Lead generation or Demand generation is the process of attracting and converting suspects (people/ businesses who are interested in your product) into prospects.

As previously discussed in Marketing Qualified Leads vs. Sales Qualified Leads article there are 2 types of leads – sales and marketing ones. 

Lead generation’s goal is to attract potential clients and turn them into customers. To do so, you need to identify the interested sides in your product and nurture them through marketing campaigns and convert them with effective sales strategies.

Leads can be created for list building and segmentation of your customers, newsletters and various processes that will eventually generate a sale. They can come organically from owned channels, earned channels, or paid ones.

Earned channels are the hardest to achieve. Here clients/ media are brand ambassadors and recommend your product without you paying for it. Owned media is important for brand identity. Paid channels are all the campaigns you set for advertising. You should not count only on paid media as the line of sales here tops at the beginning and starts going down and down afterwards.

Among the best channels for generating leads is email marketing, as well as content marketing, search engine marketing (SEM) and organizing events. Search engines drive traffic to your website that also can be direct, paid one, or a web referral. Direct traffic is believed to be the most popular online channel for lead generation as it is organic which means that the person behind the search engine intentionally searched for your company/ products which makes him more potential for future sales.

If you are a marketeer, you need all the information for a customer that will help you improve the demand generation of the company. One of your main points is to work with databases and manage them to the moment when leads become sales. Databases can be really weary. With the presence of Customer relationship management (CRM) tools and systems, they become something really beneficial for every business and funny to work with – something otherwise boring to process.

For best results in marketing campaigns, CRM systems help at every step of the marketing funnel. 

Where do we start?

Let us say you are an emerging company. You have no clients’ database and have to set up a campaign in order to convert. The best thing you can do at first is to set a CPM (cost per mile) campaign that brings awareness for your brand and products. With CPM campaigns you lack a target audience and potential customers segments. An example of such a campaign is a billboard ad or a magazine ad. A minus is that you cannot measure the success of such a campaign. But it is your first “stop” on the long way to generating leads.

Another good way to bring brand awareness is to use CRM systems that research and collect information from potential customers automatically, help in the organization of events, blog articles, webinars, direct mailing, and social media posting easily. 

Social media posting usually includes carousels, banners, infographics, videos, gifs, stories and articles. Facebook for example is good for targeting people by liked pages and the paid ad there is not determined by bidding as it is in Google.

What comes after awareness?

Interest comes when you have already created awareness among the potential customers of your business. CRM systems deliver practices that surround a successful implementation with more engagement rates, positioning of the product/ service, targeted content and classes. If you already know the interests of your potential customers, you can start sending more personalized content. 

At this part of the funnel you start measuring different data from your campaign. Here you can see how people respond to your publications/ marketing assets by the clicking rate, visits and interactions.

Investigating…

Consideration for a client in 2021 is basically a lot of research and review reading. Automation tools assist marketing teams to showcase product info, email marketing, case studies and free trials. If a potential client hasn’t come close to purchasing – send him a newsletter with additional value, or interesting facts on topics related to your products, or a short free trial/ demo of them in order to convince him it is the right solution to his problem.

CRM automation tools come to help with the content marketing campaigns and the newsletters’ design and optimization. We have to note that content could be hardly measured since its purpose should never be direct sales. People do not like to read advertising content articles – they like to digest useful information and eventually buy any of your products. 

To buy, or not to buy?

Here we are – a few steps from purchase but still not there. Marketing automation has to assist the marketeers with product demos, specials, shopping carts, sales ads, to nurture the stream.

Thank you for your order

A conversion! You did it! But does that mean you end your relationship with this customer? Of course not. First of all you must have a well-optimized checkout process. The more possible integrations of payment methods your system supports, the more are the possible ways to purchase. Contemplate this matter when looking for an automation tool for your business.

AI powered automation and loyalty

CRM systems are able to help you generate loyalty in the after-sales process. The goal is to convert clients into your brand’s advocates ready to defend your name. Loyalty also means long-lasting relationships, thus leading to secure conversions.

CRM systems’ AI abilities could help you improve the user experience (UX) and the user interface (UI) of the company’s presence as well. Companies should strive for a better presence both in online and physical space. 

With an intelligent system, you can quickly receive results on the most qualified leads and the most appropriate marketing technique based on the lead’s characteristics. With smart software, you can avoid wasting time on the wrong leads while focusing your efforts on the most promising ones. AI-powered CRM tools recommend the best marketing strategies per lead to maximize conversions. 

