Undoubtedly you want the right traffic to your site. The people who are most likely going to become leads, and ultimately, happy customers. But who are the “right” people?

Your ideal customer, also known as your buyer persona is the ideals of who your customers are, inside and out.

Your buyer persona encompasses the goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products and services, as well as personal and demographic information shared amongst all members of that particular customer type. Your buyer persona is the identity upon which your whole business is built upon.

Vital tools that will attract the right users to your site:

• Blogging – Inbound marketing starts with blogging. Including a blog page on your website is the single best way to attract new visitors. In order to get found by desired potential customers, you must create educational content that speaks to them and answers their questions

• Social Media – Share remarkable content and valuable information on your social media to engage with your prospects and put a human face to your brand. Mostly interact on the networks where your ideal buyers spend the most of their time

• SEO – Your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine to find something they have queries about. So you need to make sure you’re within the first few results that appear on their browser when they search. To get there, you need to carefully pick keywords, optimise your pages, create content, and build links around the terms your ideal buyers are searching for

• Pages – Optimise your website to appeal and speak to your ideal buyers. Transform your website into an informative source that will attract the sort of people you want to your page

2. Convert

Once you have traffic streaming to your site, the next step is to convert those visitors into leads by gathering their contact details. At the very least, you will need their email addresses.

Contact details are the most valuable information for the online marketing world. To gain this information from your clients willingly, you will need to counter-offer something in return.
That “payment” comes in the form of content, like e-books, whitepapers, or tip sheets – whatever information the buyer persona is interested in and what is valuable to them.

Important tools to convert visitors into leads:

• Call-to-Action – Your call-to-action is the buttons and/or links that encourage your visitors to take action, for example “Download a Whitepaper” or “Attend a Webinar”. If you don’t have enough calls-to-action or your calls-to-action aren’t strong enough, you won’t generate any leads

• Landing Pages – When a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they should then be sent to a landing page. A landing page is where the offer in the call-to-action is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that your sales team can use to begin conversing with them. When website visitors fill out forms on landing pages, they are on the road to becoming leads

• Forms – In order for visitors to become leads, they must fill out a form and submit their information. Modify your forms in order to make this step of the conversion process as simple as possible

• Contacts – Keep track of the leads you’re converting in a centralised marketing database. Having all of your data in one place helps you make sense out of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts – be it through email, a landing page, social media, or otherwise – and how to optimise your future interactions to more effectively attract, convert, close, and delight your buyer persona,  as well as keep on top of them and stay organised

3. Close

You have attracted suitable visitors and converted the right leads, but now you need to transform those leads into customers.
How can you most effectively accomplish this feat?
Certain marketing tools can be utilised at this stage to make sure you’re closing the right leads at the right times.

Closing tools include:

• Lead Scoring – You’ve got contacts in your system, but how do you know which of them are ready to speak to your sales team? Using a numerical representation of the sales-readiness of a lead takes the guesswork out of the process

• Email – What do you do if a visitor clicks on your call-to-action, fills out a landing page, or downloads your whitepaper, but is still not ready to become a customer? A series of emails focusing on useful, relevant content should build trust with a potential customer and slowly nudge them into buying

• Marketing Automation – This process involves creating email marketing and lead nurturing, tailored to the needs and life cycle stage of each lead. For example, if a visitor downloads a whitepaper on a certain topic from you in the past, you may want to send that lead a series of related emails. But if they follow you on Twitter and visit certain pages on your website, you may want to change the messaging to reflect their diverse interests

• Closed-loop Reporting – How do you know which marketing efforts are bringing in the bets possible traffic? Is your sales team effectively closing those best leads into customers? Integration with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) allows you to analyse just how well your marketing and sales teams are cooperating together

4. Delight

The Inbound way is all about providing remarkable content to your users, whether they are visitors, leads, or existing clients.

Successful inbound marketers continue to engage with, delight, and (hopefully) up-sell their current customer base into happy promoters of the companies and products they love.

Tools used to delight customers include:

• Smart Call-to-Action – These present different users with offers that change based on the buyer persona and life cycle stage

• Social Media – Using various social platforms allows for real-time customer service

• Email and Marketing Automation – Providing your existing customers with remarkable content can help them achieve their own goals, as well as introduce new products and features that might be of interest to them

Looking for a digital marketing agency to help grow your business online? We can help!