivate a sign-up.

Even if your business is not selling products or services, you need to grow your email list. Why?  It’s the simplest path forward to stay in touch with your clients and potential clients. Successful opt-in offers follow these guidelines:

  • Have an opt-in offer form which matches your site branding. Make sure the form is easy to complete (Not too many fields; best is name and email). Make it easy for a visitor to quickly opt-in.
  • Make sure the opt-in form is a prominent item on your site. Be sure it’s easy to locate. Use color, motion, or eye-catching graphics to call attention to it.
  • The offer should be really helpful. Make it nearly impossible for visitors to consider leaving without taking your offer. Your audience must see the value in the offer.
  • A well-received form might include a picture of you to make the offer more personal and humanize the business.
  • Make a strong case for the benefits your prospect will gain by accepting your offer.
  • Include success stories and testimonials to help encourage acceptance.

Conversion rates vary for opt-in offers. The more time you cultivate the contact, making sure they get the full value of the offer and keep in touch, the better the conversion rate. According to Totango research, trial offer conversions could run from under 8% up to 20% with follow-up. The key to better conversion is communication with the lead on a regular basis, and using their first name. This is part of your email nurture follow-up strategy.  Deployment of emails should be on a scheduled basis or based on the lead’s use or lack of use of the trial product. You can offer coaching or help by phone or email.

If you make a good impression, you’ll be rewarded!

These are essential keys to success on your site.  Any questions?

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

For those relatively new to SEO and online marketing, one of the most important tools for structuring your marketing is the digital marketing funnel.  This six-stage process describes every step on the journey of finding leads, turning them into sales, and retaining them as customers.

This process is visualized as a funnel or an inverted triangle.  You start with a great many potential leads at the top, but at each step, only some will choose to move further on in the buying journey.  Many leads enter at the top, but only a relative few exit at the bottom as steady customers.

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

A Quick Guide To The Six Stages Of The Marketing Funnel

I. Attract

This is the heart of content marketing.  You should have a wide variety of materials, such as blogs, videos, and infographics, designed to bring people to your website in the first place.  Good SEO helps ensure these are near the top of Google searches, where they can be easily seen.

II. Engage

Getting visitors to your website isn’t enough.  The materials there must actively engage them, both by being interesting enough for them to view, and compelling enough they want to share them with friends.  Understanding your market, their needs, and the searches they’re likely running on Google is the key to engaging them.

III. Capture

To move further down the funnel, leads must take the next step and engage with your website in a more active way.  This could be contacting support with questions, or signing up for a newsletter, free ebooks, webinars, or other giveaways that require trading their email address or other customer data.  Once a lead has given away some personal information, they’re far closer to becoming buyers.

IV. Nurture

Once you have means of direct contact with leads who haven’t yet become buyers, it’s important to keep reminding them of your existence.  Emails with special offers, coupons, newsletters, and even social media outreach can all be effective ways to do this.

If they aren’t ready to buy right now, they need to have this drip-feed of content to ensure your business will be the first they think of when they are ready to buy.

V. Convert

This is the actual moment they become customers and is generally handled like any other sales conversion.  They’ll reach out directly to sales staff, and be guided through the final stages of the purchase process.

This also illustrates one way digital marketing is different from offline marketing:  This may be the first time they actually have contact with a live human being at your company, with all other business contact being via website materials and automated emails.

VI.  Measure

Digital sales conversions is a cyclical process which should be continually refined.  Keep track of the results of each stage of the process, and see which methods produce the most conversions. 100% conversions are a practical impossibility, but keep trying to push the percentage higher!

Understanding the marketing funnel will help you gather better leads at the top, and ensure that more of them complete the journey to full-fledged customers.  With this tool, you’ll be on your way to far greater conversions and ROI on your online marketing investments.

Why a Blog Is Essential to SEO

Why a Blog Is Essential to SEO

By now you’ve heard of blogs.  Perhaps you wonder if a blog is relevant or would be helpful fo your business.  A few common answers to why a blog is helpful for a business includes more traffic to a website, higher sales from greater traffic, and being recognized for expertise from writing regularly on a certain topic. These are right but I’ll add that another important thing to keep in mind is how a blog can impact your company’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Indexing Pages

SEO is about coming up on the first page and in the top results on a search engine when a user types in a phrase or topic your site wants to rank for.  SEO isn’t simply keyword stuffing your articles to maximize how well your site shows up in the search engines, nor is it hidden keywords on a page programmed by a developer.  In fact, this practice is penalized by all search engines (most importantly Google).

