Each lead that doesn’t convert to a sale ends up showing on the bottom line. Lead flow is an important part of the sales process.

This guide will show why lead flow is integral for bringing in new customers and show you how to improve it.

What Is Lead Flow?

We’ve all heard of the sales funnel, as shown on the right. Visitors will have gone through the process to become a lead.  Eventually (and hopefully!) they become a customer at the end.

Lead flow describes how well your leads progress through the sales funnel. When there is a clear lead flow structure, leads become far easier to convert into sales.

If an organisation does not have an organised lead flow, leads can slip through and end up costing the business that all important revenue.

Poor Lead Flow Means Problems

If you do not have good lead flow, your sales team can easily become confused as to which leads they should be following up first.

Your marketing team may be doing a great job bringing in the leads, but if they send them to your sales team too quickly, they won’t be able to cope with the demand.

The speed in which you able to contact leads is key to winning them as customers.  They fill in your contact forms in the first place because they think you may be able to help them.  A study by InsideSales.com shows

35-50% of all sales go to the vendor that responds first.

If your business is able to implement an efficient lead flow process, your sales team will be able to make contact with leads quicker for ultimately more revenue.

A Strong Lead Flow Process Improves Results

By taking control of your lead flow processes, you are one step ahead of your competition.

According to Drift:

Only 7% of the surveyed companies are currently achieving an average lead response time of five minutes or less.

If that wasn’t shocking enough, research suggests:

The average response time to a lead is currently 61 hours for those that bother to respond, while 47% did not respond at all

Become one of the 7% and watch your sales figure grow exponentially.

How To Improve Lead Flow

Know what the sales team are looking for

A great lead flow process cannot be created unless both marketing and sales are on the same page.  The marketing team’s definition of a qualified lead must be the same as the sales team’s.

If you are only using inbound lead generation methods, you should be considering outbound sales strategies as well.

Separate your good leads from your great leads

The marketing team must establish whether or not they will add value to the client portfolio.

Quality over quantity. It’s cliche but in this situation, it could not be more true.  Better quality leads help businesses make more sales.

When categorising leads, are they:

• Close to the next stage in the sales funnel?
• In the mould of your ideal customer?

The more positive the answers to these questions, the better the quality of lead they are.  If the lead does not categorise well from these questions, they can be put further down the list, or even rejected altogether.

The sooner you start separating out leads from each other, your sales team will have a much more manageable workload to respond faster to leads’ enquiries and focus on the best leads first.

Define tasks specific to each stage of the sales funnel

Once the leads have been categorised, you will know where each of them are in the sales process.  From here, every member in your team must know exactly what role they play in the sales funnel.

CRM is crucial here.  When there is a change in a lead’s status, it should be quick and easy for the right team members to come into play.

Create some markers that once passed, leads become automatically assigned to your sales team.  Use your CRM to set up lead queues or assign a lead to the next available sales team member.

By now, the marketing team should know the signs that a lead is ready for sales.  If they are not, refer back to the meeting held in the first step.

Update your lead categorisation methods as you go

This is going to be a work in progress.  Some tweaks are going to be needed here and there to get the process spot on.

Over time, both your marketing and sales team will become more experienced when judging lead quality.

Each team will learn new things along the way.  Set up regular meetings to share what they have learned with each other.  Marketing and sales should always be on the same wavelength.

Part of the conversation should involve:

• the quality and quantity of leads the sales team are receiving
• the current marketing strategies being used

Your business and overall goals will evolve.  Not only that, sales and marketing techniques are changing. This makes it so important that everyone involved in winning work is winning the right work.

A Strong Lead Flow Process Matters

A tight relationship between the sales and marketing team is a powerful tool.  By streamlining the lead flow process, you will be successful.

These steps will ensure that you aren’t letting the best leads slip through your fingers.  Put these processes in place to make consistent, positive results.

The point of digital marketing is not to generate more traffic to your websites.  It’s purpose is to generate more leads.

Visitors that don’t fill out an enquiry form, or contact you by any other method, shows your content marketing strategies are not working.

And what about when your sales team don’t even get in contact with the best leads?  The efforts you made into the content creation become worthless.

The bottom line is this: are you getting the value for money from your current strategies or not?

Measuring the ROI from your marketing campaigns is becoming a far more important part of the sales funnel than ever before.

Understanding ROI

Before going any further, it’s important to know what your businesses’ goals are.  You must be able to clearly define what you are trying to get from all of your content marketing strategies.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are essential for defining these goals are:

1. Organic traffic and leads
2. Conversions and conversion rates
3. Referrals and PPC

Your goals may change as your business develops but with every KPI, they need to be measured and recorded.

It’s what you do with this information that enables you to calculate your ROI.

Prioritise your efforts in business areas that require the most attention.  The easier and quicker you solve these, the more effective your content marketing becomes.

Your ROI Report

Check out this step-by-step marketing funnel, from Hubspot.  It’s a really easy method to follow to turn a visitor into a customer.

