While working with a client recently, we noticed that they were seeing high numbers of traffic to their blog posts but not as many CTA clicks and conversions as we’d like. We felt that we were following all of the typical CTA best practices including a variety of CTAs for different stages of the journey and on various topics, smart CTAs, CTAs that stood out on the website, and so forth.

However, conversions still seemed slightly stalled, and we knew we could do more. So, we looked a bit closer at the analytics and found that the time on page was a little low – likely too low to actually be finishing the blog posts in their entirety and seeing our closing CTAs. This is pretty common in our content-rich world; people scan and then move on.  

You’ve created a piece of premium content that you’re proud of. You’ve designed a landing page with all the best practices represented. Your call-to-action (CTA) even makes you want to click on it. You’ve written a series of SEO-optimized blog posts on the same topic, and your content offer is appearing on each of the posts. You’re sharing the posts via social media. Everything is running smoothly.

But is your inbound effort successful, and what could make it more successful?

You built your website so that prospects would find you, get convinced they need your products and/or services, and call for a consultation, sign up for your marketing, or make a purchase, right? The goal of your website is to generate leads. What if you could optimize your site so that it was more effective at cranking out leads for you? That’s what conversion rate optimization (CRO) is all about.

As an inbound marketing and sales consultant, each day I have the opportunity to work with clients to make recommendations that help them improve their conversion rates and generate additional leads. It’s difficult to not get excited about how helpful this can be to clients since it directly impacts their revenue and is proof that the recommendations I make are truly working. Most of the recommendations that I make for clients work across industries and, for the most part, can be used by other companies to replicate the same success. This is one of the reasons I enjoy writing about the recommendations that are implemented and produce amazing results.  

You’ve surely heard the quote from hockey legend, Wayne Gretzky, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” This saying really could be attributed to most things in life. If you don’t take a chance or a risk, you’re never going to know what could have been. And it’s certainly true with marketing as well, especially when it comes to online lead generation.

Here’s the thing—as inbound marketers, we spend a lot of time creating compelling and optimized content, building campaign strategies and promotional plans, and driving potential customers to our website and brand. All of this is critical for any lead gen plan. But what happens all too often is that your website isn’t effectively set up to actually convert those visitors into real leads. It’s not designed to convert prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. It’s not making it easy for someone who isn't ready to talk to Sales but wants to do research on your products or services—and they're willing to take some type of action that would allow you to capture their information and engage later. And it’s possibly not even making it easy for those that DO want to talk to Sales, to find a way to do that that appeals to them.

If you are using inbound marketing or any type of lead generation for your sales teams, one of the most important things that you need to be doing is generating traffic to your landing pages and converting these visitors to leads.  

It’s a pretty simple mathematical equation: the more traffic you get to your landing pages and the higher the conversion rate, the more leads you get.  So if you have some great landing pages that convert very well, you will be generating more leads than you could with poorly-converting landing pages. That’s why high conversion rates on B2B landing pages should be a primary concern for marketers and sales organizations alike. Without leads converting on your landing pages, you have no leads.

Each of the steps in LeadG2’s 7 Step Lead Generation Process is extremely important to the overall success of your inbound marketing efforts. We have written several blog posts on each of these steps over the past year, and we have finally reached the last step, Step 7—Convert. It’s the one where you make your money and establish ROI.

For reference, here are the past blog posts where we outlined the first 6 steps in the 7 Steps to Inbound Marketing Success: