Lead generation and 19 quick wins

Building an inbound marketing lead generation strategy can take time – time that more often than not companies or agencies simply don’t have.  A traditional inbound marketing strategy includes persona workshops, competitor analysis, web design and build, keyword research, and that’s before we even mention content creation.  These things are critical to the success of inbound but getting it done takes weeks, not hours.

But, sales want leads now!

It could be a few weeks or even months before your stellar inbound marketing strategy begins to generate results.  But the sales team are an impatient bunch so giving them some quick wins not only helps with the sales forecast, it also establishes confidence that inbound marketing is going to work for your business.

It’s the same for marketing agencies, clients come to an agency for results so it’s important to begin to work towards their goals as early in the relationship as possible. The key here is undertaking small tasks throughout the relationship that can generate big results.

What is a quick win?

Quick wins are those that deliver the highest impact with the lowest resource requirement.  Quick wins are:

• Goal-oriented: the ‘quick wins’ tasks you put in place must contribute towards your inbound marketing goals. No goals? Establish these first – see some SMART goal examples
• Bespoke but systematic: unfortunately there isn’t a button you can press to kick off the lead generation process, however, it tends to consist of a number of separate tasks that have a small but immediate impact. Combined, the tasks are effective at giving a quick win
• Time to value is short: low effort to high impact
• Not difficult to set up: there’s no need to book a technical resource to get you up and running. Your quick wins should all be possible within your inbound marketing platform

The framework for assessing if a task is a quick win:

19 Quick Wins

As mentioned above, the quick wins you deploy are aligned with your inbound marketing goals.  What is the greatest need?  Traffic? Leads? Customers?  Here’s a selection:

Traffic boost

The following are quick wins to boost website traffic:

• Use your team to amplify your social posts.  Your employees are an invaluable resource, you can leverage their social networks by providing them with ‘lazy’ tweets.  Social media amplification tools such as Haiilo allow you to curate social posts and distribute them to your employees to forward to their social network. Make your posts go further! 
• Paid ads. The need for an immediate impact is all the justification you need to obtain a budget for some pay-per-click (PPC) advertising via Google Ads or for some dedicated ads for social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn
• Repurpose content. Creating new content takes time so instead, repurpose some of your existing content and repost out to your social channels and email database

Generating more leads

The following are quick wins to boost website lead generation:

• Page exit lead flows. The proportion of visitors bouncing off your web pages is high. You can increase the chances of them sticking around through the use of page exit lead flows. These are popups which appear when the visitor is about to depart your site. If they haven’t seen what they were looking for, offer them something different
• Add CTAs to high-traffic pages. Do some quick analytics to see which pages/blogs are getting the most traffic. Do those pages have CTAs on them? If not, add one
• Review your forms. It’s always good to check your forms. Do they work? Are they appealing enough? Are there too many fields?
• Launch a bot.  Install ‘Conservations’ (chatbots) on your site. You can be specific too, and choose specific bots for specific pages. Bots provide a huge opportunity to convert visitors. Initiate a chat and you’ll be surprised how many people start chatting back
• Turn existing blogs into content offers.  Would any of your blogs drive visitors towards new offers or services? 
• Combine or collate content into high-converting pillar pages. Pillar pages are great for helping to generate leads with high SEO qualities and high value to the readers. Combining related blogs into a valuable pillar page can give you a boost
• Gate content. Add CTAs and forms before giving away valuable content you were previously offering for free
• Track video usage.  Tools such as Vidyard provide usage information which can be integrated back into your CRM (many integrations available)
• Share landing pages directly on social media.  Cut corners by directing people directly to your offer landing pages from social media

More customers

The following are quick wins to boost customer conversions or up-sell opportunities:

• Get an email out ASAP.  Email your leads directly and individually
• Activate Sales notifications for returning customers. Your sales team will receive a notification anytime selected contacts or companies visit the website
• Build a lead scoring system. Lead scoring can help you determine how sales-ready your current leads and customers are by weighting certain content more heavily than others
• Create quick ‘BOFU’ offers. Offer your visitors something irresistible for free. Create a ‘BOFU’ (Bottom of the Funnel) offer – essentially, a landing page with a form for the user to sign up to get the offer
• Retarget current customers. Is there another service your existing customers might be interested in?  Does your current client base know everything you do?
• Slice & dice your database. Have you been through the process of segmenting your contact data?  Some basic analysis of your data can reveal insights you were previously unaware of and opportunities for acting upon them
• Ask for testimonials from current customers. Testimonials provide evidence that your product or solution works. Adding these close to the conversion points on your website will give confidence to new visitors

Conclusion

We call these “quick wins” because they allow you to begin delivering a positive return on the marketing investment as quickly as possible. The quicker you can reach the goals you helped to set, the more likely you are to establish a longer-term buy-in from the rest of your business.