What Are Leads and Why Do You Need Them
Traffic generation is not everything when it comes to promoting your blog. Page views, likes and comments are great, but they are only one indicator of success. You need to attract users who’ll become potential customers, converting traffic into leads.
Leads are users who show a noticeable interest in the product or service that you promote and offer an opportunity for feedback by subscribing to your newsletter, signing up on your website, filling in the contact form, etc. By collecting emails of interested readers, you’ll have a base of potential customers, minimize marketing expenses to cover a larger audience, and turn your website traffic into money.
How to Get Leads on Your Blog
To attract leads, you need to provide valuable content and incentivize the audience to share their contact information with you. Below, we’ve gathered 12 great strategies on how to get leads for your blog.
1. Assess the Current Lead Generation Process
First, you need to check how well lead generation works at the moment. Analyze the conversion funnel that a potential lead passes: Are all the stages well-optimized? Do you have enough content to attract new leads? Are there signup forms in place? Do you send a follow-up letter upon registration? To reveal how different stages of your funnel perform, set up conversion tracking. Tools such as Google Analytics allow you to set different goals like page views, visit duration, etc. and then see results in the reports.
2. Optimize the Conversion Path
Now, you can improve the weak parts on your conversion path. For example, if you get a lot of page views and only few signups, it might mean that your contact form isn’t appealing, has too many fields and questions, isn’t mobile-friendly, or even goes unnoticed by the majority of users.
It is very important to correctly set goals for each stage and deliver accordingly. For instance, on the awareness stage, your content should only educate the audience, while at the latest stage of the funnel, texts actually aim to promote the product. You should clearly understand what your user’s intent is at each stage and incorporate it in your content marketing strategy.
3.Use Ctas
One way to encourage an interested visitor to stay connected is by turning leads into sales with CTA buttons. Call to action elements are usually a contrasting color, located in a visible place, and encourage visitors to take a specific action. For example, CTAs may encourage visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, register on your website, or get free analytics data. Find 20 great CTA ideas for your blog in our post.
4. Offer Exclusive Content
To incentivize users to sign up, offer exclusive content in return for registration. It can be a deeper analysis of the market, a newsletter with the best deals from the advertiser, discounts, and so on. Here are some more ideas on how to leverage different content types and get more leads:
- Checklists (10 things to do before you travel)
- Charts and graphs
- PDF files
- Videos
- News
- Interviews with niche experts
- Infographics
To get the information, the user will have to leave their contact details, which will increase your subscribers database.
5. Hold Webinars
Another lead magnet is conducting webinars. It helps establish yourself as an expert in the niche, educate your audience, present the product you promote, and collect a significant number of emails at once.
The main advantage of webinars is their interactivity. The audience is involved in the process. They can ask questions, communicate in the chat, offer suggestions, and so on. Webinars are great for building trust with a future customer, which positively affects the lead generation process.
6. Offer Discounts and Free Trials
Who doesn’t love freebies! Encourage your website visitors to sign up by offering them a coupon, promo code, special offer, or discount. Thus, you will enhance the likelihood of generating more leads and even solve the problem of how to convert leads into sales.
Many advertisers provide special deals and coupons for promotion, so make sure to follow updates from your affiliate programs and explore available tools.
7. Add Live Chat
Live chat allows clients to contact you or your team directly and ask questions. It’s a great lead generation tool which helps understand client’s preferences and goals and then target them accordingly. Some chats require visitors to fill in their contact details before asking their question, so you can reach out to them later.
Make sure to indicate your working hours, when users can contact you through the chat. Otherwise, they’ll expect an immediate response any time they open your website and leave disappointed if they don’t get it.
8. Send Newsletter
What should you do with sales leads? Stay in contact by sending leads a newsletter. Email marketing is old-fashioned, but it’s still a great way to reach out to your audience. Thus, users will get your latest updates, the best deals from advertisers, or blog posts right in their mailbox. You can also attach files of different types, for example, if you want to share infographics, charts, and so on.
Here are a few tricks to increase the number of your subscribers:
- Put a subscription form in a visible place.
