How your website converts Digital Marketing leads is critical to get right. COG Digital Sydney agency understands how to build brands and ensure that your website is converting leads that delivers true sustainable commercial results. This aspect of your brand marketing strategy is an important element to make sure your brands efforts SEO, SEM and email marketing are not squandered.
So, what is Lead Generation? Lead Gen for short, is the process of becoming visible and attractive to a new audience and individuals which are formally called prospects, and turning them into someone who is interested in your brands products and services. Lead Generation is often defined via digital marketing activities such as website news blog posts, events, marketing sales coupons and offers, job applications and online marketing content.
There are a few different types of Lead generation categories in which you can segment your leads into. Segmenting your leads makes it easier to refine your lead generation strategy and also understand how to deal with the lead and how to convert the lead.
Service Qualified Lead
Service qualified leads (or SQL for short) are individuals or customers who have indicated to your sales team that they are directly interested in becoming a paying customer. Service qualified leads can be exemplified by a customer who communicates to their sales service rep that they would like to upgrade or increase their product type, size, order or subscription. And, here the sales service representative would upsell and transfer this customer to the relevant person in the business to complete the process.
Marketing Qualified Lead
Marketing qualified leads (or MQL for short) are individuals who have engaged directly with your sales and marketing team, though but are not ready to accept a direct sales call at this time. An example of a Marketing qualified leads is an individual who has filled out a website landing page from digital marketing for a product or sales offer.
Product Qualified Lead
Product qualified leads (or PQL for short) are individuals who have engaged with your product itself and taken direct action that indicates interest in becoming a paying customer. Product qualified leads are usually utilized by brands offering a free trial period to a product, or a product trial as a limited version with options to upgrade later on. This is usually converted by a sales team. A Product qualified lead is a individual that uses a free version but asks about features that are only available upon paying.
Sales Qualified Lead
Sales qualified leads (or SQL for short) are individuals who have taken direct actions that clearly indicate their interest in becoming a paid customer. An example of a Sales qualified leads is a contact who has filled out a printed or website form asking questions about your products and services.
That data demonstrates just how important a website is for a brand and business. Being the first introduction potential customers have to your business it’s vital the website is designed to compete and convert any leads into buyers and customers. Being such an integral part of your digital marketing efforts, it’s important to take the time to carefully understand the Website UX Design of your website and how it converts leads. here your digital marketing needs to be carefully connected to your websites User Experience (UX) and it’s ability to convert your targeted audience.
When COG Digital are designing websites one of the first items we unpack with our clients is what do they want website visitors to achieve while on the website, and what should their key takeaway be of the business and product. This is key in understanding how the primary touchpoint of a website is closely connected to the area of Lead Generation and how your business and brand currently is ready for it to perform optimally.
Below are the high level elements that COG Digital advise our clients to ensure are functioning optimally on their website, and not only generating leads but to convert them into sales and customers.
1. Lead Generation is all about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If your website isn’t appearing on page one of google for a few of your key phrases or search terms, then you need to invest in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) because you are missing out on leads.
With a core data set of buyer behaviour, from Google Analytics for instance, we can easily assess and understand how important it is for a website to be crawled, indexed and discoverable via Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is a specialist activity suite that ensures your website appear in search engine results. The key services for website traffic optimisation are known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and we treat this type of digital marketing like a science. SEO is technical and requires large amounts of human labor to achieve success. It is an on-going activity that will always be required to increase domain authority against the competition. Search engines like Google and Bing crawl your website regularly, (the frequency depends on various elements) and each time it’s crawled the search engines index the website which will impact your rankings, and governed by the acronym SERPs – Search Engine Ranking Position.
All marketers and business owners need to understand what SEO is and how it works in order to get their website ranking well. It is a specialist function, but knowing the basics will help you to understand how you can get more leads from your website. If your website isn’t ranking for the search terms that relate to your industry, it’s time to invest in SEO, and COG Digital are SEO experts!
2. Lead Generation is Content Marketing.
Content is king – very simple. It doesn’t matter how attractive your website is, how well the UX delivers the journey path or how high the SERP is, if your website doesn’t have the premium in rich media content your visitors will quickly depart and give you a higher bound rate in your data set. That then becomes a costly mistake, especially if you are running Performance Marketing or Email Marketing campaigns.
Having only a few seconds to engage your visitors to read text, download a PDF for share an image will be increased via great content. The skim-read is a standard way new users will absorb your website content, a quick scan of subheadings and images will first be done to see if they page content is worth investing time in. Content Marketing needs imagery and media that is attention-seeking, it means headings that resonate with your visitors are imperative to transfer that skim-read into time on site and the long read. If you hold their attention you’ll have better chance at converting this lead. When developing your website copy, use language and terminology that your audience uses. this creates a brand conversation on the same terms that builds a relationship and proofs they are in the right place.
