I recently replied to a question from one of the e-mail lists I belong to. It’s about taking search engine optimization (SEO) beyond just lead generation and looking at the full life cycle of acquiring visitors, engaging them with your site, and maintaining those relationships once they’re established.
I thought this would be of value to the greater web community. Enjoy!
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These articles seem to focus on the first part (increasing the number of hits). Can anyone offer similar links to help me increase the probability of a page-view becoming a lead?
Hi Stuart,
Good question. I don’t have any other links to share on this but I’ll share the orientation 3000k takes when building a site to see if that helps you.
PROSPECT / CUSTOMER LIFE CYCLE
The life cycle of a prospect involves three things: driving prospects to your site, encouraging them to take action once they’ve arrived, and maintaining those connections once they’re established.
ACQUIRING PROSPECTS
SEO, pay-per-click, traditional advertising, blogging, and other techniques can be used to help acquire visitors. These each have their place in your plan, some help to pull prospects to you (like blogging) while others involve pushing out to where your prospects are (like direct mail).
GETTING PROSPECTS TO ENGAGE WITH YOU
Your question is really about the second step in the cycle: how to get people to engage your firm once they’ve come to your site. This involves building a site (or landing page) that’s tailored to addressing the needs of your visitor and providing clear and explicit actions for them to take - contacting you, in the case of lead generation.
Specifically, you’ll need to:
- · Understand the needs of your audience.
- · Validate your firm and convey your value to these groups.
- · Affirm to valid prospects that you can do what they need.
- · Alleviate concerns your visitors have.
- · Provide a clear and explicit set of actions (call, email, buy, etc.).
I mentioned site or landing page, an important distinction. A landing page is a single page that sits between your site and the prospect. They’re often tied to pay-per-click campaigns and try to address 80% of a visitors needs quickly after they’ve clicked on an ad but before they’re dropped into your site.
So, for a landing page, your visitor:
- · Performs a search and sees your ad.
- · Clicks on the ad and is directed to your landing page.
- · Skims the information there.
- · Determines if you’re the right match and they should continue on to your site or contact you (good landing pages should have a clear and explicit set of contact options).
Both the landing page and your site should have a carefully crafted message that speaks to your visitors and helps them self-select whether you’re the right firm to work with or not. This is achieved through a combination of the copy, design, imagery, and features.
KEEPING THE CONNECTION ALIVE
So you’ve done all of this hard work and crafted a good search marketing campaign, driven a lot of traffic to a strong site, and begun getting contacts. Chances are only a small percentage of those prospects are a good fit ready to buy today.
The final step, then, is keeping in touch with the prospects who aren’t ready to buy now so you’re still prominent in their mind whey they are ready. E-mail newsletters and order viagra order cialis order cialis professional order viagra professional blogs can be an effective way to do this by pulling people back with interesting content (blogs) and pushing information out to those who’ve expressed interest (newsletters).
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This is how we grow businesses with a marketing website: acquire visitors, convert them to customers, and maintain those relationships.