Predictive analysis in your CRM also uses your current and historical data to find similar leads that may be interested in your products and services but have not interacted with your business. With proper AI-automated predictions, you can focus your marketing activities exactly where you have to. This will increase your company’s attraction and additional value.

There are some CRM systems that are more complete than others and have a more powerful influence on the success of your marketing strategy. In the next article on the topic we will inform you on how to improve lead generation and which are the best software systems to do so. Stay tuned! 

Today every business goes digital chasing new markets, more clients and stronger brand positioning. When planning for their company’s digital journey many marketers and brand managers use common tactics and apply one and the same techniques for positioning different products, services, and brands. However, every business owner would tell you that they offer a unique value proposition and that standard best practices for promotion may not always apply in their case. 

Digital marketers need to understand that every piece of communication, every message, call-to-action, design, ad, or email, needs to be tailored to a specific audience having in mind the stage in the user journey, the value they get and the goal of your business. But how to guess which ones would work best for your campaigns? Well, you can’t. And this is why you need to rely on A/B testing.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing in digital marketing & sales is the approach of experimenting with two or more variations and combinations of campaign elements – design, content, or audience. The purpose of A/B testing is to make you stop guessing and take data-driven decisions in regards with your targeting, budgeting and message to the right group of users. Ultimately, by means of A/B testing you are supposed to discover the best settings for your marketing campaigns and achieve conversion rate optimization. Below are some of the most popular A/B testing tools that will help you do it.

Most popular A/B testing tools you can rely on

1. Google Optimize

Within the Google Marketing Platform you get a set of tools that help you perform split testing or A/B/n testing. You have A as the original page and B or n as a given number of copies with one or more elements modified as variations. These could be colours, CTAs, arrangements, etc. Varian B could even be a completely different version of the original page. 

The best thing about this tool is that it is free and also offers Multivariate tests that experiment with two or more elements simultaneously. The user interaction with them is monitored and analyzed to identify the best performing combination of your content elements. Google Optimize also offers redirect tests that are often helpful when you publish a complete redesign of a given page and test it against the original one. 

2. Omniconvert 

A/B testing is part of the platform, commonly known as a CRO tool. You could perform tests on mobile, tablet or desktop pages, and take additional advantage of survey tools, personalization, and segmentation tools.

Talking about segmentation, you can combine it with A/B testing and experiment on additional factors such as geographical location, user device or behaviour, traffic source, and many more. Unlike our previous suggestion, Omniconvert is paid. However, you can always book a free demo to make sure that it offers the right tools for your online business. 

3. Convert

This is a bit pricy option for enterprises which has proved its value for some of the biggest brands worldwide. The tool comes with a wide variety of testing and experimenting options and offers advanced segmentation features based on events on your website. Additionally, it offers valuable insights and reporting that can help you better analyze your data and find ways to optimize conversions. One more benefit from Convert is the integration you can have with popular third-party applications such as HubSpot, WordPress, Shopify and many more. 

4. Freshmarketer

Another good option to validate your website’s messages, design, and ideas and to boost conversion rates. The tool is intended for testing landing pages and stands out with its feature allowing for tracking the revenue that each and every experiment brings. Freshmarketer enables integration with Google Analytics and also adds a split URL testing tool that helps you experiment with variations of your pages. A useful feature might be the heatmaps added to every version and the option to turn the most successful variations into real pages.  

5. Optimizely

One of the most popular tools and platforms for designing unique digital experience for users. Optimizely helps you take data-driven decisions and experiment with multiple elements on your website, even on dynamic one. The idea of the creators is to offer a great level of personalization and customization at every touch point the user has. This is why we can trust the team that Optimizely comes with a full set of features needed to build the best performing variation of a page on your website. 

6. VWO

The tool is intended for large enterprises and offers a complex set of features and integrations. The well-known A/B tests, split URL tests and multivariate tests are part of the brand’s solutions for running complex experiments and setting up various tests in no time. VWO stands out with its reporting dashboards and SmartStats features that ease you in making decisions and adjusting your digital campaigns. 

7. Crazy Egg

Businesses rely on Crazy Egg due to its simplicity and the option to set up A/B tests with no coding experience. What you need to do is to add a snippet of code to any of the pages on your website that you want to experiment with. The tool will be monitoring and analyzing the performance of each variation and will send more users to the winning one. The platform tends to have more popularity among small and medium-sized businesses. 

