Predicting How Lead Generating Websites Will Change in 2022 [eBook]

Table of Contents

Forecasting for Lead Generation Website is Dynamic

 

In the world of forecasting, you nearly always have perfect backward visibility, though you may not really understand what just happened.  Lead generation websites are probably one of the most dynamic types of websites out there.

 

Data Driven Marketing Forecast 

 

Looking forward, the further a forecast reaches out into the future, the more likely the forecast is to be wrong.  In the world of marketing, forecasting what is coming is always a dynamic, ever changing task.  The world of marketing and marketing automation has been changed forever with the advent of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence systems.

 

Lead Generation Focused Marketing Strategy

While there are many possible marketing strategies out there, we want to concern ourselves with those marketing strategies that designed to generate qualified leads and ultimately, turn them into sales.

 

What Do We Mean by Generate Leads?

This is often the first question new clients who have engaged us to provide lead generation services ask us.  That usually means getting people to provide their contact details, such as first name, last name, email and phone number.  They usually provide this information in exchange for some form of valuable marketing content.  Ultimately, according to Hubspot, it is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company's product or service.

 

Email Marketing - Workhorse of Lead Nurturing

Getting someone to provide you a bit of information in exchange for some marketing content, such as an ebook, benchmark report or even in exchange for running specialized interactive calculator, is usually only one step of many that a lead will take before completing their journey through your sales pipeline.

 

Lead nurturing driven by emails that walk your contacts, step-by-step, through each of your carefully designed content offers, is key to making a lead generation website payoff.  That's why you have to think carefully about the design of your marketing funnel.

 

Email List Quality - Paramount Importance

While many companies spend considerable time and effort to acquire leads, including their emails, maintaining the quality of those email list is one of the never ending task that must be carried out by the marketing team.

 

While there are many email service providers out there, getting your email into someone's inbox is no easy task.  That why optimization lead generation forms are so critical to get right.  You must implement the right validation strategy to ensure you get legitimate emails from potential customers, while not being so strict with your email opt-in strategy that people don't opt-in due to friction.

 

Email List Hygiene Best Practices

Just acquiring someone's email is just the first step to good email list hygiene best practices.  Once a contact is in your contact database, you must take positive action to ensure people who are not interested in receiving your emails do not.  You also must use a list segmentation so you are sending out the right emails to the right person, at the right time.

 

When you're dealing with a contact database that has millions of contacts, implementing an effective list segmentation strategy is critically important.  

 

Lead Hygiene is Critical to SMS Success

For many business, SMS messaging continues to drive sales.  It turns out, almost everyone will look at an SMS message.  However, for truly spectacular sales results, Those SMS messages work best when they are sent in response to contact behavior on your website.  

 

When you combine emails sent to highly engaged contacts, and provide them with an easy way to message you, meaning they are opening up that channel of communication with you, you operating on whole other level marketing effectiveness.

 

Content Optimization System

Given the ever increasing demands of both Google for faster, more responsive websites, and your leads demand for more relevant content, the need for a content optimization system has never been more apparent.

 

But just what does that mean when thinking about lead generation focused websites?  Well, in the case of a Hubspot hosted website, it means having the ability to deliver the right content, at the right time, with contextually relevant messaging, at blazing website speeds.

 

Measurement of Conversion Rates - Real Time

A key requirement of both marketers and sales managers is the ability to measure conversion rates in real time.   Hubspot Marketing Hub helps you measure and improve each of your content offers, campaign-by-campaign.  It is one thing to know that a conversion happened, it is entirely different to know how each stage of your funnel is converting.  

 

Knowing the conversion rate of each offer is critical to prioritizing your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) efforts.  Not unsurprisingly, it is also usually a key piece of information that clients need in order to make content investment decisions based on performance data.

 

 

Best Lead Generation Strategies

While there is no one best lead generation strategy, there is one best practice we can tell you works every time - test, test, test!  While there is a huge variety of content types you can use, and it is well known which types of content work best at stage of your marketing funnel, until you build out your own lead generation website, with content offers mapped to every stage of your theoretical marketing funnel, you just can say for sure what will work best.

