“On the FIFTH Day of Planning, your boss will ask of you:  FIVE Lead Capture Strategies  

. . . FOUR SEO Factors . . . THREE Design Directives, TWO Website Questions, and One Measurable Marketing Plan . . .”  

What lead capture strategies are you planning to use or try in the New Year?

Promoting your Offers in prominent locations throughout your website (especially on product/service pages and blog posts) is key. How prominent are your Offers now? Are your visitors presented with a Lead Generation Offer no matter what page they start on? Are you going to actively promote your Offers via email and on social media?

What about the Offers themselves?

Review your digital marketing plan for these FIVE lead capture strategies:

1. Craft VALUABLE Offers

Review the Lead Generation Offers you’ve made this year:

  • How effective were they in terms of attracting visitors to your Offer pages?
  • Were your Offers really relevant and helpful to your prospects? (Test of that: if a conference in your industry asked you to do a presentation based on one of your Offers, would it make for a valuable presentation?)
  • If you promoted your Offers on social media or by email, what was the click-through rate?

To attract more qualified leads, plan to test new and unique Offers that will really help your prospects. Use the Offer to show leads how to solve a particular problem (or how you solved it for a client).  Package the Offer into a Special Report, Ultimate Guide, Buyer’s Guide, Podcast or Video.

Deliver something of value that your prospects will really want, to help you capture the maximum number of visitor email addresses.

2. Include Lower Commitment Offers (to capture A, B and C leads)

To generate a larger quantity of leads, make a lower commitment offer.

  • If “Contact Us” is your only call to action, all you’ll attract is a small quantity (or none at all) of “A” leads — those actually ready to buy today.
  • Think that “See a Demo” is low commitment? If the prospect has to schedule a time with a sales rep to see it, that’s not low commitment.

Most visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy — they’re gathering information.  They may make a decision soon (so, they might be “B” leads), or they may just be researching your solution without an available budget (“C” leads).

Be sure you have a low commitment Offer that’s EASY to take advantage of, to start your relationship with them.

Making lower commitment Offers will give you a larger quantity of leads that you can educate and nurture over time.

3. Create Offers for Each Stage of the Sales Process

Your prospects may go through several educational and evaluation stages, including:

  • Researching different ways to solve their problem, and learning about different categories of potential solutions — in these early stages, White Papers or Case Studies may be helpful.
  • Comparing categories of solutions — for this “middle” stage, consider developing a Solutions Comparison Report.
  • Comparing providers in the chosen category – for this final “credibility and decision” stage, consider a Webinar.

At each of these stages, the information needs are different.  You want to craft Offers that meet your prospects’ needs at each of these stages. Help them learn more about your category, learn the pros and cons of different solutions, and compare providers.

Be the company that educates them at each buying stage.

4. Merchandise Your Offer to Illustrate the Value

Make your Offer sound irresistible to attract the widest number of leads. Ban “more info” or “free info” non-offers. Be creative, and package your information into something educational that your prospects will really want.

“Merchandise” your Offer: call it something that sounds like valuable and unique information. Create some bullet points of what prospects will learn from your Offer — and use those bullet points to really convince your audience they’ve got to get it.

5. Give Prospects an Easy Form to Complete

The more information you request (and the more required fields on your response form), the fewer responses you’re likely to get (and the responses you do get may include a lot of bogus information).

  • Look at traffic to each Offer page and the number of responses you received, to compute conversion. How effective was each Offer page?

Do you really need all the fields you’re making a prospect complete?

Ask only for the information you need to make your nurturing series work: email address, name, and perhaps one other question to help target your emails to their particular situation.  Use future emails to learn more about these leads.

Plan to spend more time crafting and testing Offers.  They’re one important key to more effective Lead Generation that just about everyone could spend more time on.

Did you miss:

“FOUR SEO Factors”     “THREE Design Directives“   “TWO Website Questions”    and  “ONE Measurable Marketing Plan”

If you need more detail on the planning points above, our new BEST-SELLING book, “The Results Obsession: ROI-Focused Digital Strategies to Transform Your Marketing” is now available on Amazon!

The Results Obsession Amazon Bestseller

Learn more about The Results Obsession and see the Table of Contents

The book includes a chapter on Lead Generation Strategies, and a separate chapter that lists dozens of Lead Generation Offers — and how to merchandise them.