You might have heard of the terms inbound marketing and inbound methodology. By using such an approach, you can attract strangers who become visitors, and successfully generate a huge amount of traffic to your website.
Are you satisfied with just looking at statistics or graphs about how the number of website visits keep increasing every day? Maybe, but that doesn’t really help you to grow your business yet.
After all, this is just the first stage of the inbound methodology – the attraction stage. You may have attracted a lot of visitors, but you still don’t know who is likely to buy your products or services.
That’s where the conversion stage steps in. Conversion, or lead generation, is the stage where if you want to turn visitors into your customers, you need them to opt-in, become your leads first and then nurture them.
Today I am going to share three common misconceptions that most marketers have about lead generation. If you still believe in any of these, it’s not too late to correct it!
1. Getting new leads is more important than maintaining the leads that I have
Common sense, right? Getting more leads, meaning higher chances of getting the deal?
If you look at the inbound methodology above, leads are only positioned in the middle of the flow. To get the business deal, it’s important to reach the “close” stage, in order to turn them into customers. According to a report by the Aberdeen Group, over 80% of generated leads are never followed up on, are dropped, or even diminished. This implies that it is ineffective to seek out more leads. After all, some of the leads won’t turn into customers. Therefore, it is better for you to sustain the leads that you have, and keep nurturing them.
2. The more leads you generate = more money you can make; “more is better!”
Again, this seems to make sense, but it doesn't!
Similar to my first point, although you generate more customers, it doesn’t mean that your business will be more profitable.
In fact, returning customers are those who you should be focusing your attention on if you want your business to be more profitable and successful. According to research, returning customers are 60 to 70% easier to sell rather than new customers. Some even more convincing statistics reveals that it can boost business profit up to 95% by just increasing 5% in customer retention!
If you look at the inbound methodology again, this claim also makes sense!
The inbound methodology doesn’t stop at customers but focuses on delighting customers into promoters. The reason for this is because it's always better to let customers promote how good you are, rather than you selling yourself – just a matter of trust, right?
3. Creating different kinds of landing pages is a waste of time
Some business websites have only one landing page to convert visitors to leads, and they think that’s more than enough!
The landing page is a crucial part of the inbound methodology. It has a distinct URL linked to a CTA that directs your visitors to fill in a form that asks about their contact information, so that they become known leads for you. Without a landing page, you will have a really hard time turning your visitor into leads.
Although many business corporations know it, they create only one “universal” landing page for everyone – Is this the best way to generate leads?
According to a survey in 2013 done by HubSpot, companies with more than 30 landing pages can generate leads 7 times more than those that only have 1 to 5 landing pages. Results are even more stunning for those that have more than 40 pages – 12 times more!
Clearly, the number of landing pages and successful lead generation are positively correlated!
Putting all statistics aside, more landing pages also means more conversion opportunity. Simply looking from the SEO’s point of view, if you put more landing pages, more landing pages will be indexed in search. And if a user happens to click on any one of the search results that guides them to one of your landing pages, then you will have minimised the effort in acquiring a lead for your business.
One more benefit of having more landing pages is that there are more targeting opportunities, too! With more landing pages available, you can better appeal to the different needs and interests of the audience. So, if you really want to convert more leads, take some time to develop more landing pages because, segment-specific content that caters to the different needs of the audience stands higher chances of converting them into leads more easily!
And there you have it! I hope this blog post would clarify some of the misconceptions that you might have when it comes to lead generation! Be sure to check out 4 Common Lead Generation Mistakes to Watch Out for in 2018 to see if you have committed these mistakes that might prevent you from success too!
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