4 Data-Proven Marketing Upgrades to Get More Leads

Add These Now And You Should See A 20% Increase In Leads

It’s not so easy to get results from your digital marketing efforts. You invest time, money and energy, and you expect to see increases in leads and sales opportunities. Sometimes this happens quickly, other times it takes longer and, in some cases, it might feel like it’s never going to work.

After 18 years, well over 10,000 hours and definitely hundreds of clients, our team can quickly look at a program and identify what’s missing. Most of the time it’s a missing strategy piece like story, messaging or differentiation. Other times it’s missing tactics.

To help with the tactics, the team at Square 2 met (remotely, of course) and collaborated on a list of upgrades that we’ve seen work quickly to impact lead generation and sales opportunities.

Here are the upgrades you should be working on today if you want to see results tomorrow.

Upgrade 1: Turn On And Optimize Chat

We’ve talked about the power of chat before; check out our article “Chat And Conversational Marketing: Is It Mandatory?” We go into detail on why this has become such an effective tool and how quickly it can produce results.

Here are some research-backed stats on the performance of chat across industries. I just picked a few, but if you want more stats on chat, here’s a link to the SuperOffice article.

Today, more than 41% of customers expect live chat on your website. For customers that visit your website on a mobile device, this number is as high as 50%.

According to CrazyEgg, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat support.  

Plus, chat is a great way to bring visitors back to your website, as eMarketer discovered that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.

Kayako reported that 79% of businesses said that implementing live chat resulted in increased customer loyalty, sales and revenue.

Inflow noted that there was a 3.84% increase in conversion rates, with a 6% overall lift in revenue.

ICMI found that website visitors who engage with your company via live chat are worth 4.5 times more than visitors who don’t.

Forrester noted that there was a 10% increase in the average order value when reviewing the sales from customers who engaged in a chat before making a purchase compared to those who did not use chat.

If you’re thinking these are B2C-related stats, you would be 100% wrong. If you’re thinking that your business is too service-oriented, or this isn’t right for your business, consider that Square 2 just closed a new client for six figures directly from a chat I had with that client a few months ago.

This method of engaging with prospects to get anonymous visitors to your website to come out of the clouds and identify themselves to you is real, and it needs to be an active part of your marketing, lead generation and sales efforts.

Since I’m the Chief Revenue Scientist, here are more numbers.

Neil Patel reports that the average landing page conversion rate is actually pretty low (only about 2.35%).The top 25% of sites have conversion rates of about 5.31%, while the top 10% are at around 11.45%. (These stats are from WordStream.)

A chat study released by ApexChat revealed that “live chat can increase online leads by an average of 40%.” And that’s just an average.

To do some comparisons, most sites have a conversion rate of around 1%, so a 2.35% conversion rate is a significant improvement, and a 5% to 10% conversion rate would blow your lead generation numbers through the roof.

Quick math: If you get 2,000 visitors a month to your website and you usually get 1% or 20 leads a month, now you would be getting 47 leads a month at the 2.35% average, 100 leads at the 5% mark and 200 leads at the 10% mark. Enough said, right?

Ready to turn it on and start generating lead? Here is how to do it. First, you should be aware that the more website visitors you have, the more successful this is going to be. If you have 10,000 visitors a month, you’ll get more chats, more leads and more sales opportunities than if you have 500 visitors a month. Set your expectations realistically.

You want to use chat to get to know your prospects. You want to use chat to help prospects feel safe on your site and with your business. You want to use chat to get prospects to share their information with you, so you can learn quickly if you can help them or not.

In case you missed it, this is how you decide if they’re a lead or not, which is also how you start a sales qualification call, right? The motions and the copy for the chat bot are the same.

Start by asking questions, just like if you met someone new at a party. Here are some quick examples:

• What can I help you find on our site?
• How did you hear about us? (You can provide a list of possible answers.)
• Do you have any specific issues or challenges you need help with today? (You can provide a list of possible answers here, too.)
• Could you please share your email address and/or contact info? We can then send you some educational material related to your search and/or issue.

You helped them and you have a new lead. You could continue the conversation even more to see if they are a sales-qualified lead by asking them these questions:

• Would you like to schedule a call to talk about your issue in more detail?
• Are you thinking we might be able to help you with our services?
• When were you thinking about getting started?