With every well-written blog post you publish, you’re building your “keyword footprint” for the search engine.  More articles, more posts, and more pages give Google (and other search engines) bots more material to scroll through and more relevant words from which to gather information for search, and thus more value coming from your website that can then result in your site ranking better in search engine results for key terms of importance.  Blogging makes your website a bigger, ever-growing, more SEO friendly structure on the web.  This can help you rank over the business that has little content and few new updates to their site content.

Backlinking

While backlinking is traditionally thought of as an inbound-only form of traffic (from other sites to yours), backlinking within your own website will help show how connected your content is from post to post.  For example, if your company is working on a campaign to drive traffic for a certain keyword, linking different blogs posts together in a tactful, subtle way shows search engine bots that the articles are relevant and related to one another.

Similar tactics can be used externally.  For example, be a thought leader by commenting on highly-trafficked blog posts from other websites.  Leave your comment (again, tactfully and strategically) along with the specific blog post you wish to drive traffic to (if the comments  allow it) and watch your own blog’s traffic increase all while giving the SEO bots some breadcrumbs linked to you.

Relevant Content to Searchers

Search engines are optimized to find the most appropriate content for their users.  High bounce rates, keyword stuffing, and lackluster backlinking will get you penalized by Google.  On the other hand, a blog with consistent information, which answers searchers questions and provokes thought can make a significant difference for your SEO.

By being the thought leader in your field and publishing relevant, useful content for people instead of merely publishing for Google, the search engine will reward you by elevating your site in search. By doing this, your site will see decreases in your website’s bounce rate and increases in the number of unique visitors and quality visits to your pages.

Lead Generation

Obviously, the most important connection between a quality blog and excellent SEO is lead generation and lead quality.  This requires you to think like your customer.  By establishing buyer personas of who your ideal customer is, understanding what type of information your buyers seek, and tailoring your content for your visitors you’ll dramatically improve traffic to your site and when combined with a lead capture strategy and tool, your lead generation and the quality of leads your website generates can increase exponentially.

Whether you want to make your blog posts more relevant or simply drive more traffic to your website, SEO and blogging go hand-in-hand. An informative blog without the necessary keyword focus, backlinking, and overall power of SEO will remain just good content hidden to those seeking the information it provides but a blog that offers content and focuses on key SEO items can be a way to really boost your business forward.  A blog is not only helpful and valuable to your SEO but an absolute necessity!

The Value of Website Engagement

The Value of Website Engagement

In this day and age, every business knows the value of a good website. A website with professional graphics, high-quality content, and easy navigation makes a positive impression on potential buyers and will help you score sales.

A lesser-known opportunity for a website is engagement, grabbing a person’s attention when they get to your site and encouraging them to interact with your site.  This takes intentionality and often tools to help prompt the engagement.  When done well it helps people to remember your business and builds a positive first connection.

Here are four more benefits of WebSite Engagement

1. Get’s Rid of Searching

Tools that “capture attention” on websites make it easier for a customer to interact with the site. Instead of having to scroll through the site to find a contact page or subscription form, they’ll see the Waftio form spring out at them and can immediately make inquiries or feedback. People are often in a hurry and have limited time to spend on your site. The quicker you get their attention and get them what they need the more engagement you’ll have.

2. Attention-Grabbing

With all the things vying for people attention, from funny YouTube videos to viral Instagram photos, it can be hard to capture a person’s attention online. Tools such as Waftio play into that instant gratification and quick access to tools that jump out on the page and are fun and interactive.

Instead of a plain, boring form which could be easily overlooked, the website visitor will be immediately drawn in by something that jumps out at them. You’ll get more subscriptions, registrations, and inquiries which can lead to potential sales.

3. Learn New Information

Because people have a limited amount of time and attention, if you want feedback on how a product is doing, you aren’t going to get by sending out an email begging customers to take a survey. With Waftio, the shake of the survey form will capture attention, be enticing, and you’ll get more responses.

4.  Share on Social Media

Waftio is different than it’s closest competitors because it has a social component. The tool offers the opportunity to share survey forms on social media upon completing them. Your business will get more exposure, more traffic, and more potential leads will come to your website.

That’s four more ways you can use Waftio to your benefit on your website.  Try the free trial today!