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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 are key to successful marketing and sales alignment
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.
These changes will be significant, but of even more importance is the increase in manpower this will require.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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