 

Lead Generation Website Predictions

 

If you want to see 20 of those predictions, you could start by downloading our guide to 20 market trends for 2022. Just click on the image!

 

20 Marketing Trends For 2013

 

 

Refocus Your Website On Lead Generation With These Tips

 

After reading through it, perhaps you will be able to reorient your lead generating website activities to take advantage of the changes that are clearly visible just over the horizon. 

lead generating websites

Lead generating websites are key to successful marketing and sales alignment

 

Content Marketing - The Magic Elixir

 

One of the key changes that I think everyone is already dealing with but which almost no one is able to estimate the impact of, is the concept of content marketing. 

 

In the world of inbound marketing, content is king.  As I deal in the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, creativity and content marketing, I see the impact on the organizations I deal with daily and how it is likely to affect advanced internet marketing efforts. 

 

Organizations will clearly have to change:

 

  • Job descriptions across the board.

  • They will need to train people to create content who traditionally have not been tasked with content creation.

  • Learn to be far more open with their customers about how they operate.  For example, if they offer a free trial, they will need to disclose fully whether it is a full version the product or a limited functionality version of the product.

  • Get the lawyers on board as they tend to be cautious about releasing information.

  • Use advanced Predictive Lead scoring to ensure your sales teams are working only on the leads that have the highest probability of closing.

  • While social media has continued to grow by leaps and bounds, many organizations have yet to fully realize the potential for generating quality leads from social media.

  • Use fully customizable dynamic landing pages.  While it is possible to run test with tools like optimizely (now owned by Google), it is much more effective to use a system like Hubspot Marketing Hub and it's all knowing contact database to generate landing pages that contextually relevant to every website visitor.

  • System Driven To Do List.  For many sales teams, much time is lost due to lack of focus.  This is a sales management problem as well as system design issue.  Hubspot Marketing and Sales Hub solves this by using Smart List and Workflows to populate each sales person with not only intelligent To Do list, but also by creating a daily call list, arranged by sales lead with the highest predicted probability of closing.  

  • In addition to programmatically generating To Do list and Call Queues, organizations need ensure that their CRM systems are also able to help sales team members build lists of contacts with required Follow Ups.  There is nothing more wasteful than getting a lead in, having sales work it, then drop the ball due to poor, unmanaged follow up action.

  • Organizations must also have a programmatic way to differentiate between marketing qualified leads and sales leads.  This is where your marketing automation comes into play.  By knowing every activity website visitors took before they became lead, advanced predictive analytics based lead scoring can help sales team make intelligent follow-up actions.

  • Achieve ideal contact segmentation by understanding who your target audience really is.  While almost every marketer understands the concept and need to identify the ideal buyer persona(s), actually arriving at a deep understanding of who your customer actually is can be very difficult and costly.

  • Conversion rate optimization (CRO) skills as an organizational imperative.  While it is great to generate leads and sales, using Inbound Marketing, creating content resources, landing pages, well designed call to actions (CTAs) is hard work, and thus very expensive.  By learning how to master the art and science of conversion rate optimization, which allows you to get more leads and sales from the same traffic, you can effectively multiply both your marketing and sales teams efforts and improve your bottom line.

  • Responsive Web Design is a prerequisite for lead generation websites.  Organizations will need to invest heavily to ensure their lead generation websites are responsive on all platforms, including mobile phones, iPads and even Samrt TVs. 

  • While most organizations want a lot of information about every lead, experience has shown that very little of that information is actually used by sales.  Therefore, a key CRO activity is to optimize contact forms.  The generally accepted best practice is to ask for the minimum amount of information required.  For many prospective leads, filling out long complex contact forms is one of the major pain points they have, especially on mobile devices, which almost everyone is on, most of the times.  It's best to take advantage of the ability of these devices to complete forms with information it stored on its user, versus asking them to attempt to type it in.

  • Live chat support, which is actually free with the free version of Hubspot, has become the defacto standard for most websites.  From an organizational standpoint, Live chat presents a bit of a challenge.  Live chats have to be supported by real human beings.  This means the software is a minor part of the cost (Free as previously stated, in some cases), but if you intend to provide 24 X 7 live chat support, with people who can actually help website visitors, you can be looking at substantial additional cost in terms of human resources.

