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Everybody wants more leads. So, how does one actually get them?
Great question! There are, essentially, two main levers you need to increase your lead flow. Either you can reach more people with your message (i.e. traffic generation), and/or you can increase the rate at which people who hear your message become contacts (i.e. conversion optimization). Both are important. If you’re not reaching enough people, you won’t get any leads. Let’s say, for instance, that only 50 people visit your website monthly. If you've got an average conversion rate of 1-2%, you’ll usher in maybe one lead each month. If you've got a conversion issue, on the other hand, and you’re only converting .01% of traffic that reaches your site, you’d have to drive 10,000 visitors monthly to get a conversion. If you’re serving a distinct segment audience, well, good luck making that happen.
Don’t worry, though: Assuming your business model is solid, you'll solve traffic or conversion issues, and lots of the fixes for these issues aren’t overly complex. Here are five tactics you'll implement this month in your B2B tech marketing to improve your lead generation.
Traffic Generation Tactics
Let’s start with traffic generation tactics, because 80% of the time if you’re not driving leads together with your B2B tech marketing, you've got a traffic problem. If your site receives fewer than 1,000 visitors monthly, the difficulty in your lead funnel is that not enough people are hearing your message.
Here are three tactics to assist.
1. Create a pillar page for your most impactful keyword.
The idea of “pillar pages” was coined a few years ago by HubSpot in response to a developing SEO trend: the increasing word count of pages that ranked high in search engines. within the old days (meaning the early 2000s), if you wanted to rank for the term “B2B marketing,” writing a fast, 500-word post on the subject stood a good chance of getting you there. Today, there are thousands or millions or billions or more pages of results for nearly any keyword on any search you run. to face out, you would like to put the effort in. A pillar page may be a way to stand out. Pillar pages require two traits to merit their title. First, they need to compile a lot of information around a keyword. In other words, if you’re not writing 2,000 words on a few topics, you’re probably not writing a pillar page. Second – and most significantly – pillar pages must be supported by internal links from relevant pages. If your goal is to rank for the keyword “IT ticketing software,” there should be a minimum of 10 pages on your site that have something to do with that topic and are linking to your pillar page. Usually, your pillar page will link back bent them, too.
Practically, pillar pages take some forms:
a) Resource Pillar Pages: This is a collection of relevant resources from third-party sources around a single term. Here you can take all of the content you’ve created around a topic and compile it onto a page. This approach results in pages titled “The Complete Guide to X.”
b) Product or Service Pillar Pages: This pillar page outlines your product or service in detail. It’s best for low-funnel searches – people that are basically searching to buy – which is great, but, honestly, it’s often the toughest type of page to rank. (Word of advice: If you would like more on this topic, Content Marketing Institute’s piece on these three sorts of pillar pages is really helpful.).
Creating a pillar page may be a great tactic to rank for a keyword – but, to be effective at driving leads, your pillar page has got to be targeted toward the right keyword. This may take a bit of research. Go to Google Keyword Planner and find keywords that are relevant to your offering. There are three factors to balance here:
1) The search volume of every keyword (how many people search it each month).
2) The competition around each keyword (how hard it'll be to rank for).
3) The correlation between a keyword and buying interest (how likely it's that people who search the keyword and click your result will become leads).
As you weigh your potential keyword targets, it’s helpful to think about this: The first-place ranking for a term will receive, at most, about 30% of clicks. So, if there are 300 searches for a keyword, the utmost amount of traffic it’ll drive you each month is about 30 users. So, I’d recommend that you specialize in keywords that have at least 1,000 searches per month. If you recognize that your conversion rate is very high, though, you can choose long tail keywords with less traffic.
One final note on this tactic: it's not a quick fix. Create your pillar page and monitor it for 6 months. you would possibly rank sooner, but you shouldn’t expect to.
2. Run search ads to a one-page funnel.
This approach, on the opposite hand, will start driving traffic tomorrow. I wrote a whole post about the one-page marketing funnel; you can find it here. Here’s the gist: Paid search ads are how you skip the queue of SEO results and generate traffic without working to rank organically. this will be worth it – in fact, if you are doing it well, it always is. The key's in making sure you do it well.
3. Buy an inventory of prospects and email them or engage a b2b lead gen agency
Should you buy an email list? I used to think that the answer was “Absolutely not ever.” Now, though, I feel the answer is “Definitely. Sometimes.” If you’re targeting a distinct segment audience – or simply a very specific audience – then buying a list of ideal prospects can be a helpful way to get some traffic to your site. You’ll want to narrowly refine your list parameters to specialize in ideal prospects. Then, engage them with a drip campaign. Send them 5+ targeted, personalized emails over a several-week span, and monitor the conversion on your site from the campaign. (For more on the structure of the drip, read this.) Use a high-quality vendor like Engage48 for this, you can also leverage our content marketing program for top-of-the-funnel leads or appointment-setting programs for setting up meetings for your sales team. In most cases this is often a difficult traffic generation technique to sustain in the long term, but, counting on your circumstances, it's repeatable, and it does work.