Bonus tool: Adobe Target

With this tool you can go far beyond experimenting with your website and run A/B tests on your other channels. Actually, you can A/B test your whole experience, including images, copy, UI, and more, to find the winning experience. The rigorous testing approach in Adobe Target is designed to test multiple variations across web, mobile app, IoT, and more on both the client and server sides.

Looking for ways to drive more organic traffic to your website? Growing your audience is crucial for the success of your business online, for building a strong brand, and for engaging your target groups of clients, partners, and other stakeholders. Unlike driving visitors to your physical location, getting more traffic on your website is much easier and affordable, but also time-consuming. Here are some good ideas how to do it:

Focus on content creation

Your content strategy must aim at engaging users, educating them about your business and products, building and promoting your brand, and increasing your value proposition. Currently, the best performing formats include:

• Video content – 86% of businesses with online presence have relied on video content formats across the web as part of their digital marketing strategy. For IT businesses, telecoms, and software companies, for example, explanation videos turn out to be a great way to describe their products and services and to demonstrate their advantages. Another good reason to use video, especially on social media, is to present your company culture or entertain your audience. In fact, the number of people watching webinars, Instagram and Facebook stories and Tik-Tok videos has been growing dramatically in the past years. On top of this, YouTube has turned into the second biggest search engine after Google. Do you need any more facts and figures to start working on your next video right away? 
• Blog posts – Articles on your blog will keep being one of your most powerful tools for user engagement and a booster for your SEO. Write about topics that relate to your brand and concern your target audience. Remember that the purpose of your blog posts is not to sell your service, but to engage readers and establish yourself as a trusted partner and a source of useful information in a given field. 
• E-books and whitepapers – How many times have you downloaded a PDF file with exclusive content on a certain topic? Did you manage to engage deeper with the business that produced it? For sure, your audience will value additional content that you create for your most engaged followers that shares more insights and knowledge in your field of expertise. 

Do your job with on-page SEO

You will never have 100% of the SEO factors under your control. On-page SEO, however, includes all these that you can influence to improve your ranking on search engines. 

• Content – it must be optimized for user searches which means it needs to bring useful and quality information, natural keywords usage, and a combination between texts and visuals.
• Structure – make sure your website could be easily scanned by search engine robots and that it has logical structure of URL addresses. Add a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap to ease the indexing process.
• Code – you need to help search engines read and visualize your content better. Make sure you put the right titles, headings, meta descriptions, and alt tags to all the elements on your pages to guide search engines and help them better understand your website. 

Make sure you get covered with technical SEO

The effort put so far would be pointless unless your website performs well enough. In 2021 your search engine ranking depends a lot on the following factors:

• Website speed – loading time is crucial for the quality and ranking of your website. Users tend to wait less and less which means that they will leave a web page in just a few seconds if it does not load. Speeding up your website goes through many stages and depends on factors such as the quality of your code, size of your content, web hosting solution, server locations, and many more. Thank to PageSpeed Insights by Google you can check whether the speed of your pages is good and what corrective measures you could take to improve it. 
• Website security – search engines make sure that they deliver content to users that is safe and reliable. A must-do in this field for you is to offer secure connection and browsing on your website via SSL certificate, as minimum. For years now, the https protocol enabled by this certificate is a ranking factor for Google and other search engines indicating that a website is safe for users. 
• Responsive design – does your website load perfectly on any device? Currently, mobile traffic exceeds desktop traffic which means your pages must appear on mobile phones and tablets and look fine. Apart from being crucial for attracting and engaging users on your website, this is also an important ranking factor for search engines.

Optimize for voice searches

Very soon, users searching with voice will be much more than those typing on search engines. Even now, over 40% of people do at least one voice search per day, according to WordStream.

Will voice searches change the rules of the game? For sure. Just think about the long questions we ask Alexa or Siri in comparison with the short phrases that we type on search engines and that are key for traditional SEO. If you want to retain and grow the user base on your website you will need to take into account the organic traffic coming from voice searches. 

Keep an eye on analyses and reports

The key to consistent growth of the number of users on your website is to identify all your best-performing channels and traffic sources. If you know that you are getting most of your website visitors from social media, then you may decide to leverage your social media strategy instead of investing in SEO. Or just the opposite. Google Analytics is one of the free tools that are fundamental for analyzing your website’s performance, the behaviour of users, traffic sources and user flows. It will help you better understand whether your digital marketing strategy is driving results and whether you need to put more effort in a certain field.

Having in mind the most essential ways to increase organic traffic to your website it is now time to focus on improving your website’s performance, engage users with content that is also optimized for search engines, and to keep measuring your results. At Brandanizer we can help you build the right marketing strategy to get the most out of your marketing and branding efforts. Get in touch with us right away! 