You can do a lot of qualification with chat, so when sales picks this up, they are educated and aware of their issues, creating a remarkable experience with your company.

This is a very basic and introductory example. Chat can be complex and have many more questions and branches to take the conversation. It can be automated or manned by humans. Chat can contribute to creating a lead score and be different based on the pages the visitor is on while browsing your site. The options are almost limitless.

Now that you’re convinced, most marketing automation software (like HubSpot) offers chat, as do standalone products like Drift. If you want to talk about chat for your company or need help, let us know.

Upgrade 2: Add One New And Innovative Late-Stage Buyer Journey Offer

On to the second most successful upgrade that can be added quickly to almost any company’s website. This tactic is especially good at generating sales-ready leads because it’s designed to do just that.

It’s possible you might not understand the language here. Late-stage buyer journey is used to describe prospects who are deep in their search and ready to make a purchase or hiring decision. To learn more about this, check out this article on the Cyclonic Buyer Journey™ or this article on the Evaluation Stage of the Cyclonic Buyer Journey. This is where buyers typically engage with salespeople.

Most companies we talk with make a big mistake here. They provide these types of offers for people deep in the buyer journey. For example, “Schedule A Demo” if they’re a software company. Other examples include “Talk To A Sales Rep,” “Free Consultation” or the always creative “Get A Quote.”

I know that’s what you want. You want to talk to people who want to see the software, want a quote and want to spend time with you. It shows they’re serious and not tire-kickers.

But in all honesty, do they want to take the time to do this with you? No, they don’t. How do you feel when you’re on a site and you see these offers? Are you dying to talk to a rep, get a free consultation or get a quote? No, you’re not.

If those types of offers aren’t good, then what should you be offering for people late into their buyer journey?

Here are some examples.

If you’re a software company, your offer should be “30-Minute Requirements Review Session.”

If you’re an accounting firm, your offer should be “A No-Obligation Tax Reduction Analysis Session.”

If you’re a concrete finishing firm, your offer could be “Send Us A Picture Of Your Floor; We’ll Give You 5 Ways To Bring It Back To Luster.”

If you’re a safety products company, consider offering “A Free Safety Audit Of Your Shop Floor.”

If you sell medical products, you can offer “A Free Purchasing Review To Identify Up To 5 Savings Ideas.”

I could do this all day. These offers all have something in common. They provide value to the prospect. While you will use your sales team and they will work to qualify the prospect and quickly identify if there is a real opportunity, they’ll also deliver the value outlined in the offer.

The result will be more people wanting to talk to your salespeople, and in those conversations you’ll find more sales opportunities.

You’ll find some other benefits in this approach. First, you can turn this around in a day. Create the details of the offer, build your landing page, create a call-to action (CTA), put the CTA on your website and you’re ready to go.

Next, make sure your sales team knows what you expect from them. Make sure they know how to deliver the value you’re offering, and help them transition from those conversations to lead qualification questions.

Make sure they understand responding quickly is key. The faster you get back to people, the sooner you schedule your session and the better the experience, the more sales opportunities you’ll generate for your company.

This upgrade works every time and it’s one of our go-to tactic upgrades for clients that want more sales-qualified leads and more sales opportunities.

Upgrade 3: Optimize Your Top-Visited Landing Page

Here’s another easy one. Take a quick look at your list of landing pages in your marketing automation platform. Rank them in order of visits over the past 30 days, or if your business is seasonal, change that view to visits over the past 90 days or even for all of 2020.

You can get this, right? If you can’t, then you desperately need to consider installing a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, Marketo or SharpSpring, because this data should be at your fingertips. Today’s marketing, lead generation and sales development must be data-driven. If you don’t have data or don’t have access to the data right now, that’s something that should be solved, too.

But I digress.

When you get your list, look at the top-visited pages. What are the conversion rates on those pages?

Our clients typically see landing page conversion rates between 10% and 20%, with some pushing 40% and the best-performing pages in the 60% range.

Once you’ve identified the top-visited pages and you know their current conversion rates, here’s what you can work on today to improve those conversion rates tomorrow.

Almost every landing page has similar components, and these are where you’ll focus your energy. Those components include the headline, secondary headline (usually), page copy, form and image of your offer. Some longer landing pages might also have a few testimonials or social proof to support the value of the offer. But generally, that’s what you have to work with.