- Describe in detail the topic and content of your newsletter. For example, “Be the first to know about discounts on flights to Spain!”
- Minimize the number of fields on your form. The more users have to type, the less likely they are to do it, especially on mobile devices.
To get the best of email marketing, be sure to personalize your mailing or segment the audience to target it better.
9. Retarget
Retargeting is a great tool for converting leads. This is an advertisement aimed at users who once visited your site and didn’t complete the action. With the help of retargeting, you remind them about your offer. It’s also important to regularly update the ads you use to cover a wider audience.
How does it work? You segment visitors depending on their actions on your site and show relevant ads. For example, users who read a post about holidays in Spain, will be shown an ad with vacations in Madrid.
10. Promote Your Blog
Never stop promoting your blog and reaching out to new audiences. Blogging is a great way to leverage content marketing, and the more traffic it gets, the more potential leads your business might get. Here are a few suggestions on how to optimize and promote your site:
- Build a link profile
- Generate content
- Improve SEO
- Set up advertising
- Regularly audit your site
- Promote on different platforms
11. Create Surveys and Quizzes
Surveys and quizzes help engage the target audience and, if done correctly, generate new leads. You can either create surveys to get to know your audience, help them decide, for example, on a destination, or simply entertain visitors. In either case, the survey should be appealing enough to make users leave their contact details to know the results.
Here are a few ideas on how to leverage surveys and quizzes:
- Make the survey visually appealing. Use bright attractive buttons and contrasting image blocks.
- Offer an incentive in return for filling out the survey. It can be a discount, promo code, access to exclusive content, a chance to win a prize, etc.
- Ask users for an email in return for getting the quiz results.
12. Run Contests
With the help of contests, you can collect a large lead base in a short time and increase user engagement on your site. The reward can be anything relevant to your site niche, from a discount or promo code to a physical prize—whatever you feel your audience will like. Check out your competitors’ giveaways and contents, if you are clueless about prizes.
Keep in mind that contests may bring you plenty of leads but not all of them will actually be interested in your business. Make sure to target the right audience with your contest—focus on quality of leads rather than quantity.
How to Nurture Leads
Increasing your subscriber base is only one part of the whole promotion process. It’s also important to manage leads. According to stats, 96% of website visitors are not looking to purchase just yet, so nurturing them is essential if you want to generate sales. Only systematic and properly structured work will help you increase your revenue.
1. Follow Up in Time
According to research, if you follow up with potential customers online in less than 5 minutes, you increase your chances of making a sale by nine times. The content of the response letter will depend on the lead nurturing strategy in general, and on the request for which you received the user’s contacts. For example, if a user signed up for a webinar, send them the link to the webinar, and so on.
2. Personalize
One lead nurturing best practice is to personalize the mailing. Segment the existing leads into different audiences—by gender, age, geo, interests, the most relevant categories—and target these categories accordingly.
You can collect data about your visitors through different ways such as:
- Surveys and quizzes
- Completed registration forms
- Saved data on the site, as a traffic source, UTM-tags, visit time
3. Use Different Channels
For better results, it is worth combining several communication channels. Email marketing is a traditional lead communication channel, but with an average email open rate of 21.33%, you still need other means.
Depending on your audience, leverage social media, advertisement, push-notifications, and search engine optimization for the promotion of your blog.
4. Give More Content
A vital step in the lead nurturing process is to regularly upload relevant content, so that they return for it over and over again. To make it easier, develop a publishing frequency for your blog, so that readers know when to expect new posts, and diversify your content, using different types such as:
- Infographics
- Slides
- Videos
- Checklists
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- How-to guides
- White papers
- Case studies
- Reviews, and more.
How to Get and Manage Your Leads
To generate leads, you need to provide content valuable enough to encourage people to subscribe to get more. In order to succeed, it’s vital to optimize your conversion path at every stage. Make sure you upload relevant content and leverage different channels, place subscription forms in a visible place, and nurture your leads afterwards. With the tips above, you can get the ball rolling and start capturing leads in no time!
