HOW TO OPTIMIZE your LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY

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HOW TO

OPTIMIZE

your

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HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY

HOW TO

OPTIMIZE

your

LEAD GENERATION

STRATEGY

Introduction 2 PART ONE:

Creating Content to Generate Leads 3

Optimizing Landing Pages to Increase Conversions 7

Building Effective Conversion Paths 14

PART TWO:

Measuring Efficiency 17

Utilizing Marketing Data 23

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As a smart marketer, you know how important it is to generate leads and keep those potential customers fully engaged as they flow down the sales funnel. This ebook will give you best practices for optimizing your lead generation strategies. If you’re in the early stages of building your strategy, start with Part One to learn about optimizing landing pages. If you’ve already mastered land-ing pages, start with Part Two to learn how to implement trackland-ing on your lead generation efforts to measure success.

IN THIS EBOOK, YOU WILL LEARN:

• What type of content you should produce to generate leads

• How to optimize all the elements of your landing pages to increase form-fills • How to build efficient conversion paths to drive leads

• What tools you should be using to track marketing campaigns • How to use the data you collect to improve your marketing strategy

HOW TO

OPTIMIZE

your

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3

HOW TO

REGAIN

CONTROL OF

your BRAND

“In the real world, you don’t have infinite resources; you don’t

have a perfect product; you don’t sell to a growing market without

competition. You’re also not omnipotent, so you cannot enforce

what your brand represents. Under these assumptions, most

companies need all the help they can get with branding,”

GUY KAWASAKI

CREATING

CONTENT

to

GENERATE

LEADS

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CREATING CONTENT to GENERATE LEADS

It’s important for your marketing team to collect contact information from potential leads to pass along to your sales team. Site forms serve as a prime resource to collect contact information, since the people who visit your website are usually interested in learning more about your company. But many times, visitors are still in the information gathering stage and not ready to buy.

In order to convert leads faster, you should provide visitors with relevant content that they are more willing to exchange their contact information for on your website.

Here are four things to consider when creating content :

You want to create content that is valuable to your prospects. A good way to provide value is by creating content that alleviates a painpoint for your target audience: content should solve the problem that brought your site visitors to your resources.

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Create unique offers that are relevant to the different segments of your audience. When you’re building your content strategy, identify the differ-ent audience personas that are interested in your product then follow up with those leads using a tailored piece of content.

You want to have specific content for your site visi-tors based on where they are in the sales funnel. If someone is at the top of the sales funnel, they will be interested in educational content like guides, checklists and ebooks. If someone is further along, they will be more interested in content that ex-plains how your company can help them solve a problem. You can target this group with a detailed product demo and case study.

2. RELEVANCE

3. TIMELINESS

New to audience personas?

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Don’t offer the same exact content as your com-petitors. Always strive to create content that your site visitors can’t find anywhere else. Don’t be afraid to get creative! Your prospects will be more enticed to exchange their contact information for unique resources. Ebooks Guides Checklists Templates Live Webinars Recorded Webinars Product Demos Slideshows Presentations Case Studies

What can you

give your site

visitors?

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HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY 7

OPTIMIZING

LANDING

PAGES

to

INCREASE

CONVERSIONS

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OPTIMIZING LANDING PAGES to INCREASE CONVERSIONS

Here are some general guidelines to optimize the different elements of your landing pages:

Headers are valuable space on landing pages because they sit at the top of your form. Keep your headers simple. Always include your compa-ny name or logo and steer away from having acompa-ny navigation to distract visitors from filling out the form. Consider putting contact information in your header - studies have shown that site visitors that directly call your company have a 15% increased likelihood of turning into a customer.*

HEADERS:

646-678-5610

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9

Headlines serve as the title to your website and should restate the offer. Strong headlines have a clear hook, use offers like “free” and include active verbs that provide the visitor with direction on what to do next. If you want to include an addition-al explanation of your offer add a subhead. This is where you can say how your offer is going to benefit your prospects.

HEADLINES:

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Strong, clear copy is essential for your website visitors to understand what you offer. Avoid dense paragraphs or being overly text-heavy. Studies show that on average, web visitors only read about 20% of the text on any page.* To make your land-ing page more digestible, keep your copy to a few short paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each, or break up the copy with bullet points. Make it easy for your site visitors to skim the page by bolding the key phrases and benefits of your offer throughout your copy.

COPY:

646-678-5610

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Always include an image on your landing pages. Vibrant, strong imagery can help visitors better un-derstand your offer. Visitors rely on images to help understand what information is important to pay attention to and relevant images can help support your copy to increase conversions.

IMAGERY:

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The form is the most important element of your landing page because it’s where you collect contact information.

While there is no magic number of form fields to include, there are best practices you should keep in mind when creating forms. If your focus is driving top-of-the-funnel leads, keep the num-ber of fields to a minimum. If your focus is high-er-quality leads, include additional form fields specific to business objectives. This ensures the

FORM:

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leads you are generating are the right leads for your sales team.

Additionally, you may consider including a privacy policy at the bottom of your form. This will build trust with your prospects, as they will be reassured that you’re not going to sell their contact informa-tion to any third parties.

And finally, always use in-button text that reflects a call to action that is relevant to your offer, like “Download Now” for ebooks or“Save My Seat” for webinars. You can raise conversion rate by as much as three percent just by optimizing your button copy.*

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BUILDING

EFFECTIVE

CONVERSION

PATHS

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BUILDING EFFECTIVE CONVERSION PATHS

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Start by linking to your landing pages using

calls-to-action throughout your site. Add CTA buttons to your homepage, your resources section, across your blog (including individual blog posts and blog sidebar), throughout your product, and even on your About page.

