If the past year taught us anything, it’s that cutting corners in marketing doesn’t work anymore.
Adhoc communication campaigns that don’t speak directly to your audience and what matters to them won’t make it in the ocean of information.
Instead, as marketers, we need to play the long term game: follow a coherent marketing plan, build relationships with our audiences and give value in the form of educational content & advice. Follow an inbound approach in other words.
But finding the right formula, writing quality content, and building efficient conversion funnels takes time. How much time exactly? HubSpot estimated that it takes around 7 months for businesses to see inbound leads flowing.
Your businesses might need to generate leads now, and luckily there are some quick wins that can speed up your lead generation without compromising on the long-term strategy.
Instant communication has become the norm, and we expect to be able to receive instant answers or be able to chat with a company representative. Adding a live chat or a chatbot to your website can help you connect with those users and point them in the right direction.
A couple of ideas you can test are:
When people land on your website, they get there searching for specific information or by following a link they were interested in.
However, only 2-3% are ready to make a purchase. The rest will eventually close your website and perhaps never return if you don’t find a way to connect.
One of the best ways to do that is by giving them something of value in exchange for contact information. You could think of offering:
But not all your pages are created equal; look at your most visited pages and think what offer would make sense for each.
Your blog readers have already spent some time with you, engaging with your website. So they are more likely to take another step if you give them the chance: read a related article, download more in-depth material on the same topic, sign up for an online event, follow you on social media, etc.
So you can start with your most visited blog posts and figure what an appropriate next step can be and add a call to action at the end of the article or inside the content, next to a topic related paragraph.
When was the last time to reviewed and updated your website forms?
If the answer is months ago, it can be a good time to assess how your forms are performing and try to optimize where needed.
The average conversion rate is 2.35%, while the top-performing websites have conversion rates above 5.3%.
For the underperforming forms, ask yourself:
For your blog or pillar page, some formats you can test are:
If you don’t have a bottom-of-the-funnel offer on your website, it’s time to get creative.
A bottom-of-the-funnel offer can be attractive for those visitors that have decided on a solution and are assessing multiple vendors.
Think of what would make sense for your potential customers:
Once you settled on what you will offer, make it visible on your website:
Creating original and high-quality content takes a lot of time and work – and I think all content marketers can relate. But creating content is only 50% of the job, the other 50% is promoting that content. And repurposing content into visual elements gives you tons of material to promote on social media.
The plus side to repurposing content is that it’s also easier for your audience to consume it (we all prefer a nugget of information most days, instead of reading 5,000 words articles).
There are a ton of formats to play around with:
If you have several related articles that tackle the same main topic, you can compile them into a pillar page.
The goal of the pillar page is to give your readers an overview of that topic in one place, without needing to navigate from article to article. The added benefit is that in time pillar pages will help you increase your organic search visibility.
Because this will be a long material, be mindful of how your users will navigate it:
To make the most of your pillar page, consider:
According to Marketing Sherpas research, B2B contact data decays at a rate of 2.1% per month, that is 22.5% per year.
If you have cold contacts in your database that you haven’t communicated with for a while, a re-engagement campaign can help in two ways:
What should your re-engagement email look like?
After you delivered the campaign, look for bounced contacts or unsubscribes and add them to a list. Then continue to nurture the active contacts with useful content, depending on which email links they followed.
Smart marketing today needs a long term strategy and cohesive implementation. But there are some low effort – high impact ideas you can implement today to give you a boost: implement a chat function in your website, update or add forms, add the right calls-to-action, repurpose content or run a re-engagement campaign.
Which of these quick wins did you try already? And which ones helped you the most?