You’ve invested time, energy, and money on creating a great inbound marketing plan. You’re regularly publishing strategic content that is attracting new visitors to your website daily. You’re promoting your campaigns effectively with a mix of organic and paid efforts. But you just aren’t seeing the leads come in. Sound familiar? That’s because driving traffic to your website is only half the battle. What happens once they get there is what makes the difference between a visitor that comes and goes, and a visitor that raises their hand by filling out a form or taking an action.

There are many reasons why this might be the case, but I’m going to share three of the top reasons we see time and time again causing a low visitor to lead conversion rate.

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.  

Every day, I talk to business leaders who share some common sales challenges. Whether it's a business owner, VP of Sales, or a VP of marketing, the struggles are often the same. I often get asked these questions:

• How can we generate more qualified leads for our sales team?
• How can we get our sales team in front of more opportunities?

Yet, when I go to their websites, what I often find, is websites that are old, boring, static, and basically online brochures. This might be great for communicating your brand message, but its one-way communication. That could have worked back in 2008 or 2009, but it's 2019, and your prospects (and your market) expect so much more!

Lead flow is a very important, and often-overlooked, step when building an inbound marketing or lead generation strategy. In this one-minute video, I touch on what lead flow is, who is involved, what the process looks like, and more.

I'm starting today's blog post off with a few stats:

• 74% of B2B buyers choose a company that is first to help them with useful content
• 50% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn when making purchase decisions.
• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.
• 7 out of 10 professionals describe LinkedIn as a trustworthy source of professional content.
• 1 out of 3 professionals on the planet are on LinkedIn.
• 200 conversions per minute are happening on LinkedIn.

Okay, great. Let's all give LinkedIn a big pat on the back. Those are some intense and super interesting stats to a person in the B2B marketing and sales industries... or they should be. If you aren't interested in capitalizing on these stats, you can stop reading. If you are interested in a 'hack' to help you capitalize and capture some of this focused attention from LinkedIn, keep reading. 

Developing a solid inbound marketing and content strategy is something that most companies struggle with. In fact, a study from Ascend2 and its research partners revealed that 46% of the marketing, sales, and business professionals surveyed around the world said that the lack of an effective strategy and the creation of content are the most challenging obstacles to reaching the next level of inbound marketing performance. LeadG2 uses a lead generation process to help our clients navigate and embrace an inbound marketing culture.

Have you been churning out quality content for years for your business and industry? Does traffic to your blog still come from old posts? Are ebooks published three years ago still converting? You're not alone.

I spoke with a business owner recently about their revenue growth objectives. They were frustrated because the first half of the year didn’t go as planned, and their new business revenue numbers were lagging behind the goals they set at the beginning of the year. They were very optimistic, however, that the second half of the year would be different. They were confident they would eventually exceed all their growth goals.

When I asked what they were basing this optimism on, they went on to tell me that they had just hired a new salesperson. And this was not just any salesperson. This was someone with deep connections in their industry and a network of relationships that could get them in front of the decision-makers at some of their most attractive target accounts. In fact, this salesperson was even bringing a few deals with them that they expected to close very shortly. They had hired a rainmaker.       

I hope it works out for them.

Without a doubt, one of the very first steps we do when onboarding a new client is ask them what their content inventory is. This inventory acts as an audit of any possible thought leadership that they might have already produced, whether it is printed or a digital version. 

I’ve recently learned that nothing makes a room fall silent more quickly than asking a group of sales managers, “Who here is in charge of lead generation?” Typically, the person in charge of lead generation is the same person who is in charge of setting appointments, finding needs, coming up with solutions, building proposals, making presentations, getting the contracts signed, ensuring that the contracts are fulfilled, and picking up the checks: the salesperson.