The 7 Secret Digital Marketing Solutions To Accelerate Your Lead Generation

With just two months left to go in the year, it’s time to start thinking about your strategies and plans for 2024. Typically, this process starts with looking back at the year. It’s likely that when you reflect on the performance of your digital marketing, you’re a little disappointed.

When we talk with CEOs, marketing leaders and sales leaders, most tell us they expected more from their digital marketing efforts. Once we start digging into what they’re doing, we often find missing ingredients that are contributing to their lackluster results.

We’re going to share the seven secret digital marketing solutions that we think can drive the best return on your investment in marketing.

1. Video

This might not sound like a secret, but it’s missing from almost every company’s marketing. You might have a few videos, but if you’re not creating at least one new video a month, you aren’t using this marketing tactic correctly.

Seven out of 10 people prefer to watch or listen than read. This means you need video as part of your marketing efforts, including:

• Video testimonials from your clients
• Video from people on your delivery team for sales to share with prospects
• Educational video content for prospects to download
• Video for your website and video to be embedded in your email marketing campaigns
• Video on your YouTube channel and on your social channels

The more video you have, the longer people stay on your website, the more they click around, the better they get to know you and the faster they feel connected to your company and your people.

Video has to be a cornerstone of your content marketing and content creation efforts.

The best way to get ahead of this is to create a video marketing strategy that outlines all the uses, the videos you need and the schedule for shooting, editing and releasing new video during the year. Click here to learn more about how exactly to do this.

2. Lead Nurturing

The concept of lead nurturing isn’t new, but again, it’s one of those tactics that we rarely see getting executed and done correctly.

The goal of lead nurturing is to keep the conversation going with people who are NOT yet ready to talk with sales. Effective lead-nurturing campaigns pull people through their buyer journey with you and, if done correctly, signal the person’s readiness to speak with sales.

The Square 2 team uses some lead-nurturing best practices that you should consider:

• Every online conversion offer should have an associated lead nurture campaign that triggers the conversion.
• That nurture should be contextual to their stage in the buyer journey, and the subsequent offers delivered in the lead-nurturing email should be used to encourage their buyer journey to continue progressing.
• The length of the nurtures should be aligned with the length of your sales cycle and the days each prospect might spend in each stage of the buyer journey. The longer the sales cycle, the longer the timing for your nurture.
• Don’t over-nurture. Don’t send 10 emails in 10 days – that’s too much for anyone. Consider your prospects. What would turn them off? What would be helpful? Our general rule of thumb is three emails with three days between. Again, longer sales cycles might be longer with more time in between.
• Make sure you track the success of the emails. Open rates are solid measures of engagement and the quality of your subject lines. Click rates are a measure of the effectiveness of the message and links in the email.
• After you have enough data to make some decisions, make sure someone is accountable and responsible for continually reviewing the data, making adjustments and reporting on the improvement in the key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with the nurture campaigns. 

3. Paid Ads on Meta

When it comes to paid advertising on social media, most B2B companies balk at Meta and lean into LinkedIn. This makes sense on the surface, but we’re here to report Meta is a viable channel for B2B marketing.

First, consider your persona. Most B2B companies want executives – CEOs or other C-suite or VP-level contacts. Data shows these people are on Instagram and Facebook.

While they are also on LinkedIn, the cost to advertise on LinkedIn is dramatically higher than on Meta. This makes it harder to generate good ROI on the LinkedIn ad programs.

The big secret here is to NOT rush to the late-stage buyer journey offers on either platform. Social media is generally considered by Square 2 and other leading digital marketing agencies as an early buyer journey platform.

This means your offers have to align. Consider Square 2’s offer: Sign up for an email newsletter to help you eliminate hit-or-miss marketing. That’s it.

Obviously, people who have challenges with their marketing are going to sign up, and that’s exactly who we want to be talking to.

When you align your offer with the correct channel and create compelling ads around issues people are having, you can drive a lot of leads with paid ads on Meta and LinkedIn.

If you rush to ask for the demo or the sales meeting, you can kiss your investment goodbye. It’s the wrong alignment of offers and channels.

4. Website Conversion Rate Optimization

Too many CEOs and even a lot of marketing leaders consider their websites as a set-it-and-forget-it marketing tool. This is a bad move.

Your website should be considered a work in progress. Every month you should be making an upgrade, update or optimization.

Consider reading this article: How Good Is Your Website at Generating Leads? 9 Questions To Uncover The Truth.

Your team should be regularly working to optimize your website in the following areas.

Organic Search Performance – Your site needs to rank organically and see month-over-month increases in organic visitors. One of the best ways to keep your organic search performance high is to continually monitor the health and performance of the site and as well as your rankings for important keywords, phrases and questions. Work should be done each month to deliver these optimizations.

CTA Conversion – You’ll need CTAs (calls-to-action) strategically deployed across your site. This is more than Contact Us, Schedule a Demo or Speak to a Sales Rep. CTAs are offers that educate, advise, guide and even entertain your visitors. The right offers have to be deployed on the right pages. The language and the design of these CTAs also must be on point. The better this execution, the more leads you’ll get from your site.

Landing Page Conversion – Find the landing pages with the most visitors and work to improve the conversion rates. Taking a page that gets even 100 visitors a month and moving the conversion rate from 10% to 20% will double the leads from that page alone. Do this on five pages and get the conversion rate to 30%, and you have a major win and major improvement in leads generated.

Domain Authority – The higher your domain authority, the better your site will rank, and you should be working to improve your domain authority over time. Here’s a domain authority checker to see how your site performs today.

Technical Performance Score – This lets you know how well your site is performing technically, and if you use these Google tools, it will give you some indication as to how technically proficient Google sees your site. This is critical in getting Google to rank you. High-performing sites rank higher, no question.

5. Chat

This new feature available on most websites can be turned into your 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week salesperson if you execute it correctly.

Leverage the bot capabilities to quickly screen visitors and answer their questions. Then collect their email address and build your contact database.

Finally, if it’s during business hours, route the conversation to your sales team and get a human to intervene, work with the prospect and see if it’s a legitimate opportunity or not.

People on your website right now would like to talk with someone. By engaging them with a tool like chat and leveraging your existing sales team, you can turn visitors into leads at a faster rate.

6. Referral Websites

Another little-known tip is to use other websites to drive perfectly targeted visitors to your website. These are typically known as referral sites or referral traffic.

To do this correctly, you need a very tight persona profile. Once you have this dialed in, you can find other website properties your target persona is already visiting, other blog articles they are reading and other emails they have subscribed to.

Next, do a bit more research to find out how active these sites are, including the number of visitors each day, week or month. Know the domain authority associated with the site. If you’re leveraging an email list, find out how many people are subscribed to the email. If you’re writing a guest blog article, find out how many people subscribe to the blog and how many views each blog gets on average.

The more eyeballs you get your content in front of, the more referral links will be driving new visitors to your site. Not only will you get more people coming to your site, but these backlinks signal to Google that your site has valuable content, improving your rankings.

7. Podcasting

I’m sure most of you are thinking that podcasting isn’t much of a secret. That’s true. But most people don’t really understand the value of producing a podcast regularly, and that’s why it’s a secret in my mind. The amount of value from a 15-minute podcast segment is massive.

In 2024, the name of the game is creating content at scale. That means high-value content that is relatively easy to produce regularly. It also means creating content in the format that people want to digest.

Remember, most people want to watch and listen rather than read. This is where podcasting and video come into play around content marketing.

In 15 minutes, you can create a podcast episode that also provides video for your website and YouTube channel as well as content for an email, a blog article and all your social media platforms. That’s content at scale, and this creates leads.