Your conversion path starts with the call-to-action. There are a few things that you should keep in mind when creating CTAs:

• Keep CTAs above the fold in your emails and forms.

• Make the CTAs clear and include an active verb.

• Track all hyperlinks used in CTAs (more about this in Measuring Success) In the conversion path, your CTA leads to your landing page. We discussed

CHECKLIST

Homepage Resource section Blog posts Blog sidebar Product pages About page

ADD CTA TO:

After you’ve optimized your landing pages, it’s important to set up an effective con-version path to ensure prospects can find those landing pages once they are live.

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BUILDING EFFECTIVE CONVERSION PATHS

how to optimize your landing pages in Optimizing

Landing Pages to Increase Conversions_.

The second part of your conversion path is your Thank You page. On the Thank You page, you should provide a link to the offer that your visitors signed up for. You can also include social sharing buttons on your Thank You page to encourage your site visitors to share that they’ve downloaded something valuable from you, further promoting your content and increasing the number of people who visit your site and your landing pages.

The final part of the conversion path is the follow-up email. The follow-up email serves a similar purpose as the Thank You page, but having the offer your website visitor downloaded in their inboxes allows your leads to refer to your offer anytime they need to. A follow-up email allows you to keep your lead engaged for a longer period of time and gives you an additional opportunity to engage with them.

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MEASURING

SUCCESS

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MEASURING SUCCESS WEB ANALYTICS MARKETING AUTOMATION PLATFORM CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

It’s important to understand and identify the market-ing analytics tools that are available to you and how you can use them effectively to measure success. There are several different tools designed to help you understand and track the activity in the market-ing analytics funnel:

At the bottom of the funnel is your

customer relationship management (CRM)

database that you can use to tie revenue to your marketing efforts.

At the top of the funnel are

web analytics tools that help

you track and understand the traffic generated to your website and your owned assets, helping you optimize the content on your website.

Marketing automation platforms help

you analyze and track middle-of-the-funnel activities. These tools allow you to target known leads with content that is relevant to them at the right time.

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MEASURING SUCCESS

Social Media

• Paid social media efforts • Organic social media efforts • All channels - Facebook, Twitter,

LinkedIn, Google+, etc

Website

• Your homepage • Any in-product CTAs

• Blog post announcing your offer • The CTA in each blog post

• Your blog promo

Blog

Search Engine

Marketing

• All paid search efforts • Display Ads

Email

• Invitation email • Reminder email • Follow-up email

Offline

• Print Ads • OOH (Out-Of-Home) • Direct Mail

In order to build a comprehensive understanding of your marketing efforts, you need to identify and track all the assets of your campaign. Example assets include:

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MEASURING SUCCESS

By implementing tracking parameters for all the assets we identified in Part 2, you can gain important insight into how your marketing efforts are resonating with your audience. Here’s a brief overview of how to set up tracking parameters to measure success.

Tracking begins with global website tracking scripts. Your web analytics and marketing automation plat-forms will have global website tracking scripts that need to be installed on every page of your website. Global website tracking scripts allow you to analyze the traffic on your site and learn how your site visitors are interacting with it. By understanding what resonates with visitors, you can further optimize your content.

STEP

1 Install Global

Website Tracking

Scripts

ga(‘create’, ‘34-2ff3455621-11’, ‘.org’);ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’); </script>

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MEASURING SUCCESS

You should also consider adding hidden form fields to your forms. Hidden form fields capture informa-tion from your links and pass it through to your mar-keting automation platform and CRM. Hidden form fields give you deeper insight into lead tracking such as where your site visitors are coming from and the specific channel that drove them to your form. If you’re using paid search and display advertising, be sure to install tracking pixels. Tracking pixels help you keep track of how many users see your advertisements and clicked through to your landing page. You should also install tracking pixels on your landing pages to keep track of when visitors have successfully converted and what advertisements drove the most traffic to the landing pages.

STEP

3 Add Hidden

Form Fields

STEP

2 Install Tracking

Pixels

Name: Job Title:

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MEASURING SUCCESS

Appended links are links that include the tracking information for your analytics tools. Appended links include parameters associated with your CRM and your web analytics.

STEP

4 Create

Appended

Links

http://bitly.com/webinar/html ?drivercampaignid=7000000000wwww&utm_campaign=webinar

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UTILIZING

MARKETING

DATA

Once you begin collecting information from your leads

and tracking all of your assets, your marketing team will

be armed with insightful and actionable data that can be

utilized across all your marketing efforts.

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UTLIZING marketing DATA

You can use this data for:

Lead Nurturing:

Just because a site visitor has converted into a lead doesn’t mean they are ready to buy your product. Through lead nurturing efforts, you can educate and build a relationship with all of your prospects to help propel them through the sales funnel.

You can use the data you’ve collected on your leads - such as demographic information, industry, title and more - to create strong, relevant content to their needs, as discussed in Creating Content to

Generate Leads.

Sales Enablement:

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UTLIZING marketing DATA

sales team will be more knowledgable about the needs of your prospects and can be prepared to talk about how your product will solve their problems.

Marketing Strategy:

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After reading this ebook, your marketing team will be armed and prepared to create an optimized lead generation strategy that you can track its success to drive conversion rates, leads and company objectives.

Interested in learning more about how Bitly Brand Tools can help you

fully optimize your lead generation strategy?

Visit bitly.is/LeadGeneration to learn more about Bitly Brand Tools.