Beyond the Landing Page - Advanced Lead Generation Strategies

How well are your landing pages converting visitors to qualified sales leads? Do you even know? Assuming you have metrics at your disposal, what are your conversion rates? 5%? 10%? 20%? Better? If you've converting leads at 20% or better, you are doing pretty well by most standards. What if your results aren't that good? What can you do to jumpstart your landing pages?

There is no Bill of Rights for landing pages, and they are not all created equal. It's critically important to go beyond a single landing page concept, using advanced lead generation and analytics techniques to capture the interest and convince your visitors to convert to leads and eventually to become loyal customers.

Tracking the almighty attention span

As you no doubt know, you have about 30 seconds to grab someone's attention and convince them to convert on your landing page. Start with a strategy by answering the following questions:

• What's the "hook" for your visitors when they first glance at your landing page. How do you grab their interest in less than 30 seconds? This starts with effective calls-to-action and/or online ads with a great punchline. On the landing page itself, stop talking about your company and start talking loudly about how to solve problems that matter to your target market.
• The offer itself is key. If you're offering me something I want for free, you have my attention. But, I still need to be convinced that this isn't a waste of my time.
• How do you convince the visitor to surrender even basic contact information? This is where effective landing page design is crucial. Your mission in a few headlines, a minimal amount of text, a compelling image and a few bullets, is to make signing up a no-brainer.
• If someone signs up to receive content, how do you convert that person from a lead to a customer? Do you cold-call them immediately or nurture them over time with more content?
• What is the best way to test and analyze the results? You need to know how well your site content is working from the initial visit all the way down the sales funnel to repeat purchases.

Developing an advanced lead generation and analytics program

Don't assume that your inbound marketing efforts will be successful. Test your ideas and analyze your results. Analyze visitor behavior from website (or other marketing vehicle) to landing page to sign-up form to confirmation page and beyond. Offer more than one problem-solving idea via downloads, videos and webinars. Promote them with different methods and perform A/B testing on different landing pages to find the optimum design and content. Give your tests some time to develop, so you can obtain reliable data and trends.

After you've tested your ideas and analyzed the results, it's a good idea to leverage what you've learned with:

• Social media campaigns and advertising
• Search engine marketing (paid search campaigns)
• Mobile marketing campaigns via location based services and texting
• Outbound marketing campaigns to opted-in leads

Drive these campaigns to more advanced lead analytics landing pages and test their conversion rates.

Over time you'll develop a comprehensive marketing strategy rather than a hit-and-miss approach.

Remember that the web is not a "field of dreams". If you build it, they may not come and even if they come, they may not convert. When a potential customer arrives at your landing page, make the most of it by creating and implementing an advanced lead generation and analytics plan. Learn from your visitors and give them what they want.

Photo credit: Elmira College

Learn How to Audit Your Own Website