There are five important concepts that are the cornerstone of a successful digital marketing strategy. Businesses lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because of a misunderstanding of those concepts while simple they can have a profound impact on your go-to market strategy.
Understanding and deploying those concepts will effectively help you generate a continuous stream of qualified leads and convert more of those leads to business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo8LqMhz05g
Content is any piece of article, landing page, video, or email you produce with the intention of reaching your targeted audience.
Two mistakes that small and medium businesses do especially when they are starting. The first mistake is that they focus a lot on advertisement. They want to sell their services and generate leads very quickly and that is counterintuitive.
What you really need is to create content that achieves two objectives: first, establish your authority in that line of business, and second, add value to your audience even if part of that value is giving up free information or free value. The objective is that not every customer sees this content will become a client. A percentage of them will convert to customers.
The second mistake that a lot of small and medium businesses tend to make is that they are not consistent and continuous. When you start producing content, there is a process of optimization and figuring out how to create that content which will be explained in details in this post.
You can reach your targeted audience through different channels, some are very well known such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. On the other hand, there are also smaller channels.
Yes, you can reach to your ideal customer through the big channels, however those channels are expensive and time-consuming to organically generate leads from those if you are going the organic way versus the paid advertisement.
You can generate leads for your business by considering smaller channels such as Google groups where you may find your ideal customer profiles by asking certain questions or sharing information.
One of the major things that you need to do when creating your digital marketing strategy is to define your Ideal Customer Profile ICP.
Defining your ideal customer profile will determine the channels that they are in, the content that you will produce to establish your authority as well as add value to them. Examples of an ICP include customer title, company size, etc...
If you are working on a smaller marketing budget, it would be so confusing to use multi- channels.We have seen many small and medium startups spend their energy getting channel deals. The problem is that this effort gets diluted as it takes time to figure out who are your audience, your Ideal Customer Profile and which channel should you start with to interact with them.
Our advice to you is to focus on one channel to make your campaign success to generate leads and convert them to customers.
If you are adding value, you are establishing your authority over what will happen and you are reaching the right audience, you start generating leads and it's important to be able to capture all the leads that you generate. We find a lot of small and medium businesses don't have a centralized lead management software that automates the capturing of those leads.
It is very important to have a centralized lead management software that can automate the capturing of lead from all method of contacts whether it's chat, website form, email, phone call or whatever other sources or mediums available to capture those leads.
Once you start generating leads successfully, you are able to convert some of those leads to appointments and then to business. It's very important to establish what we call conversion ratio.
What's conversion ratio? basically, the rate at which a website visitor becomes a lead.
When you are doing marketing, you get in front of people. Those are called views or impressions. Views and impressions could be your Google ad or a a post on LinkedIn.
So, for example, let's say you are hoping to convert a percentage of views to clicks or visits, and once they visit your website or landing page, some of them will interact with you by filling out a form to share their contact information. Once they do that, then they become leads. A percentage of your visitors will become leads, and then you will go through a qualification process.
Sometimes leads don't fit your ideal customer profile and the type of business you work with which means they are not qualified. A percentage of them will be qualified, and then there is a conversion ratio from leads to qualified leads.
Once you have qualified leads, you need to start interacting with them, and most probably this would be through appointments. Not every lead will convert to an appointment.
A conversion ratio is when you are able to convert number of leads to new customers and being able to establish an accurate percentage of conversion from each stage in this funnel to the next. This is extremely important especially when we start talking about customer acquisition cost.
The last concept is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), so what's CAC? It's the cost of sales plus the cost of marketing over new customers acquired, and both of those concepts are connected together. Why? Because if I'm spending ten thousand dollars in season marketing even if that generated ten leads but I was able to convert one lead to new customer, then my new customer or my customer acquisition cost is ten thousand dollars.
It's very important to understand what's the customer acquisition cost and once you start understanding that and actually when you start doing advertisement out of time or for digital marketing, the customer acquisition cost will be at the higher end but then once you understand your conversion ratio it's a continuous optimization process where you see where are the conversion ratios as at a lower end and you try to improve it.
Maybe you are able to generate qualified leads but they are not converting to appointments and appointments are not converting to new customers. What we notice with our customers is that even a small percentage increase in conversion from one stage to another can mean a dramatical decrease in customer acquisition cost which in turn will improve your profitability.
A website is a medium, especially for small and medium businesses. A website is a medium to deliver content and capture leads. A lot of small and medium businesses get disappointed because they build a website thinking that they will start generating customers and then find out that is not the case.
Actually, a website without a digital marketing strategy is like a store in the middle of the desert without channels leading to it. Digital marketing strategy is where you are building roads and channels to reach to your store and actually the content you produce is kind of the advertisement or the way you lure in those customers on that road to reach to your store.
Some websites don't need channels. Some websites grow big enough where they have enough viral effect that they get almost 95 percent of their traffic without relying on any channel. And for small and medium businesses, it's really hard to reach that stage. Yes, it's possible, but it's really hard to say I can get customers online without relying on any other channel.
Here, we will show you a demo on how to set up channels as well as read lead tracking on LeadCenter.AI
In the setup menu, you will notice that you have lead capturing under lead capturing. You will have mediums you can set up sources and then you can assign the various mediums that get attached to those sources. So, for example, when you click on medium here, you will see all the existing mediums or the known mediums that can be used to capture leads, that's email redirect, phone call redirect, website forms, offline chat, Zapier calendar csv upload which is manual as well as Redtail which is a CRM for financial advisors.
When you click on for redirect, you will see all the lead sources. For example, the phone numbers or the virtual phone number that we redirect to the business number to capture phone call leads.
Another example, when you click on email redirects it will show you the emails that assigned to those channels or sources and any email that get forwarded to this email will show up under this channel.
If you start running an Omni channel or a multi-channel campaign strategy, it is extremely important to be able to know which channel is generating the best amount of leads and the maximum amount of qualified leads and the customer acquisition cost per channel. So, the first thing of course you want to do is to set up lead sources for all the channels that you are working on.
Please click here to watch the demo.
Please feel free to reach out to us at support@leadcenter.ai. If you have any questions or if you need help both with lead generation and configuring your lead management software you can call us also toll-free at 888 291 711