  • Organizations who spend a lot of money on lead generation will need to invest much more time and effort to stay connected with their leads.  This is hard to do at scale, but it can be done.  For example, many organizations created dedicated Facebook groups where they invite their prospects and customers to join.  Of course, that then means they have to spend time, usually with dedicated resources, to provide content that keeps people engaged.

    One especially useful community I've helped setup and actually managed was a Salesforce based community for a client of ours.  It had over 100,000 highly engaged members, and resulted in a large number of new customers, and especially in recurring customers (this was a subscription based business).

  • The right website design is just the start of a critical organizational requirement - the need to build trust and ensure customer loyalty.  No matter where a website visitor is at on your website, even landing page, there's an opportunity to present social proof.  These can come in the form of customer testimonials submitted directly on your website, or from trusted third-parties, such as Google Reviews.

  • Marketers will need to learn to use Pop-Ups more judiciously.  Many people find pop-ups irritating, but they work.  So we keep using them.  One type that of pop-up that works particularly well is an exit intent pop-up on an ecommerce page.  There are systems available for ecommerce platforms like Shopify that not only allow you to use exit intent pop-ups but allow you to generate pop-up offers tailored to each specific site visitor.

 

These changes will be significant, but of even more importance is the increase in manpower this will require. 

 

Marketers Will Have To Know Their Business Intimately

 

In larger enterprise marketing organizations, marketing is in one group and much of what they do also involves contracting to outside agencies. 

That will still happen, but now, unless the marketers came from the ‘floor’, they won’t have the profound knowledge to generate high impact content

 

Reluctant Content Creators Need Help

 

Those with the profound knowledge won’t necessarily be onboard with a new requirement to create not just content, but to create it on a constant basis. 

But if the business has a lead generation blog, or rather just a blog, it is going to take a significant amount of organizational change management to convince a non-marketer, i.e., sales, logistics, human resources, finance, or any other part of the organization, to not just commit to blogging, but to actually learning to write blog posts according to the best practice guidelines, though some certainly will do it.

 

Pick the Shop Floor Expert's Brains

 

However, if marketing is going to deliver sales ready leads to sales, they will need an all-hands-on-deck effort to make content marketing based lead generation to work. 

I believe one of the most difficult aspects of this approach to marketing will be when you have shop floor expertise but not a lot of documentation about what the old expert does. 

This happens a lot, for example, in the aerospace & defense industry

 

Knowledge Management System

 

Some call this knowledge management, but in reality, the trick from a content marketing standpoint is even identifying who has this expertise and getting it down on paper before the expertise is lost. 

This author once knew a federal civil tool and die maker that was absolutely critical to the overall operations of a depot aircraft facility, but as he was 81, no one ever really pushed him to document anything. 

When he left, much was lost. 

That is a challenge marketers will increasingly face as they reach the limits of their knowledge about how a business works or delivers value while still needing to come up with valuable content.

 

Marketing Agencies Can/Must Help Meet Your Staffing Requirements

 

The impact of all this on organizations means we’re going to need a lot more people to feed the google beast!  Want to read some other trends we see, or perhaps compare these to your own views. Grab a copy of our ebook, "20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013 & Beyond"

 

20 Marketing Trends For 2013

 

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Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

About the Author: Lonnie Ayers is a Hubspot Certified Inbound Marketing consultant, with additional certifications in Hubspot Content Optimization, Hubspot Contextual Marketing, and is a Hubspot Certified Partner. Specialized in demand generation and sales execution, especially in the SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Partner space, he has unique insight into the tough challenges Service Providers face with generating leads and closing sales using the latest digital tools. With 15 years of SAP Program Management experience, and dozens of complex sales engagements under his belt, he helps partners develop and communicate their unique sales proposition. Frequently sought as a public speaker in various events, he is available for both inhouse engagements and remote coaching.
Balanced Scorecard Consultant

He also recently released a book "How to Dominate Any Market - Turbocharging Your Digital Marketing and Sales Results", which is available on Amazon.

View All Articles by Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

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