Conversion Optimization Tactics
I’ve given you three traffic generation tactics. Now, let’s address conversion optimization. It’s worth noting that you simply shouldn’t pay too much attention to your conversion rate until you get to a certain threshold of traffic. If you’re only driving 100 users a month, you only don’t have enough data to understand your conversion rate. I like to recommend looking at 1,000+ users before you draw any conclusions. If you would like to expand your timeframe to look at 1,000 users (say, by watching three months instead of one), you almost certainly have a traffic problem, not a conversion problem. If you’re getting 1,000+ visitors to your site monthly but you still aren’t consistently driving leads, then you are having a conversion problem. You should be aiming to convert at least 2% of all site visitors into contacts. If you’re specialized, you’ll convert 5% of tourists. If you’re great, you’ll convert 10%. If you're literally on fire and a wizard, you’ll convert 12% or more. If you’re battling this, here are a few simple tactics to help fix it. (There are more advanced tactics, too, but these are an honest start.)
1. Optimize your 10 most-viewed pages.
Go to Google Analytics and pull up the Landing Pages report for the past three months. Analyze each page for conversion issues. Some of your most-landed-on pages might not even have clear conversion points; maybe you wrote a blog article three years ago and didn’t put any calls-to-action (CTAs) in it, so users are just going to the end of the page, hitting the rear button, and leaving forever. If this is often the issue, fix it. If your most-hit pages are decently designed and have clear CTAs, then there are two potential issues. Either the content on the page isn’t relevant to users, or the CTA that’s offered isn’t relevant.
To check on the first potential issue, examine acquisition sources to consider how users are finding the page. If it’s mostly referral traffic, are they being sent from an old page on another site with outdated information? Request an update. Are they coming via organic search? See what other sites rank once you search your page’s focus keywords. you'll simply be ranking for a keyword that isn’t relevant to your business – if that’s the case, there’s not much you can do (although I’d still recommend trying what’s below).
If the traffic to the page has relevancy, then evaluate the CTA. Here’s what I recommend: Each page should have a high-funnel conversion point and a low-funnel conversion point. Most pages only have a low-funnel conversion point – something enticing to people that are ready to buy, like “Call for a consultation” or “Let’s Talk.” The matter is that most users aren’t ready to buy – but even so, a number of them might be ready to offer up their email address for something valuable. So, review your page again. After identifying sources of traffic, find out what's the most valuable piece of content that users would want to see next. For example, if your page is “10 Cyber Security Policy Tips,” users could be interested in a downloadable Cyber security policy template. If you've got such a content piece – great. Make it available as a downloadable piece on the page. If you don’t – no problem. Make one. Repeat this process for every of your top 10 pages and your conversion rate will significantly improve.
2. Create a service overview content piece.
This is, really, a continuation of the previous tactic. I’m breaking it out because: It’s something that the majority of people don’t quickly think of. It works rather well. Here’s the premise: for several B2B tech businesses, their most-viewed pages include their homepage and product/services pages. That’s great. The matter is that it can be difficult to come up with good high-funnel conversion points for these kinds of pages; unlike blog posts, which frequently lead naturally to more content, service pages and homepages often lead most naturally to a buying decision. So, if the user isn’t able to buy, that’s it – right?
Not so fast. There are literally a lot of users in the B2B world who are doing research. These folks look for your service, and land on your service page – but aren’t quite able to move forward with a contact form because they’re gathering data on you and the competition. But there's a logical next step for them: A download piece that offers more detail on your product or service. The motivation, for the user, is that they get to continue the info collection process and potentially bring your (impressive, authentic, and aesthetically pleasing) information to a decision-maker. If your most-viewed pages are your service pages, do this approach.
Ready to Bring in the Leads?
Hopefully, the following pointers have been helpful as you consider your own B2B tech marketing efforts. If you’ve got a traffic problem or a conversion problem, no fear – it is often fixed.
And, if you’re trying to find more guidance on lead generation, let’s talk. At Engage48, we help businesses like yours unclog the lead funnel in order that consistent growth can happen. We are a full-service B2B Content Marketing and Appointment Setting Agency servicing B2B marketers worldwide on their digital lead generation programs. We also provide accurate and verified b2b contact data for your marketing and sales outreach programs.
We support business owners, b2b marketing, and sales heads in their quest for qualified leads. Whether you are looking to promote your b2b offerings to IT directors, HR heads, CFOs, CMOs, or the executive suite you can rely on our targeted lead generation and appointment-setting programs to produce the desired outcomes. And on a budget!
