This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post. You may wan’t to sit down for this statistic. Ready? Only 2% of traffic converts on the first visit to a website. I repeat, 2%. Considering you work tirelessly to drive traffic toContinue Reading
What’s the best length for landing page forms? Would a shorter form increase submissions while retaining quality, or are longer forms better?
These exact questions have been at the center of a hotly contested debate that’s been raging on since 2009. In fact, the popular website WhichTestWon that catalogs A/B tests, has 40+ tests on forms alone.
In an ideal world, marketers would have limitless budgets to invest in experimental initiatives and new programs. After all, the customer acquisition and retention landscape is evolving faster than ever. To see what works, it’s crucial to find new opportunities and test new waters.
The challenge, however, is that marketing budgets are often limited around what’s “proven” to work — which tends to look different from company to company.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
To many salespeople, “social selling” equates to “LinkedIn.” According to a survey conducted by PeopleLinx, 76% of reps understand LinkedIn’s potential for sales, but a scant 16% see the value in Twitter for social selling.
The marketing formula seems simple: Attract audiences, engage prospects, convert leads, and facilitate retention. One of the biggest “wins” you can achieve is the ability to connect your disparate initiatives into a scalable, predictable demand generation engine.
But when you’re in the trenches, you know this process is easier said than done. Marketers, immersed within their organizations, frequently lack access to industry data.
Lead generation is a major component of inbound marketing. It’s an exchange of information: You offer people valuable content, and they offer you valuable information about themselves, like their name, email address, and company.
When it comes to meeting your lead generation goals, landing pages are the strongest tools marketers have — which is why it’s so important to get them right.
Just like some words are more persuasive than others, some designs are more persuasive than others, too. A landing page’s layout, the fonts and colors used, image placement, form length, and other design factors can have an impact on how many people actually choose to fill out the form.
Want to design a landing page that persuades people to convert? Then you’ll need to take a step back from the aggregate data about site visits, conversion rates, and lead numbers, and think hard about the human behind the screen.
Optimizing your web pages shouldn’t just be a task on your to-do list. It should be an overarching strategy — something you think about and test and tweak every single day.
Why? Because your website is how people get to know your brand, and having optimized web pages will make for a more engaging and delightful experience. Plus, you’ll see greater returns on the content you publish across your marketing channels.
Your leads are the driver of your business. To grow and to gain customers you need to have quality leads that are actively engaged in your organization’s offerings—leads that are a fit for organizations strategy.
While every organization has a unique approach to categorizing its leads, there are several myths associated with lead quality many organizations fall to. Lets take a look at 10 lead quality myths and debunk them using facts derived from industry data.
“We need more leads.”
Pretty much every B2B marketer has heard this phrase from their sales team at some point in their career. And after hearing it, most marketers are left in a sticky situation: They suddenly have to do more with the same budget and the same number of hours in a week.
According to the 2014 State of Inbound Marketing, marketers are obsessed with generating more leads: Nearly a quarter of surveyed marketers rank lead generation as their number one priority.
But just because lead generation is a priority doesn’t mean it’s easy to find great information about it. There’s plenty of content online about how to generate leads, but it can sometimes be difficult to sift through it all and find out what really works.
Calls-to-action. You know that they’re a crucial component of inbound marketing. You know you need ’em on your website if you want to attract more visitors, generate more leads, and convert more customers.
… And that’s about all you know.
Inbound marketing is a powerful strategy. When we implement it for a company here at Imagine Business Development, we will typically see a 2 to 7 times increase in lead generation in the first year and a 5 to 10 times increase in future years.
A 2013 study identified generating high quality leads as the number one challenge for B2B marketers. It’s no surprise that Inbound Marketing, with it’s proven track record, is exploding in use. While Inbound Marketing will certainly increase the generation of quality leads, it will also generate more low-quality leads.
In our experience, of the leads created by an effective Inbound Marketing approach between 50% and 90% of leads will never become qualified in any fashion. This rate is highly dependent upon the industry you’re in, how clearly you’ve segmented your market and how effective your process and strategy is.
Your value proposition is the core of your competitive advantage. It clearly articulates why someone would want to buy from your company instead of a competitor.
It’s also one of the most important conversion factors. A great value proposition could be the difference between losing a sale — and closing it.