COG Digital recommend that each page on your website must have a specific objective for each content group. Put yourself in your customers shoes and work backwards from there, it’s not what you think it is, it’s what they think it is.
3. Lead Generation is Email Marketing
COG Digital are experts in Email Marketing. Our clients use our Sydney Digital Agency for their email marketing campaigns as our methodologies use strategy, innovation, technology, copywriting and savvy graphic design. We know that our clients email marketing campaigns are required to be deployed en-masse, at strategic times and be delivered to a sometimes global audience.
COG Digital rely on our technology partners such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor to ensure this happens. Email Marketing has been around a long time and is closely connected to CRM’s – though not to be confused. It’s a cost effective and a relatively simple method to communicate with customers and your audience. In order for it to work however, you need to take an editorial approach and regularly send out emails that are rich in information and news rather than sales messages.
Many SMEs make the mistake of thinking that email marketing is only for communicating with existing clients or people. In reality, you should be using email marketing in many different ways, to send targeted content to different contacts. Mailboxes are becoming clogged with junk email, and it’s getting harder to attract reader attention, therefore it’s vital to only use email marketing when you have something worthwhile to say or share.
The trend with email marketing is segmenting mailing lists and sending more targeted messages to readers. Marketing, in general, is becoming more targeted and can be used to retargeting lead generation tactics for instance.
Growing your mailing list and communicating with subscribers regularly should be 2 primary key objectives for every brand and business. Plus, all brands should be capturing contact details everywhere you can to ensure your mailing list continually grows. And, making sure to include share functionality in your email to increase referral, and to support exclusivity within the email community that is getting built.
4. Lead Generation is Simplicity, Mysterious Yet Critical
Ever noticed how the best brands and experiences are relatively simple? The best things are simple, and its a science, its not easy to keep things simple though remember, humans are fickle yet simple creatures at our core. Food, shelter, safety. Your website needs these elements to convert leads. Structure your website with simplicity at the top of the list. Websites and businesses with large content volumes go to extreme lengths to create neat and tidy simplified information architectures simply due to the need to convert the leads that come in.
If your website is not easy to understand and navigate, then your website traffic will not spend time trying to understand the messages and content it has put forward. With so many other options and competitors at a simple click away this is important to understand. A great website will carefully design the home page to be in clear sections and simple to understand and absorb, with links within a device optimised layout that are easy to navigate through. A journey scroll for the home page is great, with everything on your homepage, Google will love it. But it needs careful consideration to ensure it delivers the content in a strategic manner to nurture any leads that come in, a high bounce rate here will void the journey page strategy.
Think of the types of information people are looking for when they arrive, make that easy to find. Then from each additional page consider what other information a visitor may find useful – remember to up-sell and cross-sell whenever possible.A brands website needs to simply promote confidence, organisation and to be immediately received as a professional entity. A simple structure with headings and bullet points assist in guiding website visitors to the relevant information they are searching for.
5. Lead Generation Images That Will Engage
Content Marketing relies on impactful and stimulating images and are a great way of ensuring your business has a considered creative direction. Any brand worth its salt should also come with a Brand Guidelines and Creative Direction, and a Corporate Identity, so through-the-line marketing here needs to be adhered too. Colour suites and graphics can assist in a consumers connection, emotional branding is a strong element to consider and will also play a part in Lead generation and well it performs at an emotive level. Some website visitors will be visually stimulated, and others will read text, so the combination of both here is key.
6. Lead Generation CTA’s (Call To Action)
Your website is the best autonomous sales person. Any lead that comes in, should be converted by the website. lead generation is nothing without a powerful website. Every page on your website should contain a call to action that pushes the visitor to the next step in their user journey. This journey could include a email marketing newsletter sign-up, a Case Study PDF download, some free resource or content, or a form to request a call back. To nurture Lead Generation your website users should be guided to the next steps. Every website should collect email addresses and be helping you to grow your database for future lead generation marketing activities.
7. Lead Generation Events
Event as a Lead Generation strategy are great. An event can be seen as a tool at the beginning of the customers buying cycle when customised information is not necessarily required. A great way to engage with a new or warm audience is via events, as we’re no longer restricted to in-person events, in the advent of Covid, virtually we’re becoming more used to online event opportunities. Virtual web based events are growing in popularity and represent a low cost-effective way to engage your consumers and potential customers online. Obviously nothing beats a real live show, and it’s not as personal or as impressive as an in-person event, though when executed really well it can perform well for lead generation.
