Inbound marketing insights to boost your website’s lead generation powers

Inbound marketing is a pretty big subject area, but Atomicdust, a St. Louis based brand marketing agency, got to the heart of things this morning when they shared insights on conversion-focused websites with an audience of clients, marketers and at least one content strategist – me.

Mike Spakowski, Jesse McGowan and Danielle Hohmeier talked about why your lead generating website needs great content and how to use it to build strong relationships and nurture your audience until they are ready to  buy.

Here are some highlights from the presentations:

Search engine optimization

• SEO is a lifestyle not something that is once and done.
• The best SEO advice – publish relevant content often.

Websites

• Websites should be 80 percent helpful and 20 percent sales.
• Your website is the most accessible part of your business. Around 90 percent of purchases, even local and B2B purchases, begin with a web search.
• Your website should explain what you do and motivate and inspire your audience.

Content marketing

• The goal of content marketing is to get people to subscribe to your thinking.
• When creating a website ask yourself “why would anyone come back to my site?”
• Most people return to sites because the content is entertaining or helpful.
• High value content elements – white papers, case studies, reports – generate leads if you collect the reader’s contact information in return for access to the document.

Calls to action

• A call to action is a way of asking people for permission to stay in front of them.
• Calls to action should be easy and not scary. Signing up for a newsletter is less of a commitment than  a phone call.

Lead nurturing

• The aim of lead nurturing is to build a relationship with people no matter where they are in the sales cycle.
• To nurture leads, offer content that is informative, inspiring, reassuring and useful, even if the person never buys.
• Marketing automation systems such as HubSpot, Eloqua and Marketo make it easy to track and measure your inbound marketing efforts.