When it comes to profitability, sales and leads, the name of the game has changed drastically in the past five years. Traditional marketing methods are become passé while technology requires a more targeted and strategic approach to increase organic leads online. Consider this: 91 percent of Americans unsubscribe from email lists, 44 percent of direct mail is never opened and 200 million people have put themselves on the national “Do Not Call” list. So what’s the answer to attracting your desired customer and target audience in our technologically advanced marketplace? Inbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing
We’ll start with the basics. Organic leads are website visitors that found your site through a Google search, social media or another referral route. In the simplest terms, if you want to increase your online leads, the first step is increasing website traffic. This is where inbound marketing comes in. We live in an age where content reigns and SEO and keywords play a huge role in your company’s online success. Through the process of creating quality content on your company blog you’ll begin to attract more qualified prospects.
When developing content, it’s critical that you keep your target audience in mind. What do they want to learn from you? What can you offer them? What are the keywords that they’re using to find you? Keeping your content educational, easy to consume and extremely targeted will help to break through SEO barriers and attract and increase your organic leads. Make sure you’re taking the time to develop a well-planned keyword strategy and monitor the ranks for those keywords. There are plenty of simple tools available online to assist you in determining the ranks of your keywords. Furthermore, it’s critical to remember to include these keywords in your blog content.
But how do you convert these new qualified prospects? Ensuring that you have developed a detailed conversion process to include effective and strategic CTAs, landing pages and offers will help to move your audience into the next phase of the inbound marketing funnel, and eventually into qualified leads and customers.
Social Media
Inbound marketing is designed to effectively attract customers to your product or service. But what are some of the other ways that your target audience can find you online? Social media can play a huge role in increasing organic leads and brand awareness. Just having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ can make all the difference when it comes to reaching your audience and helping them find you.
Of course, the quality of your presence can make a huge difference in driving organic leads and increasing brand awareness, as well. We recommend avoiding auto-generated content, and instead “pulling back the curtain” of your company with behind-the-scenes content and utilizing imagery as much as possible to better attract potential customers.
Additionally, creating high-quality videos for your YouTube page, and promoting them on various social media platforms, can make all the difference in your efforts to increase organic leads online. By 2016, online video traffic is expected to account for 55 percent of all consumer online traffic. YouTube alone receives more than one billion unique visitors every month. We cannot stress enough the importance of video to a successful digital marketing campaign. You’ll be shocked at how video can help to increase your organic leads online.
Increasing your company’s organic leads online can sound like a daunting task, but all it really takes is a well-developed marketing strategy to include inbound marketing techniques, video marketing and social media. We’re confident that if you take the time and appropriate steps to help your audience find you, you’ll notice a jump in the number and quality of your organic leads.
