Strategies to Generate Leads Online

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By David Bussell

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There are a variety of ways to generate leads online. In the following article I lay out several considerations, step and tools that I use to generate leads from search. By no means is this intended to be exhaustive guide but it is a great start to understanding the process.

Lead Generation Systems typically require a couple major components. Namely;

• A way to target customers
• A way to acquire customers
• A way to retain customers

Customer Targeting

Customer targeting is both an easy and logical place to start. Put simply the first step is to identify the following:

• Who is my customer?
• what is my customers problem (why do they HAVE to connect with you)
• how do they go about solving that problem (aka. what keywords do they search to find people like you)

Answering these should give you a couple things. The most important out of the gate is:

1. A Keyword or Set of Keywords
2. A Clear Intention Associated with the Search
3. A Clear Idea of the Solution they are anticipating

With this in hand you are now in a position to do some important things. Namely:

• Do an analysis of the competition on the keywords
• Identify “long tail” or more specific inquiries associated with your key terms
• Asses the competition for your keyword when used alone and in combination with common qualifiers and location indicators

While these three go a long way in terms of traditional competitor analysis and keyword research they are narrowly search related considerations. Once you have narrowed down search terms that you feel like you can compete on the next step is to asses your actual competitors search result pages. Doing a broad overview of SERP will allow you to critically understand;

• the kind of content search engines expect to find displayed on landing pages related to this topic and
• the kind of content searchers expect to find on landing pages when they search for this topic

It is a pretty safe bet that if you arrive on landing pages and feel like your competitors are missing the ball then you or they have gotten the intention associated with the keywords wrong.

Customer Acquisition

Finding the customer and the keywords is the easy and often fun exploratory phase. Building a system and consistently delivers high quality leads is the much harder next step. This stage involves:

Build Landing Pages

• Building keyword targeted landing pages for the identified keywords
• Building out a site structure that logically ties together these pages and prioritizes the high return keywords
• Developing out 300 word plus content pieces for each page

Build Funnel Pages

• Building out a series of pages that help visitors who have landed on these pages get to know your brand and understand why they should choose your product or service

Build Conversion Pages & Thank You Pages

• Create pages that have a form and phone number that can track inquiries and pass the information across to your CRM

Integrate you Site with a CRM & Call Tracking Solution

• You will need to track and quantity of inquiries generated by your site to both manage your ad-spend and assess any efforts to optimize your conversion rate and funnel

Set Up Analytics, Attribution and Testing Software

• You need to know where you traffic is coming from, what channels and keywords are resulting in conversions and where and why people leave your site.

Build Backlinks to Your Home, Landing and Funnel Pages

• Your site in order to rank on Google critically must be found and referred to by other sites which cover the topic you are trying to rank on. The more links you have from these sites to your pages the more likely they will rank. The easiest way to get started here is to find articles on your topic and comment in them with a link back to your site.

List in Directories and Engage on Social

• Last but not least you need to have active accounts on major social media sites (twitter, linkedin, facebook, google plus) and you need to list your site on any and all directories.

This rather exhaustive list is rather bare bones in reality. That said, if you follow its structure and at minimum use:

1. MOZ for competitor and keyword analysis and
2. YOAST  for on page SEO

You will be a position to start generating interest in your product and traffic from search engines.

CUSTOMER RETENTION

This is kind of a weird title because it presumes you have already turned the traffic into an inquiry. Lets not move to quickly! The term “retention” is used here to signify the start of a conversation that will ideally turn into a sale but not end unless there is no prospect of the customer ever buying from you.

There are a variety of tools to help one out in this area and all typically fall under the heading “CRM” or customer relationship management software. It is where your leads either land (from a form) or should be entered when someone call inquiring.

The often missed point of these tools is to ensure that your sales team always does the following:

• Follows up with leads quickly and predictably
• Always ends conversations with clients by setting a time to follow up (even if this is post sale, or post follow up sale)
• Keeps notes on customers that will help them build rapport and close deals

(side: There is literally no good excuse to do any of the above and a simple agenda more than suffices. Ask me and I will walk you through the process!)

The reason having a modern CRM is helpful in this area is in large becouse of their ability to:

• keep a safe, clear and consistent record of contacts, leads and info
• automate much of the manual labour involved in relationship building.

TAKE AWAYS and conclusion.

Generating leads online, put mildy, is not a modest undertaking. That said, while considerable the result of showing up consistantly in good is getting quality leads for years to come with minimal to no work having to be invested on a daily basis.