You could have the best marketing agency in St. Louis, but it doesn’t mean you will close more sales. Too often, I come across B2B and B2C brands that are hyper-focused on how their website will look and feel (don’t get me wrong, web design is very important) but they lose sight of the user experience required to capture leads. For example, I came across a post on my LinkedIn profile recently from another marketing agency promoting their work for a sports equipment company and they described how they increased their traffic by 1000+%. I have no doubt that they generated this metric for their client (they are a solid agency), but one key metric was missing from their case study – leads and conversion rate.
Being the curious researcher that I am, I decided to dive in deeper. The website was beautiful, well optimized for search, and had great engaging content. It was a picture-perfect example of what every website should aspire to be, except for one thing. There wasn’t a lead capture form in sight – not even a newsletter subscriber form. The “contact us” page had a phone number with an address, and while the product pages had great descriptions and creative product positioning, it was devoid of any way for potential customers to engage with the brand and request information.
As a business, you can spend a great deal of money building a brand identity and website, but ask yourself and your marketing manager this question. How are we getting ROI out of this digital shiny object? Sure, you are getting a crazy amount of traffic, some phone calls, and maybe some Facebook Messenger inbounds, but you have no substantial prospect data at the end of the day except an invisible shopper who has come and gone. Of course, some of these invisible shoppers will become your customers, but wouldn’t it be nice to capture some data on these visitors to see if your investment in marketing is paying off? Trust me, you don’t want to be the person at your company whose only job is to spend the company budget on “fluffy marketing stuff.”
If you find yourself in this situation, let’s turn your marketing team into a revenue-generating machine with these key tips for capturing customers with your website:
- If you have met with me in the past, you know I’m a firm believer in having multiple ways for a customer to engage with you based on where they are at in the purchase funnel. Whether it’s chat leads, premium content downloads such as buyers guides (top of the funnel), or request a quote (bottom of the funnel) leads, providing your website visitors with multiple opportunities to engage with you online will help your sales team better qualify their prospects.
- Where is your prospect and customer data being stored? If your answer is an excel spreadsheet, you get a hand slap. There are many cost-effective marketing automation and CRM tools for small businesses available that will automatically collect prospects from web forms and segment them into a database. Plus, you will get data on the web pages the prospect visited and your sales team will have the tools necessary to follow-up from their mobile device.
- Once the prospect is in your database, you should implement an email nurturing program with your selected marketing automation tool. If this concept is new to you, I encourage you to think about how long the sales cycle is for your business. Once identified, you can develop automated communications to be delivered to prospects on defined days in the nurture stream, such as your value proposition, case studies, customer testimonials, or other premium content to qualify the prospect.
- Did your nurture stream end without a sale? No big deal. With marketing automation, you can set-up alerts for your marketing and sales teams to be notified when the prospect re-engages with content or is back on the website browsing pages. All of these activities are typically summarized in a lead score, which ebbs and flows with the prospect’s interest in your brand.
If you recall the case study above, marketing data can take many forms. I like seeing a good search engine optimization (SEO) case study showing higher Google rankings and increased traffic, but I love seeing real-life prospects in my database that I can re-market to in the future. Plus, you get to start measuring fun metrics such as cost-per-prospect (how much does it take to acquire a customer online) and lead-to-sale matching (did an online lead close and how long did it take)?
If you are ready to take your website to the next level with marketing automation and CRM tools, contact us today.