A question that bothers everybody is, how one can increase the number of leads without increasing their existing digital marketing budget. The answer isn’t quite simple, but it is possible to refocus and strategize your digital marketing budget so that lead generation takes center stage.
It all started when businesses began to spend more money on digital marketing than on traditional marketing. The influx of smartphones and other portable devices necessitated a completely different approach at the turn of the last decade. Today, digital is far more important than other platforms, and nobody is arguing about that.
However, digital marketing budgets have increased sharply in recent years and in United States Digital Spend is surpassing the traditional media spend. It is in digital media that we are able to understand how the visitors are behaving and a number of us work are trying to get more from what we have already spent.
A number of clients often ask this and then we go ahead with a 10 step simple guide which helps to multiply leads without no extra cost. You might just have to divert your budget a little to the left, and a little to the right.
If you haven’t heard already, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming soon and will require you to seek explicit consent from all the emails in your database. The regulation focuses on improving privacy and requires you to stop contacting people if you do not have their explicit consent to do so. Auditing your email database and discarding emails that do not explicitly permit you can be a great way to not only comply with GDPR, but also making your database more meaningful and lean. A curated and lean email database will convert at an exponentially higher rate than a large database with no meaningful leads.
To comply with GDPR, you will also need to redevelop your contact forms and call to action forms, so that explicit permission is sought before customers share their emails. In addition, you will have to change your cookies policies and write terms and conditions in layman’s terms, all of which require a little bit of redevelopment and redesigning. Once you do this, you will notice that leads convert quickly because the traffic is more targeted, and those who engage with your website truly want to do so. Though the actual traffic may fall, your lead conversion percentage will drastically increase.
While most businesses have a lot of money to spend on social campaigns, they forget to engage with their audiences meaningfully. To increase the number of leads, it is important to focus on social engagement and get more personal. Social engagement is an important aspect that is often neglected by even the savviest digital marketers. Whether on Facebook or Twitter, maintain a respectful friendliness that is neither distant nor uncomfortably intrusive. This balanced approach to social engagement will help you to win hearts, as you will not appear pushy or non-responsive. In result, you will see the number of leads soar quickly.
Most businesses fail at customizing and doing meaningful conversations and end up talking to every segment of the market in the same tone and manner. It doesn’t work. At best, people may ignore you, and at worst, they may get annoyed or offended. Every communication from your side needs to be tailor-made for your audience. Study your target audience’s psychographic factors and demographic details, and create conversations that are customized for them. Tailor-made conversations feel a lot more intimate and personal than pushy marketing scripts, which will put people off. Be subtle and friendly, and use data to customize your conversations to suit your target audience.
A lead magnet is type of content that will automatically fetch you a large number of email addresses. This kind of content needs to be of top-notch quality, and people should download it even months after you make it available. Creating a series of lead magnets will help you to gain a large number of leads who can be nurtured so that they convert in future. Please do remember that you may have to make your download page GDPR-compliant, especially if you plan to use visitors’ emails in the future for marketing purposes. This means, you will have to seek explicit consent here too.
Most businesses think of blogs and eBooks when they think of content. However, creating content in different formats will help you to generate more leads. A number of people prefer to watch videos or listen to podcasts than read textual content. It makes sense to create excellent videos that urge the viewer to download a lead magnet if they want to learn more. That will be the moment of truth, if they choose to give their consent and download your lead magnet. Such motivated users usually convert sooner or later. In addition, this also helps you with your SEO, which in turn again helps you generate leads.
If you haven’t fixed your landing pages in a while, now is probably be the best time to do so. Even your landing pages will need to become GDPR-compliant, as explicit permissions will need to be sought before visitors share their email addresses. Make changes to the forms on your landing pages, and see a more relevant database whose conversion rates will be very high. After all, it is not a good idea to keep a large number of leads that will never convert to prospects. A highly curated list will make sure that leads convert to prospects, and prospects to customers.
Re-route a large percentage of your digital marketing budget towards paid ads, as this is where much of lead generation takes place. Though many choose to ignore paid ads and focus on organic marketing, it is not a great idea. Existing digital marketing budget can be used to channel funds towards paid ads. Paid ads have a higher conversion rate and increasing your ad spend will help you to enhance engagement, resulting in more number of leads. Whether you choose to use Google Ads or Facebook Ads, the conversion rate will be higher than depending on organic campaigns alone.
You might be surprised to learn that not fixing meta-tags or not engaging in keyword research could be affecting your lead generation. The basic premise of SEO is to help people find you organically, without you having to depend on paid content alone. SEO turbocharges your organic campaigns and needs to be fixed before you see any changes. Just fixing your website, making sure that it loads quickly, rectifying meta-tags and keywords, and engaging in basic SEO strategies will help you to see an increase in the number of leads. In fact, content marketing depends on search engine optimization.
Last but not the least, ask every customer or client to leave positive feedback regarding your products or services. You may think this isn’t important but please bear in mind, you are spending absolutely nothing when you ask for customer reviews and testimonials. Not only will your brand image improve, you will also fetch free user-generated content that may help you in your search engine optimization. Businesses with good reviews and testimonials often rank better than those that have none.
Multiplying your leads is easy, if you play smart
As you can see, it is certainly possible to multiply your leads without spending more on digital marketing. All you need to do is carefully manage your finances and ensure that you reroute your funds to certain priority tasks such as redeveloping your website, revamping your landing pages, and focusing on making yourself GDPR-compliant.
This will in turn help you to target a very niche and curated database that is actually interested in your marketing communication. Though your database gets smaller, you will be able to exponentially increase the number of leads that actually convert.
In addition to auditing, redeveloping and redesigning your website to comply with GDPR regulations, focus on creating stellar content and lead magnets, fix your SEO and create social conversations that actually pull people right in. With the right amount of effort and persistence, you will see the number of leads that convert will multiply rapidly.