When it comes to working on the upgrades, try to do just one landing page upgrade at a time. This will help you realize how the upgrade contributed to improved results. If you change more than one component at a time, you could see improvements, but you won’t really know which of the changes contributed.

Headlines have to be clean, clear, disruptive, emotional and compelling. Sometimes we switch the secondary headline with the primary headline.

Copy should have bullets and should clearly focus on the value delivered.

Your form should be short, and if the page is for the early buyer journey, extremely short (potentially limiting it to just asking for their email address).

Make sure your image is big and bold, and that it clearly shows people what they’ll be getting when they receive your offer.

You might even have to consider adding the social proof we discussed above as well.

Even small changes, which take minutes, can have a big impact.

Back to the numbers: If you have a page that gets 100 visits a month, and you go from a 5% conversion rate or five leads to a 20% conversion rate, that’s now 20 leads for a 400% improvement. Wow!

Do this on four other landing pages, and you went from 25 leads across all five pages to 100 leads across all five pages. Again, wow!

Sometimes small changes can produce big results.

Upgrade 4: Set Up And Run A Facebook Ad Campaign

For our last upgrade we’re going to spend a little bit of money and get proactive. All of the other upgrades have a lot to do with optimizing your current visitors, using your current website and creating content or offers to converts visitors into leads.

This upgrade is about going after prospects.

Facebook has one of the most powerful targeting engines on the planet, and almost every one of your prospects is probably on Facebook, even if you’re a B2B business. Why? Because you sell to people.

According to Facebook, one billion people are on the platform.

In that number are the people you want to do business with, and the Facebook platform allows you to create an audience, push advertising to those people on the platform and then get them back to your website.

There are two types of audience creation methodologies you can use on Facebook. There are custom audiences that you create based on people who have visited your Facebook page, visited your website or watched a video.

Then there are “look-alike” audiences based on the data that Facebook gets access to, like your Facebook page fans. Then they go out and find people who look similar to those people and you serve up ads to those people, too.

Once you have the audience targeting done you have to move on to the offer, ad creation and budgeting.

Don’t make the offer general and don’t go too deep into the buyer journey with your ad offer. Remember, these people don’t know you yet. You want to date before you ask them to marry you.

Consider using one of your early buyer journey offers or one of your new late-stage buyer journey offers.

Now that you have the offer, let’s work on the ads. First, you’ll have limited space for copy, so you have to be smart about your headline and message. Try to be direct but disruptive. Remember, you’re competing for eyeballs with other ads and other content on the platform.

You’ll want to create and test a number of ads. We’ve learned that the one we like isn’t always the one that performs the best, and this is about performance and data, not opinions.

We typically recommend three ads to start. Test them and see which one performs the best, then pause the two weaker ads in favor of the strongest ad.

Since we’re talking about ad testing, you want to test your budget, too. Don’t go all-in with your budget out of the gate. Instead, test your ads and then go all-in with your budget. This means you could get started with a couple of hundred dollars.

Once you have data on the ad, offer and landing page performance, put your money into the campaign, and you can be sure of optimal budget performance out of the gate.

I mentioned this but didn’t talk about it specifically: You don’t want to send people from your ads to your homepage. You want to send them to a dedicated landing page. This is for tracking purposes, but it’s also for performance purposes.

You need to create a safe and seamless experience for people who click on your ads. If they’re looking for something specific but instead you send them to your homepage, they’re going to bounce.

Again, if you have the assets, campaigns like this can be set up, funded and launched in a day. Results can start coming in immediately, and you’ll know in a week if you have a campaign tactic worth investing in or one worth working to improve performance before you go all-in.

Before we wrap up, all ad campaigns don’t work. Sometimes people just aren’t interested in clicking on ads no matter what they say, what they offer or how much money you put behind it. Don’t be discouraged; just move on and work on a few of the other tactics.

We learn more from what fails than we do from what succeeds.

These four upgrades are hands down winners. They’re proven and tested with companies big and small, in all different kinds of industries. These are all upgrades that you can probably make on your own, but if you need help, we’re here to assist.

Bottom line, these need to be in your portfolio of marketing tactics if you’re looking for more leads, sales-qualified leads, sales opportunities and new customers.