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How to Increase Your Inbound Marketing Conversions

[fa icon="calendar"] 30-Aug-2016 09:00:00 / by Iliyana Stareva

How_to_Increase_Your_Inbound_Marketing_Conversions.jpgI run a webinar a while ago for a group of my HubSpot customers on how to get more conversions with inbound marketing. 

It's a difficult topic but an important one because everyone who's doing inbound marketing wants to generate leads. 

A lot of companies create content and put landing pages out there hoping to get some good conversions out. But publishing just something and hoping for the best doesn't work. You need a proper strategy behind this. 

Another common challenge is staying up-to-date with everything new in the world of marketing and digital and keeping up with your customers and their constant change in behaviour. 

So today, I want to share with you those slides that will offer you both strategic and tactical tips on how to increase your inbound marketing conversions. 

But before I get to the deck, I want to summarise the key points for you. 

5 Crucial Steps to Increasing Your Inbound Marketing Conversions: 

1. Get Your Strategy

This first tip comes as no surprise. It makes sense, right? 

Yep, it sure does, but do you know how often it's actually not done? I'll tell you - very often. 

People think they can just create an ebook, put it on a landing page and the leads will come! 

Boy, I wish it was that easy! 

You need to know who you are creating that ebook for and you need to know for a fact that that ebook will be relevant, useful and downloaded because it's relevant and useful. 

You'll only know that with a clear definition of your buyer personas, their needs, their challenges and pain points, the questions they are asking and where they go to find answers to those questions. 

Buyer personas are at the centre of any inbound activity and especially your content strategy and planning. Your content needs to be created with your buyer persona in mind. It also needs to be promoted with your buyer persona in mind. That's something marketing people tend to forget. It's not just about the challenges of your buyer personas, it's also about the way they solve them. You have to be there at the right time with the right content. 

And yes, next to your buyer personas you'll need to know what you want to achieve. SMART goals are important to set up what you are striving for (like 60 leads per month by the end of next quarter) and if you are not achieving it, you'll need to figure out why and find a way to get there. The following points help with this. 

2. Talk to Sales

I'm always shocked at how many marketing and content decisions are based on assumptions. Yes, assumptions are a good start but you have to test those to make sure they are actually true. 

This is particularly relevant when designing buyer personas but also when defining their buyer's journey. (If you are not defining the buyer's journey, please start now! As I always say, buyer personas and the buyer's journey always come hand in hand.)

So how do you define the buyer's journey? Well, you talk to sales! 

Sales people are the ones who get questions from potential customers all the time. If you can't speak to customers directly, you can certainly speak to sales and gather all those questions. 

Because the questions potential customers ask are the ones that we need to answer with content and with the content offers on our landing pages. Only so will we be able to generate leads, and not just any leads, but good leads because we are answering the right questions. 

So the next time you plan your content strategy, speak to sales and map the questions based on each stage of the buyer's journey (awareness, consideration, decision). That'll tell you what content offers to create and you'll have your full funnel ready (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU).

3. Follow the Best Practices 

Now that you have your content created, it's time for the conversion process.

Often when I analyse a landing page that is not converting properly, there's something wrong with the structure of the page that is off-putting for visitors. For example, the form is too long and the questions are irrelevant, i.e. not related to the offer, or the text information is too scarce, the benefit is not clear, or there are a bunch of distractions like footers, menus, other links so the visitor is confused. 

The single purpose of a landing page is for people to convert. So make it easy for them. I know you want to show them as much as you can about how great you are or your content is, but there's time and place for everything. You'll get another chance right after the landing page with your thank you page to showcase more. Focus is the key to conversion success. 

In addition, there are other elements of design that help. This includes things like a well designed CTA that is enticing and actionable and that sets clear expectations on what to expect on the landing page. Hugely important then is also to meet those expectations once arriving on the landing page. You'd be surprised how many oversee this! The text and image you include in your CTA is the same text and image that needs to appear on your landing page. Same cadence follows on the thank you page and your follow-up email. Be consistent to create a good lead experience that they'd want to "relive" again. 

4. Get Creative

Now, best practices are important but sometimes you also need to get creative, especially because the world of digital and consumer behaviour change so quickly. There are always new tools and tactics and you need to be open to trying those out because they might work better for your audience. 

Lately, I've seen quizzes as a truly great way to generate leads. Basically, they are just an interactive content offer that people react to more openly and with bigger interest than the usual ebooks or whitepapers we are all so used to. 

If you want to try quizzes, here are three tools to check out: ZEFSnapApp (integrates with HubSpot) or Qzzr, and a good article by Kissmetrics on how to strategically plan the use of quizzes in your marketing

Another idea is to use LeadIn or SumoMe to make your CTAs more prominent. Both tools do wonders when it comes to increasing subscribers!  

Whatever tool you choose, the point here really is to listen to your audience and if needed to try gamification or interactive tools to get their attention and engagement. 

5. Listen and Optimise

In line with the previous point, get in the habit of continuously analysing and improving your strategy or assets. Your website is a living organism that needs to respond to the needs of everyone who comes to it. 

If your CTAs have a low click rate, then do some A/B testing. Change the colours, change the placement, try something new. 

The same goes for your landing pages. Maybe reposition the form, or change the headline to something snappier. 

Also, don't forget to think mobile. We are on our smartphones a lot more today than we used to so when you are designing your conversion process, optimise it for mobile devices too not just laptop or desktop. It's what your customers want - short, visual, mobile-optimised content

Your inbound marketing needs to evolve and constantly adapt to consumer behaviour. If you can't keep up with everything on your own, there are plenty of great agencies that can help. 

Just remember that user experience is key. And a good user experience only comes with listening and continuously optimising. 

 

What is your number one tip for increasing conversions? 

 

Topics: Inbound Marketing, Marketing

Iliyana Stareva

Written by Iliyana Stareva

Iliyana Stareva is the author of Inbound PR - the book that is transforming the PR industry. She's also a keynote speaker and a consultant in inbound and digital for fast-growing companies and agencies. Currently, Iliyana is Chief of Staff to the EMEA President at ServiceNow. Before that, she held global and EMEA-wide positions at Cisco and HubSpot. She is also certified by the PMI as a Project Management Professional (PMP)®. In her free time, you can find Iliyana writing for her blog, dancing salsa or travelling the world.

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