In digital marketing, your key most important indicator is called “conversion rate”. Even if you do massive marketing campaigns and achieve impressive results such as traffic to your website, awareness for your brand and products, or minimal cost-per-click, this will have little meaning for the business. Unless you drive enough conversions. In this article, we are diving deeper into the meaning of conversion rate and giving you some proven strategies to optimize it.

What is conversion rate?

Conversion rate is the result of your marketing efforts with the greatest meaning for you as a marketer, salesperson, or business owner. Simply said, the conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete the final step desired by you in your marketing campaign. This could be finalizing a purchase, completing a registration form, signing up for an event, etc. You can calculate the conversion rate by dividing the total number of visitors who land on your website by the ones who convert. 

Is your conversion rate good enough?

Good conversion rate depends on numerous factors – from your website design and performance, through the planning and execution of your campaigns, to the copy and the value of your offerings. And you should bear in mind that conversion rates vary significantly across industries. Recent data by Statista tells us the average conversion rates in the biggest industries worldwide for 2021. If you just discovered that yours is not good enough, then you might keep on reading to learn about some best practices for CRO. 

How to optimize conversion rate (CRO)

Marketers may give an endless list of possible actions you can take to optimize the conversion rate for your web pages. We are giving you the top 7 of them that are tested by HubSpot and give proven results.

1. Run A/B testing on your landing pages

Landing pages play an essential role in your digital strategy since they help you move users to the next step in their customer journey and engage strongly with your brand. A good approach for optimizing landing pages is to run A/B tests with variations of your copy, designs, layout, images, etc. Then, monitor which variant performs better and gives you a higher conversion rate. 

Read more: Top 5 Landing Page Builders that Will Help You Convert More Leads

2. Identify best-performing blog posts and optimize them

You can turn blog posts into one of your most powerful weapons for driving conversions. Just pay attention to any of your posts that drive significant traffic but do not lead to purchases, registrations or subscriptions by the user. Identify ways to optimize CTAs, add content and link to additional materials (whitepapers, case studies, etc.). 

On the other side, as a best-case scenario, you might have some blog posts that generate both high traffic and good conversion rates. Use them as part of your SEO strategy and update them regularly to keep them on top of the search engine results. 

3. Include messages on your web pages with the most conversions

It is very likely that the pages from your website with the highest conversion rate are those with your product descriptions or your pricing plans. Being at this step before the acquisition, customers might have questions or uncertainties about some features, benefits or pricing that may stop them from converting. What you can do to prevent it is to add live chat and messaging options on certain pages to enable the opportunity for direct communication between users and your team. Thus, you can make sure that you will minimize the number of leaving users and abandoned carts and optimize your conversion rates. 

4. Back to blog posts: Add text CTAs 

A great idea to increase conversion rates of blog posts is to try adding text-based call-to-actions as part of the post. Despite being a popular strategy for content marketers, adding CTAs to articles often gives poor or no results. Have in mind that today users avoid clicking on banners or rarely reach the end of a blog post where usually call-to-actions are placed. HubSpot’s test shows that users respond better to text CTAs formatted as H3 and H4 headlines within the main blog post’s text. 

5. Try adding lead flows 

Those are the high-converting pop-ups that appear on different web pages and blog posts with special discounts, limited offerings, or something else. They are designed to attract users’ attention and can significantly increase your CTR bringing more conversions.

6. Identify the most common lead flow of your own users

Users will come to your website from different traffic sources and will go through various steps before converting. Monitor their behavior and interaction with your website and identify the most common flows that turn them from leads to marketing-qualified leads. For example, leads coming from your newsletter might be converting more than those from your PPC campaigns. In such a case, what you need to do is to ease and optimize the process for the first ones to drive conversions faster with fewer interactions. 

7. Focus on remarketing

Those, who know your brand and services, are a few steps closer to a conversion. This means you must include remarketing in your digital strategy and retarget users who have been on your website on Facebook and on the Google Search and Display networks. Have in mind that today users may need much more time and many more interactions before making a purchasing decision than you think. Your retargeting campaigns will make them recall your product and come back to read more, compare, and, finally, to convert. 

CRO for your brand

As a takeaway, remember that marketing strategies for conversion rate optimization may vary across industries and depend on the position of your brand on the market. Being a full-service marketing agency, we at Brandanizer help IT businesses within the process of planning and executing their marketing strategy and driving more conversion for the business. Learn more about our expertise and get in touch with us. 

