Dear Flawless: How Do I Get conversions? Better Leads? Start My Marketing Plan?

You are always able to submit your own questions here!

I’m seeing plenty of traffic to my website, organic and paid, but no one’s actually converting to the lead stage. How do I increase the chances of somebody actually converting?

Let’s talk about two ways traffic may be arriving on your website. With organic, you may see this traffic enter on blog posts. They’re probably more likely to be in the earlier stages of the buyer’s journey, so you’ll want to consider how to nudge them forward. I recommend you try a couple of tactics: 

• Make sure your content is structured in content clusters. Give the reader somewhere to go next to learn more — ideally, a pillar page that itself contains links to further articles and has an option for them to contact you
• Sprinkle a few CTAs that lead to either other posts or landing pages, depending on the stage the post is intended for
• Use retargeting ads to prompt that next piece of content you’d want someone to see, again, according to the stage of the buyer’s journey the visitor is in

People may also be landing on your site on landing pages. Make sure that your ads and CTAs to these pages are geared toward attracting those further along the journey and more ready to convert — and then review your landing page to ensure that it’s optimized for conversion. We go deeper into how to make a conversion-ready landing page here. 

My good leads are getting lost among a lot of leads that just aren’t relevant, but it takes me time to go through them and figure that out, and I’m worried some of the good leads are losing interest before I have the chance to actually get to them. How can I reduce the number of bad leads?

This can often be easier than you think! If you’re seeing a lot of people filling in your contact forms to the extent that you have trouble sifting through all your contacts, try adding some more qualifying questions to the form.

If you’re providing a service that, for example, both businesses and individuals might purchase, but you stand to profit more from commercial clients, ask in the form which they are. You can have your contacts automatically separate into two groups, so you know which ones you’d prefer to follow up with — but you still have the others just in case. 

Add as many questions as you think you need to narrow down your leads, but keep in mind that every additional question does carry the risk of a lead not filling it in. If your form’s getting too long, you might be able to split your form in two with the critical info up front, and a secondary optional form showing up on the first form’s thank you page. Or you could run workflows designed to segment your leads via automated follow-up.

I’ve never had a marketing plan before. My company’s very new and has been getting by on word-of-mouth. How do I even start?

Even if you don’t have a marketing plan, you’ve probably still been doing marketing — in some way or another. We developed a helpful marketing diagnostics quiz designed to help businesses in all stages of growth identify what they should be doing next according to what they’re already doing. Why not try that out? 

If you’re in the early stages and you’re serious about scaling up, probably the most valuable work you can do is building a foundation. The first step there is getting a CRM, like HubSpot. Get all your contacts in there — existing customers and leads — and start segmenting.

Segmentation is one of the most powerful automation tools you have available because of the opportunities for personalization-at-scale that it unlocks. From there, you can work on email campaigns, landing pages, and compelling content and service offers your contacts may be interested in — and build the deal pipelines that help you track and optimize.

Got a growth question of your very own? Enter it here and we’ll have one of our experts address it in a future instalment of Dear Flawless!