By Eric Hammis, courtesy of 3Sixty Interactive
Turning visitors into leads is not a step, it’s a process that involves many steps. But it all begins with your content. Throughout the entire process, your content is what will keep visitors enticed and inevitable convert them into a lead.
The visitors to your site are at the beginning stages. It’s your responsibility as a business owner, or marketer, to take that visitor through an exciting, engaging sales journey that finishes with a conversion or a sale. How they get there is the process, and along the way, they will be engaging with your content.
Nurturing Your Visitors
You always hear about nurturing leads, but what about nurturing visitors? There really is no line that visitors cross that makes them a lead, so whether you’re nurturing a lead or a visitor is difficult to distinguish. But you should most definitely be nurturing both every step of their journey.
If you step back and look at the entire journey, you’ll see milestones that each visitor hits. After a visit to your site, they join your email list. Then they click on a coupon and finally purchase a product. If you’re really good, that customer will turn into a lifetime customer. This all comes with nurturing that visitor from the start to end. When you’re nurturing leads and visitors, you’re giving them exactly what they need.
Have Your Content In Place
Not only should you be creating great content, but you should have it ready. If you’re going to turn a visitor into a lead, you have to act quickly, or else you might lose that visitor. If a visitor clicks on a download, they best receive within a short period of time, or else, that visitor is long gone on to someone else.
This rule also applies to your email marketing strategies. You can’t create and send emails on the run. Instead, your emails should already be created and generated based on a visitor’s actions with your content. Then you set those emails on a schedule and let them do their work.
Don’t Just Sell, Educate
If all your content is just sales pitch after sales pitch, you’ll never get anywhere with your visitors. There’s a lot of hacks out there in just about every market, and people know this. So trust is a very important aspect of make a connection with visitors. If people don’t trust you, you can guarantee they won’t convert to a lead.
So rather than trying to sell yourself, educate your audience in order to build credibility. A great way of doing this is by having a blog. By writing strong blog posts, you’re showing that you are an expert in your market. This builds credibility for yourself and trust for your audience.
Content Is Everywhere
As I mentioned earlier, your content is there for every step of the buying journey. So it’s important to think about every little bit of content you are putting out there. Content is definitely something you don’t want to cut corners on because it’s your way of speaking to visitors and leads.