Providing event goers with forms to fill in or something to capture some metrics prior to the event and interacting with them during the event will ensure there is some data or results gathered from the event. In many sectors it’s getting harder to persuade people out of their homes to a live event, as it can be time-consuming and costly. For the most part, events function optimally as a lead gen exercise and opens up the potential for new customers to enjoy the opportunity to open dialogue directly with the brand or team in a open format and group environment. Successful events need consideration to ammenities, the presentation of entertainment, products and the broader experience.
8. Lead Generation Videos
COG Digital understand that potential customers will absorb information differently, some individuals like to read written word information, others are more stimulated to action from graphics while others prefer to open up spoken dialogue with someone. Video Marketing, however, can make a real impact to a wide audience, and with the mobile device functioning as a key element to almost everyones lives, video content as information is much easier to engage with and consume at home, in transit, at the desk or outdoors.
YouTube is a popular platform, and a good one to build a loyal following of potential buyers and it’s also a great tool for SEO. COG Digital creates engaging, tailored, bespoke videos which promote business and brands. Our approach to video and short film as branded content is unique, as we consider the existing brand assets and equity to ensure there is a common thread represented throughout the video project prior to production.
Online video media has achieved the most growth with the Business To Business audience in front of all digital channels. Its been assessed that 70% of Business To Business buyers and researchers are consuming videos throughout their journey path towards making a purchase.
YouTube is recognised as the second largest search engine in the world, with Google being the largest of course (though YouTube being owned by Google). It’s the third most visited site on the internet. Google recently released information showing that users are using YouTube to search on “how to” information. Google owns YouTube so it makes sense that Google will serve YouTube videos in its search results. There is no doubt that video is growing in popularity and will continue to do so. Young buyers now prefer to watch YouTube Vlogs and video content than watch television.
Including Video into your brands digital content marketing efforts is not easy, as video requires resources and time to create quality videos, though it performs. Marketing Videos on your website are an excellent way to engage your audience and work towards a larger on page time duration. Using video marketing on lead generation landing pages helps in driving conversions and digital marketing campaign success. A brand or service video is also to be considered as a powerful sales tool that can be utilised in presentations or product launches. And the almighty explainer videos are perfect opportunity to add an animated and entraining method to delivering what might come cross as transactional if used real people.
COG Digital are experts at finding strategies that meets your lead generation objectives using a methodology that is built specifically for the business and brand. And, to ideally add value for your recipients. Below are some creative lead generation concepts and ideas to generate activity on your marketing offers, email database lists, website, and to influence your conversion rates.
Our Sydney Digital Marketing team can identify when our clients are using one of these lead gen tactics and when they’re not working correctly. We assess messaging, call to action, key benefit statements and technical function. Our digital agency is expert at looking deep within the execution to audit potential flaws that may be a reason why marketing tactics have failed. Our Digital Marketing Professionals are continually looking to improve our clients results, that’s our single goal. If you’re looking for inspiration below are a couple of COG Digital favourite creative lead generation tactics that your brand could consider.
COG Branding is human first. Great technology and software requires intelligent humans to guide and manage how they are implemented. Our delivery of digital solutions have smart people at the centre, orchestrating tailored strategies that use a variety of applications to obtain efficiency and operate optimally for Australian small businesses. We offer both packaged products and customised services – because not all of our clients’ businesses are similar.
Our purpose is to give business owners more time, and to nurture opportunities through to success. Over time it’s become apparent that our skill is in being able to provide value when others are not able – and this continues to remain a core part of the COG Branding purpose.
COG Branding leads as a technology and small business consultancy and operates as a brand and marketing agency. Our team has a high digital literacy ensuring the solutions and services we supply small businesses and brands are the most appropriate for the business, the most innovative and commercially viable.
Our Sydney Branding Agency has two primary functions. The first is to deliver a dynamic consulting service to Australian small businesses, which includes the transfer of knowledge, advice and strategic processes that are purposefully built to make them more profitable, sustainable and enjoyable.
The COG Branding structure ensures we are providing brand, marketing and technology solutions for Australian small businesses that are underpinned by true value. Our approach is in large part due to the robust structure of our broader business model. It’s COG Branding’s mandate to continually push hard and assist Australia in becoming more innovative, competitive and prosperous.
We know you need a dependable professional brand and marketing agency to support your business. We’re focused on providing first class lead generation and digital marketing services, Where services are affordable, simple to understand yet deliver leads and perform well.
