How to use digital marketing to get more enquiries

Clients come to us usually with a specific requirement in mind, perhaps a new website, brand or digital marketing. However, there is an underlying reason for each item: to create a more sustainable business through increased revenue and enquiries.

There are many ways to do this, however in our experience digital marketing, with its measurable, always-on approach, is a great place to start.

Let’s break down five areas of how to use digital marketing to get more leads to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward online and turning website visits to enquiries (and hopefully sales) in no time.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is producing relevant, unbiased content that adds value to your customers by addressing their needs. Blogging is one common example of content marketing. But before I hear you say “I tried that and it didn’t work” hear me out. We’ve had lots of success for our clients with content marketing by applying these rules to the content we produce:

Always add value. Customers have a high bullsh*t meter, don’t push an agenda, give them honest recommendations. Instead of simply telling people what you do, offer insights into how you’ve solved the same problems they have now based on your experience.

Be consistent. Producing one piece of content every three months isn’t going to get you results. Content marketing feeds into SEO by having your posts rank for the questions you’re answering and they all add up over the long run.

Plan & Measure. Writing the first thing that comes to mind won’t work. Listen to your customers’ concerns, note those down and respond through content. Create a list of relevant topics that you can continuously work through so that you’re never stuck for ideas. Also, make sure you’re measuring the performance of your content. This can be as simple as installing and using something like Google Search Console for your website to know how many times Google is showing your posts and how many people are clicking them. You can then make adjustments and see if it improves.

Social Media Marketing

“We should use Tiktok! And Snapchat! And Instagram Stories!” No, you shouldn’t just use all social media channels to promote your business. Focus on the ones that are relevant for the customers you are trying to attract. When selected carefully, create a message which speaks directly to the person you want to help. Start with a message that, again, addresses a need or concern they have and then create messaging to promote it.

At its most simple, promote one message in the most relevant channel. However, you can be much more sophisticated with your social media marketing by using different messages based on the customer’s position in your sales funnel. This YouTube video does a great job of explaining this for Facebook advertising.

Email Marketing

In our experience, email marketing converts higher than any other source of digital marketing for messages sent to existing customers. This is because the customer is already invested in receiving your messages or has purchased from you already and is actively engaged in your product or service. It allows you to cut through the nonsense and get to the point.

Email marketing is highly useful in improving the retention of your customers as you can send them deals and offers specific to their needs. A few things to utilise are:

Customer Segmentation. According to Hubspot recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns. EDM tools like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor make it easy to create customer segments within your entire list which enables you to write more dedicated content based on their needs. Here’s a great article explaining how to do this with Mailchimp and another for Campaign Monitor.

Automated Nurture Campaigns. A nurture campaign is an act of sending regular, automated emails to a new subscriber to your email database. So, for example, if you had a large number of blog posts you could send a new subscriber one relevant article to their inbox per week without having to lift a finger. It’s dead simple and a highly effective way to increase customer retention and increase sales. Mailchimp goes into a good amount of detail here.

Cart Abandonment. The average rate of shopping cart abandonment is around 70%. If your business relies on online sales utilising an automated abandoned cart system is a must to help convert these customers. It allows you to send an email to a user who views but closes a shopping cart on your site. The content can contain a customised offer as well as a direct call to action to the checkout. We’ve seen conversion rates for this technique be between 15% to 30%. That’s a lot of sales!

SEO

When done correctly, search engine optimisation is a powerful way to increase leads. I’ve written previously about how SEO works and it boils down to a considered strategy with on-page and off-page tactics. It takes time and needs to be supported by an honest and trustworthy supplier.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Ok so you’re writing content, managing paid ads in social media channels, doing consistent and automated email marketing and kicking goals with SEO… What else is there? CRO.

CRO or conversion rate optimisation, is the act of making small, iterative changes to your website or advertising and monitoring the results.

What happens if you change that call to action to ‘Buy Now’ instead or ‘Purchase’? Or you add a full-width image containing people rather than a paragraph of text? Or, reduce the form fields by half for the primary lead generating form on your website? Well, it might lead to no change, or it could increase it substantially…

Good CRO is an “always-on” approach. You’ll want to consider managing the constant changes through the use of a content management system and measuring results with tools like Google Analytics or HotJar.

It’s important to understand what you want to measure and set up tracking before undergoing changes, otherwise, you may confuse which change leads to what benefit. Paul Boag has a great breakdown on CRO here.

Success will follow

It’s worth mentioning that there’s a big difference between attracting an enquiry and closing a sale, but if you’re active in these five areas in your use of digital marketing you’ll no doubt see success in increasing your lead generation.

If you wish to know more about anything mentioned here, we’d be happy to have a chat. Why not give us a call?