How do you optimize your digital marketing strategy to generate more leads?

Frankly, that's a broad question. To find your way through the digital marketing jungle of today, you need to better understand trends in digital marketing today.

Because of how complex digital marketing is today, we gathered some do's and don'ts from practitioners and will share an overview of best-practices to be used in 2020 and beyond.

Leave some practices behind

Chances are, if you spend five minutes around someone working in content marketing, you'll hear "lead generation." Marketers chase leads like Ponce de León chased the Fountain of Youth. They plan for it; work for it; eat, sleep, and breathe for it.

But generating leads has become more important and more complex. That said, several specialists shared the lead generation practices they recommend tossing out with the new decade.

  • First, lead generation through social media advertising is not what it used to be.

    Tytus Golas, founder of Tidio, chooses to give less importance to growing their social media reach in favor of focusing on their blog and SEO: "We will continue investing into Facebook ads, and they still work fine, but we plan to slowly switch our attention to bringing more organic traffic from Google."

    Adam Hempenstall, CEO and founder of Better Proposals, states that the leads the company gets from social media ads are not qualified: "They churn pretty fast." The company will stop social media marketing and organic reach efforts, and start focusing on other practices, as discussed in this article.

  • Automated and generic messages don't work anymore. People want content that is relevant to them. This is the first time we're mentioning the tendency toward relevant, personalized content. It won't be the last time you hear of it.

    Arek Ponski, founder at Teambuzz: "Automated and generic messages should be off the menu for any business. We should turn to a more personalized approach."

  • Be original, don't choose strategies that have become mainstream. Stand out by looking at your business from a different angle. Choose one main tactic and let the others play a supporting role.

    Daniel Ndukwu, founder at Kyleads, confirms: "Content upgrades aren't as effective as they've been in the past. This may be due to the tactic's becoming mainstream."

The consensus with the marketing specialists we spoke with seems to be that pay-for-play marketing should stay in the 2010s, along with automated, generic messages. Though new, relevant content is still a valuable marketing strategy, it might need to be approached from another angle.

Stand out

Because of digital transformation, the world of marketing is filled with competition. Everyone is fighting for their space online. They're duking it out for their product or service to win that coveted number one spot.

But for every business, product or service, there are hundreds, if not thousands of competitors offering essentially (or exactly) the same thing.

So, how can you get your service or product to stand out?

The answer is personalization. By personalizing your content to reach the right person with the right content, you have a leg up on your competition.

No matter what you offer, you should be able to segment your audience. The challenge:

  1. To define (and distinguish) segments
  2. To create content for those segments
  3. To reach each segment with relevant content

But what does that really mean?

Define

Get to know your audience. Interact with them. Where do they spend their time? What are they interested in? What problems are they trying to solve? Through personal conversations and community management, reach out to your audience and build authentic relationships with them.

Create

Use the information you gathered to create relevant content that will interest your audience groups: horizontally, by focusing on different product categories, services, etc.; and vertically, by creating content that works from the top, through the middle, and down the bottom of the sales funnel.

Don't forget the value of visual content. There's a reason videos are among the top marketing tools year after year!

Reach

You could create the best content in the entire world, but unless you get eyes on it there's little to no value in it. That's why it's so important to expand the reach of your content. There's a myriad of ways to do that, including a solid SEO strategy with link-building, video marketing, and content optimization.

Spread your segmented content through various channels, such as gated resources and live chats.

1. Encourage interaction

The internet is filled with a lot of static content. The problem with such content is that the interaction between you as its maker and the reader is only one-way. The audience can only read and share your content, nothing else.

Interact with your audience. Go for the win-win, where you both get the info you need, preferably in a conversational, pleasant environment.

Ask questions

Survey Anyplace, my company, has a lot of customers who use quizzes or assessments to generate leads: Questionnaires are a great way to engage in an interactive conversation: you get to know your respondent because of his/her specific answers, and the respondent gets to know you through the results and recommendations they get from you.

Creating content, such as quizzes, will give you a better understanding of your audience. As a result, you'll be able to create a more targeted marketing campaign in the future.

Chat

Another example is conversational landing pages: A lot of websites use a chatbot or live chat operator to interact directly with website visitors. People visit websites with a specific objective in mind. When they can ask their questions directly, they will convert much sooner because they have found what they were looking for.

Tytus Golas of Tidio engaged in some A/B-testing and concluded: "We've noticed that conversational landing pages performed much better than traditional ones. With 30% of customers expecting live chats on the websites they visit, it's clear that this form of acquiring leads will only gain more popularity in the years to come."

Educate

Another way to engage and interact with your target audience is by offering educational content, which results in a perception of high value, expertise, and reliability.

Online learning and training have become an essential part of online business. Create an online course or webinar to provide your target audience with useful information.

Teambuzz booked success by scheduling 1-1 demos with target customers.

Kyleads built a few landing pages that gave away a free course. Daniel Ndukwu: "These pages convert at roughly 35% because the perceived value is much greater than an e-book or cheatsheet."

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Stefan Debois

Stefan Debois is the founder and CEO of Survey Anyplace, an online software tool to create engaging surveys, quizzes, and assessments.

LinkedIn: Stefan Debois

Twitter: @sde77