To get leads or contacts that are interested in your product or service, you can implement different digital marketing strategies that generally consist of generating relevant traffic to your website. Once people are on your website, it is necessary to use a tool such as a contact form, a chat app, or a WhatsApp button, for example. Finally, it is important to measure which traffic source is generating more leads at a better cost to make an efficient distribution of advertising investment.
How to generate web traffic to get leads
The main strategies you can use to get clicks to your website and get leads are Google Ads Search Network, Google Ads Display Network, Community Management, Facebook Ads and SEO. The strategies that involve pay per click campaigns (Google Ads and Facebook Ads) are short-term, and you can get results in the day, while those that are long-term (Community Management and SEO) require more time. For example, SEO results can take 6-12 months to appear, and building a community of social media users takes time and effort.
Google Ads Search Network
This strategy allows you to appear with text ads in Google queries that you choose, in the geographical area that you choose and pay per click. There is no minimum investment and you can determine your daily investment. The position of each advertiser is determined by your maximum bid per click (You can determine this value for each query) and your quality score (Metric that indicates how relevant your ad is to the user). In the following link, you can see in more detail how Google Ads works. The advantage of Google Ads is that you can determine exactly the searches in which your ads appear. In this way, you ensure that the users who enter your website for which you are paying, are interested in the product or service that you offer. This is very important when it comes to getting leads since we want not only the number of leads but also quality.
Google Ads Display Network
By running Google Ads campaigns targeting the Google display network, you can appear on millions of websites and apps with image and video ads. Some of the most effective segmentation to achieve results on your website are:
• Users who have already visited your website (Remarketing) in a certain period (30 days, in general).
• Keyword targeting, in which you show ads to users who are interested in certain queries, or who are browsing websites or apps whose content includes the text of those queries. Although Google Display Network segmentations are not as precise as the Google Ads Search Network, in which we accurately determine the queries in which our ads appear, the Google Display Network usually has less competition, and you can get better costs per click.
Facebook Ads
To get leads using Facebook Ads with ads that appear on Instagram and Facebook we have two options:
• Carry out website traffic campaigns in which the user enters a web page and leaves data.
• Carry out Facebook lead ad campaigns in which, when clicking on the ad, the user has displayed a form with certain fields that you choose (Name, Email, etc.) that the user automatically completes with the data that is saved in its Instagram or Facebook account. Facebook Lead Ads have the advantage that the cost per acquisition of the lead is usually lower than in traffic campaigns since the lead is easier to obtain because the process is shorter and more automatic. On the other hand, it often happens that being so automatic, low-quality leads are generated from people who did not enter the web page and do not understand what the product or service offered is. Regarding traffic campaigns, although the leads tend to be more expensive than in lead generation campaigns, they are more valuable. Since people entered the website, they generally have more information about the products or services provided.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Ranking at the top of Google without ads is a method that can be very effective to get website traffic since approximately 95% of people skip the ads and go directly to the organic results. However, this takes time and work, and the results are long-term.
Some of the most important factors when it comes to achieving SEO ranking are:
• The number of links to your website from other good quality sites (with good authority) that are related to your industry.
• Your website’s loading speed, and metrics that measure user experience like bounce rate and average session time.
• The match between the queries in which you want to rank with the <title>, <h1> and <h2> tags of the web page you want to rank.
Community Management
Having a community of users and publishing content regularly on social networks such as Instagram, Linkedin, Tik Tok, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Youtube, is another means by which you can obtain web traffic and generate new leads. In any case, this strategy takes time and work, and the results are not generated immediately. Of these networks that we name, Linkedin and Tik Tok are the ones that have the most organic dissemination, and allow us to reach a lot of people generating valuable content and interacting with users with profiles similar to ours (following, commenting, sharing and liking).
Tools to get leads on your website
The most used tools to capture leads on your website are forms, chat apps, or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger buttons.
• Forms are usually used on contact pages, in pop-ups that appear the first time you open a web page, or on landing pages whose objective is to complete a certain form. It is advisable to strike a balance between requesting relevant information in various fields, but without making the form very long and cumbersome.
• Chat apps often have a form that must be answered before starting the chat session, or become a form when there are no operators to answer the chat, and the chat is offline. In general, the user is usually asked for data (Name, Email, Telephone, etc.) before starting a chat session through a form, or through an automated chatbot that asks a series of questions.
• The WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger buttons have the advantage that they provide a good experience for the user, who directly contacts a company representative, using a method that he usually uses to communicate on a daily basis. The advantage that forms have is that they allow you to obtain Emails that can be used for Email Marketing, which is a high return on investment strategy. It is possible to integrate the forms in contact pages, landing pages, pop-ups or chat apps with an Email Sending platform so that the obtained leads are stored in Email lists used for mass mailings. It is possible to personalize these Emails by greeting each contact by its name in the text of the email and in a video added in the email. Most Email Marketing platforms allow you to customize the text in the email, and there are tools such as Pirsonal, which allow you to create personalized videos for each lead, in which the lead is greeted by its name, or in which there is a reference to a certain field that was completed in a form.
Also, although the forms are a little more uncomfortable for the user than a WhatsApp button, they provide data that can also be useful to filter leads obtained and focus on those of better quality.
How to measure results obtained with tools to get leads on your website
Regarding the measurement of results, actions such as completed forms, chat starts, or clicks on a WhatsApp button, can usually be measured with Google Analytics without having to resort to a developer. When a form is completed, for example, and the user comes to a thank you page, the process is easier. On the other hand, if this does not happen, as in the case of a WhatsApp button or a chat app, the tool used has to generate events that are registered by Google Analytics. However, most are configured in this way, to facilitate the measurement of results.
Google Analytics allows you to measure which of all your traffic sources is more effective and generates more conversions at a lower cost, which allows you to distribute your investment more efficiently.
A very useful functionality that many chat apps provide (Pure chat, for example, which is free), is to show the URL from which a certain lead opened a chat. If this URL has Google Analytics parameters, we can identify which digital marketing campaign a user that ended up hiring our services came from, for example. This is very useful to optimize our advertising investment by measuring not only the number of leads and cost per lead but also the quality of Leads obtained. For example, if “John Williams” contacted our company using a chat app and ended up hiring the service, we can find out which specific Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or Email Marketing campaign John came from.
This is a guest article by Pirsonal Partner Javier Chapto (Marketing Director at DigitalNow)