Website traffic is like staring at a delicious cake: it’s no good, unless you get to eat it! Using data to optimise your site for conversions is the knife you need to cut yourself a slice!
Website traffic is a vanity metric. Yes, I said it, it is fairly easy to increase your website traffic.
Paid advertising is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website - and it definitely has its place. A well-balanced digital strategy should include pay per click advertising or other paid advertising. Having said this, an agency can buy visits - but they can’t buy you leads, and they definitely can’t buy conversions or customers.
Take a look at the digital marketing mix
As you can see, there are three elements to a well balanced digital strategy. As an inbound marketing agency, our focus lies in the “earned media” category - the most powerful (and hardest to achieve) element of the mix.
What makes ‘earned media’ so powerful?
Earned media is the key to generating better quality leads.
Say you’re using pay per click advertising (PPC), and you manage to drive a great deal of traffic to your landing page, what happens next? If your landing page isn’t optimised for conversions, you’re likely to lose a lot of this traffic, almost as soon as they arrive.
This is what makes the inbound methodology stand out from traditional advertising strategies. Inbound marketing is about analysing, interpreting and knowing how to use data to implement a winning strategy. We use data to tell us exactly who your best audience is (creating buyer personas), we use data to illuminate their unique buyer’s journey, and we use data to build hyper-targeted messages for your audience.
Inbound marketing still uses digital tactics - it’s just that our process is driven and backed by data.
Data helps us build smart content
Inbound marketing uses buyer personas and the buyer’s journey to build smart content.
So, when that lead clicks on your paid advert and lands on your landing page, we’ve targeted their unique persona. The content on that page talks to the right stage of their journey, which increases the likelihood of them clicking on your call to action (CTA) and thus, your page is optimised for conversions.
With data, we’re able to create the perfect mixture of content and context. The inbound methodology helps us serve the right message, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time - and in the right context.
For example, Contact Us is a very strong CTA - but if you use it on every single page of your website, your conversion rate would remain relatively low. This is because not every visitor is ready to buy - in fact, they may not even be ready to become a lead yet. Just because someone subscribed to your blog, it doesn’t mean they’re a potential customer - they could just love your content!
Through the inbound marketing process, we can track where a contact sits in the buyer’s journey. This allows us to keep serving them content that is relevant and helpful to them. We’re also able to nurture visitors into contacts, and continue nurturing these contacts into marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and, eventually, sales qualified leads (SQLs) and opportunities. We make sure that only good quality, hot leads make it into the hands of the sales team - so they won’t waste their time on non-serious prospects.
But it doesn’t stop there...
Lead nurturing - the recipe for success
So you’ve handed an SQL on to your sales team, now what? If you think an inbound marketer’s job ends there… you’re horribly mistaken!
Imagine you’re having your family over for a Sunday roast - but they’re running a few minutes late. You wouldn’t serve their food, and leave it on the table to go ice cold would you? No. You’d keep it in the warming draw so that it’s still hot when everyone’s ready to eat.
Your leads are like that roast - they may be hot when you hand them over to your sales team, but they won’t stay that way unless you carry on nurturing them.
Inbound marketers need to work hand in hand with sales, even once a lead becomes an SQL. Our job is to continue nurturing that lead further down the sales funnel, warming it up even more. We compliment your sales team’s activities, and strengthen the relationship between your brand and the lead. This process of lead nurturing ensures that by the time your sales person is ready to pitch, your lead is ready to say yes.
So, as I said before - anyone can get you traffic, but only an excellent inbound agency will get you leads and drive your business’ conversion rates.
If you need help developing your own inbound marketing strategy, contact us. Our team of inbound experts are passionate about helping our clients reach their business goals.
Not ready to contact us yet? We have a few other ways you can learn more about inbound marketing... in other words here are some alternative CTAs 👇.
Looking for a way to determine which of your leads are hot and which leads are lukewarm? Our guide to Navigating Lead Scoring provides a road map to setting up a lead scoring system as well as a lead scoring worksheet to get you started. Download the Lead Scoring guide and get started.
Want to find out how your website is performing. We offer a comprehensive website review that looks at a variety of performance metrics to help you see where you could be optimising your website. This review offers some useful tips on improving the performance of various apects of your website. Get your website reviewed now.
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