The need for website redesign or renewal comes in every two or three years with the changing trends in web design and the increasing demand of users for a better experience, website speed and performance. For businesses, this means constant efforts put in optimization and updates. 

The website renewal process might turn into both a chance to fix certain technical issues and a threat to cause new ones if done in the wrong way. Here is why careful planning of the process is essential for ending up with a website that offers a better look, functionalities, and speed. Here are the most important steps that you should never skip:

Redesign the User Experience

Now is the time to think about the users and plan for a whole new experience for them on your website. Starting from its technical performance to the design of the last call-to-action button everything should look and work great. When thinking about how you can improve your website pay attention to:

• Creating user-friendly design – on average, users spend around 3 seconds on a webpage before deciding whether to continue browsing a website. This means 3 seconds for you to prove that your site is easy to navigate on and the design attracts the attention of your users, clients, partners, or other website visitors. 
• Making the website responsive – this is not a recommendation. This is a must since more than half of the traffic will come from mobile devices. Make sure that you plan the redesign of your website in such a way to make it responsive for any kind of mobile and desktop device. 
• Creating and updating your content for your users – think about who they are and customize your content to respond to the needs of your own clients and partners. Do not try to flood your content with keywords because this will not boost your search engine ranking.

Consider Link Paths and Redirection

It is very likely that after the launch of your website you have added new pages, categories, and menus. Usually, such an update contradicts the initial plan for your website when you were looking at the big picture, but now you need to adapt new content to your old vision. This often leads to improper link paths or even broken links. The time to avoid issues like this one is when you plan for your website renewal. At this point, you can decide to change certain categories or menus of the website which requires a redirection of the old links. 

First of all, think of a link path that responds to your users’ needs and your business offering. An example of customer-oriented site could be the structure leading users in the following way: 

Homepage – Service offering – Additional information – Contact form

Simple, but effective. Try it and you will notice an increase in customer engagement and conversion rates.

The next step is the redirection of old and broken links to the new ones. Usually, you will need it when your page is moved to a new location, you are changing your domain name or you need to remove and delete a page. In such case, you will need to do the so called 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect leading users and search engines to a new URL address. It should be done in a specific way not to damage your user experience and the way your website is being indexed by search engines. Take a look at the complete 301 Redirects guide by SEMrush to learn when and how to use redirects for your website. 

Don’t Forget the SEO

Think about your SEO before your website renewal and this will save you time and efforts for optimization at a later stage. This is an ongoing process and at this point, you need to consider:

• How keywords have changed
• How competitors use keywords
• How search engine algorithms have changed and what they give most priority to

Have in mind that work on your SEO brings long-term results rather than a quick magical increase in your brand awareness, website visitors and conversions.  

Create a Sitemap 

Having gone through all the previous steps, the time comes to do the actual mapping of your website. You want to help Google navigate and find all new pages, don’t you? Then you need to plan and create a sitemap that will help your most important content get indexed on search engines. Without a sitemap, this will be nearly impossible to do and you will not be able to link your old content right on your updated website. 

It is extremely important sitemaps to be created for new websites, very big websites with many pages and sites with large archives. Let’s take a look at some of the best XML sitemap generator tools recommended by SEMrush that can ease the process for you:

• Slickplan – this is a visual type of sitemap generator tool that is highly customizable and allows users to work on the visual representation of the hierarchy of pages on their website. 
• Mindnode which is actually a mind mapping tool used to plan a project in a visual way. However, its functionalities allow for the visual planning of website sitemaps that could be exported in basic text formats and a PDF version. Mindnode is an app for Apple devices and has a free editor version. 
• XML-Sitemaps is a classic sitemap tool that comes with both free and paid versions with good SEO features included. The tool can also detect some broken links on your website so that you can fix them. XML-Sitemaps has also a mobile app.
• XML Sitemap Generators for WordPress – in the past these were always needed as additional plugins until version 5.5 of WordPress came with the XML sitemap function. However, you can still continue using the popular Google XML Sitemaps, Yoast SEO, or XML Sitemap Generator WordPress plugins to help you generate a sitemap for your website. 

Once you are done it is time to submit your sitemap. Google offers some great guidelines and opportunities to do it as easy as possible – link. 

You Are Not Done

Renewing your website is a never-ending process. Progress in web development, new trends in digital marketing, new business environment and the evolvement of industries will require constant changes updates. With new technologies, users will become more and more demanding and less likely to engage with a website that has a poor design, speed and functionalities. For you, this means keeping an eye on trends and being able to react on time.