Increasing the flow of traffic to your website is an important first step, but is not the end goal. Many businesses find that, although their total web traffic increases month on month, the number of qualified leads does not. What are the main reasons businesses continue to find it difficult to generate B2B sales leads, despite an increase in web traffic? Let’s have a look:
Let’s start with the leads themselves. One of the reasons they’re not converting may be because you’re attracting the wrong people to your website. No offence to them personally, but if a website visitor/lead is unlikely to purchase from you, they are a ‘low-quality lead.’ Investing time in nurturing them is a waste of time for both parties.
Careful use of keywords helps ensure the right type of visitor is attracted to your website. Google AdWords lets you be very specific in the keywords you target. You can also define negative keywords to exclude people searching for certain terms. Your website content should avoid ambiguity while providing valuable information to your target audience.
Unfortunately, the Internet is swarming with fraudsters, time-wasters and robots. According to HubSpot, only 25% of leads are genuine. Qualify your leads through a personalised, drip-feed email marketing campaign that responds to their behavioural triggers, and let them make the first moves. This excludes time-wasters and places genuine leads in control over the sales process.
If you snooze, you lose. Leads go cold quickly, and the longer you leave it to follow them up, the greater the chance of them losing interest in you. Setting up automated thank you messages sets the ball rolling straight away and keeps you at the forefront of their mind. Nevertheless, it is essential to manually monitor messages received through your website and social media, as people increasingly expect responses within minutes, rather than days or hours. To avoid missing online leads, consider installing a chatbot on your website, programmed with answers to a range of commonly asked questions. This keeps your leads hot while waiting for a representative to get back to them.
When a lead calls you, or they request a callback, you have one chance to make a good impression. It’s remarkably easy to give someone a poor phone experience by not having the relevant information to hand, or by being unable to meet their immediate needs and concerns. Establish sales scripts and conversation guidelines, and share them widely among your team. By using a marketing automation platform, you can log engagement with leads and monitor the performance of your sales team.
Failure to convert web visitors may be due to your content being insufficiently personalised. This is tricky because while it’s straightforward enough to personalise landing pages, blog posts, and emails to a specific audience, your core web content is fairly static. It’s hard to personalise it to multiple audiences without diluting the message. Once you recognise that your website content can’t be all things to all people, it allows you to avoid the trap of being too vague. Know who to personalise your website content for, and you can start answering specific questions and attracting high quality, qualified leads.
When optimising your website design for mobile users (an absolute must for digital marketing), consider how easy your contact forms, navigation menus, and buttons are to use on small touchscreens. A considerable number of mobile users may be put off if your site is difficult to use on small devices, even if it looks great and loads quickly. Make use of easy drop-down menus and checkboxes, and keep typing requirements to a minimum.
For solid advice on the best ways to generate leads for sales, have a chat with one of our marketing experts today. Please call 01332 982022, or click here to arrange a free inbound marketing audit and consultation.
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