Inbound marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.
The truth is, inbound marketing takes time - it can take a minimum of six months to see significant traffic increases from inbound marketing and HubSpot suggests that around 93% of companies see lead increases in around seven months.
But don’t worry, there are things you can do make an impact early on - it’s all about having a goal in mind and thinking about the small steps you can take that require minimal effort but deliver a high impact.
So without further ado, here are seven quick wins that will help boost your inbound marketing efforts and deliver more and better qualified leads in 2019 and beyond:
- Install leads flows
- Add CTAs to high traffic pages
- Review forms
- Launch a bot
- Turn existing blogs into content offers
- Collate content in high converting pillar pages
- Gate content you’re giving away for free
1. Install lead flows
Lead flows - or pop-up forms - are a great way to create engaging lead capture forms.
A quick way to boost conversions is to use your existing offers, such as a download or blog subscription, to create a lead flow on relevant pages on your site.
The best thing is, using software like HubSpot, this process is incredibly easy to achieve - no developer work is needed and they can work on any website. All you need is a form on your website and lead flows will do the rest.
You can customise how your lead flow looks and behaves without any coding, such as styling your pop-up box with an image, defining a color that matches your brand, and customising the text. With HubSpot you can choose between three main types of leadflows:
- Pop-up box: attention-grabbing and best used to promote social channels, grow your email list, and provide the most valuable content you have
- Dropdown Banner: best used to promote a timely offer (i.e. a sale, webinar), or grow your blog subscribers
- Slide-in box left/right: best used to promote your content or grow blog subscribers
You can also set triggers for when the lead flow pops-up, for example when a user spends a certain amount of time on the page, when they scroll down halfway down the page, or when they go to exit the page. The perfect combination depends on the visitor’s journey and your goal.
2. Add CTAs to high traffic pages
Your first step to increasing conversions is to identify where the highest source of traffic is landing on your site.
Companies that take on a structured approach towards conversion optimisation are more likely to see a large increase in sales.
You’ll likely find it’s often your homepage, your "About" page and maybe one or two of your most popular blog posts where you’ll see most of your traffic is landing. These pages are where you should focus on optimising for conversions.
Your next step to is to design effective calls-to-action (CTAs) for each page, depending on what action you want your visitors to take. For example, on your homepage, you may want to place CTAs that prompt visitors to sign-up, log in, or learn more. Whereas on a blog page you may want people to download an ebook or subscribe to your blog.
Ensure you CTAs stand out from the page, and are placed where people naturally look on your website. For example, according to an eye-tracking study, our natural eye path starts in the upper left-hand corner of a website and moves on from there in an ‘F’ shape.
Also consider creating special offers specifically for your most popular pages, and gate them behind landing page forms.
3. Review forms
You might be generating leads, but are you capturing the right information to qualify them? Could it be that your marketing team is misaligned with sales?
For example, do your sales team need a phone number to follow-up with leads? Or will putting a phone number on the form put people off? Should you be using progressive fields that capture further details about your contacts that will help you sell to them?
As well as asking the right things on your forms to better qualify leads, think about how your forms can be optimised to improve conversions. For example, consider that shorter forms usually means more people will be willing to fill it out, so you’ll generate more leads. However, the quality of the leads will be higher when visitors are willing to fill out more form fields and provide you with more information about themselves and what they’re looking for.
Another way to improve conversions on forms is to change the copy. A study by Unbounce revealed that using the word “Submit” as your form CTA copy, reduces conversion rates by around 3%.
4. Launch a bot
A chatbot can be an incredible tool that enables you to collect information about new visitors on your site without forcing them to convert on a form and connect them with helpful and educational information.
For bots to be successful, you need to know who visits your website and who your messages should be targeted to, so you can provide your visitors with a helpful experience.
For example, putting a bot that asks, “Would you like to schedule a demo?” on a blog page will be bad user experience for casual blog readers and existing customers. Whereas you’re more likely to get a response from someone on your pricing page who reads the message “Want to know more about our pricing structure?”
5. Turning existing blogs in content offers
Gated content - or content offers - is any content which can only be access once a website visitor has provided lead information (e.g their email address).
To save time creating new content offers from scratch, you might want to consider repurposing existing content such as blogs, into a gated offer by combining multiple, small pieces of content on similar topics into a cohesive collection.
As Hubspot’s flowchart suggests, the best gated content is both valuable and shareable, and not too self-promotional.
6. Collate content into high converting pillar pages
If you’re thinking ‘what is a pillar page?’ HubSpot editor, Sophia Bernazzani, does an excellent job of summarising below:
"A pillar page is the basis on which a topic cluster is built. A pillar page covers all aspects of the topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. Pillar pages broadly cover a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth."
Not only does this linked series of pages and posts indicate to Google that you’re an authority on that particular subject - resulting in higher rankings, it will also help answer the questions on the mind of your prospective buyers, leading to more conversion opportunities.
So if you’re not yet using pillar pages as part of your content strategy, a great way to start is to collate all your existing content (your cluster-content) on your chosen topic and create a single pillar page. This page will cover all aspects of the topic you’re trying to rank for, linking to the more detailed blog posts (your topic clusters).
7. Gate content you’re giving away for free
In much of the same essence of tip #5, it’s all about identifying any content that you can easily turn into valuable offers to your readers as a way to capture their information in return for the content.
So if you have any educational eBooks or brochures that are ‘free’ to download, why not gate this content by putting them behind a form instead?
Got any top tips you’ve implemented in your marketing campaign that has driven quick results? Comment them below - we’d love to hear them.
And if you need any advice on how to implement any of these ‘quick wins’ or help on how to boost your inbound marketing efforts, get in touch with one of our inbound consultants today.