It is a four step process:

Step 4, ‘Delight’, is pretty self explanatory and is where we are all aiming to get to.

But let’s break down each of the other steps to see how you should be constructing your ROI reports.

Attract

Attracting visitors falls within the SEO scope.  Effective on page optimisation and technical SEO is how potential customers will find your website in the SERPs.

The KPIs you need to be measuring at this part in the funnel should focus on organic traffic.  Your ROI reports should show how your webpages and content marketing is ranking in the SERPS and how much traffic they are generating.

Organic traffic is not a goal; it’s a measurement to determine how many leads you are generating, which is the goal.

High quality content is a sure fire way to get the audience you need to your website.  The better the quality, the more authority you have in the field, boosting organic traffic.

Another part of the Attract step is tracking keywords.  You must be able to track your position for the most competitive keywords or your rankings will slip.

We have built an effective content strategy template, customised to each business individually.

Convert

Conversions are one of the three core KPIs you must be tracking.

Conversions rates are essential for every website as it’s the quickest way to increase overall profitability and top line revenue of a company.

You may have created really good content but they become pointless if they don’t convert into sales.  A good ROI report will take this into consideration.

ROI reports are great for looking at conversion rate optimisation because you can track how well your website performs.

Your reports should be looking to collect information on how your visitors turn into conversions.  Two of the most popular and effective methods are opt-in email participators and of course, the people who fill out your enquiry forms.

If people are not signing up, you’re not going to see any results in the near future.

However, once you start getting a good flow of leads into the system, you can make sure this continues.  If there is large drop off in leads, you can easily go back and find out what changed.

If we look at the email opt-in list as an example, if for some reason participation falls, it would be worth looking at how you are interacting with the list.

It could also be something to do with any website updates you have implemented.  Little changes can make a big difference.

Clients of HQ SEO receive a full conversion rate optimisation audit and recommendations report based on several best practices.

Close

Arguably, the hardest part of the entire sales funnel to master.

ROI reports shows if you are meeting regular targets and keeping you on track to meet them.

Ensure your sales team are updating their progress frequently to get useful data.  An ROI report should give you indicators about where your sales team are doing well.

However, the best information will come from looking at metrics that show where you or your sales team are faltering and can be improved.

For example, if you analyse the report and see your team aren’t doing too well at closing deals over the phone, you can send them on a course to improve these skills.

If you have the data, use it.

ROI Reports Help Make Data Driven Decisions

Each of the three parts in generating effective ROI reports will help you better understand how and where to improve on business performance.

The more data you have, the more reliable your results will be.  Reliable information provides data driven results.

You will be able to use your time at a much more effective rate.  Focus on how to develop your ROI to improve your business marketing campaigns.

Having leads come to you instead of the other way around is hitting the jackpot when it comes to lead generation marketing.  But how can you increase the number of inbound leads and ultimately take your business to the next level almost instantly?

I will be showing you some methods that we use here at HQ SEO in order to help grow our business.

All the methods I will be discussing are geared to whatever stage you are at with your business: you may be just starting out and looking for that first big break or you may be in a position to scale up and grow your client base.

Fact based decision making

Let’s  start with the basics.  The best b2b lead generation strategies are built on knowledge and understanding of what the market is telling you.

Content that has poor choice in keywords will not only mean you will be flooded with bad quality leads, your service will often be hidden away from the leads that are interested in what you have to offer.

Avoid making decisions that you ‘think’ are correct and make choices that are backed by data-driven facts.

In order to do this, use applications such as the Google Keyword Planner to show you what keywords relate and get the biggest search volumes.  Another benefit of this tool is that it shows you how competitive that particular keyword is in the market.

Attempt to find longtail keywords that are specific to your niche but have little to no competition for it.  This is obviously the goal of every keyword campaign but it is worth the time in order to get your business ahead of the competition.

Make your enquiry forms better

To me, this is a big one.

Let’s face it, the generic enquiry form is terrible.  It’s so boring and disengaging.

“Tell us your name and we will get back to you with a quote.”  How many times have you seen this?  Exactly.  Too many times.  I would even bet that you are using this yourself.

Let me tell you this…  this lifeless form is costing you leads.

You’ve shown off your service and convinced them to choose you for their business needs.  And then they see your form.

It just screams out basic and standard and does not separate you from the crowd like your previous pages claim.  *Visitor closes page*.

Improving your forms will dramatically improve the success rate from a potential lead into an actual lead.

Let’s compare the following forms to show you what I mean.  One of them is a generic form generated from WordPress.  The other is not:

Firstly,

Secondly,

Which one are you more likely to fill in?  What is giving you the most value?  Which one is actually worth using your time?

It’s not even close.  The second example is what we use here at HQ SEO and tells you exactly what we can do for you.  It specifically asks what you need and will go on to tailor the questions to that specific lead.  

How do you do this?  Simple. Give them what they want.  

A client wants to be sure that you know what you are talking about.  The best way to do this is by phrasing the enquiry as a free consultation rather than just a quote.  Offering a personalised service will show a lead that you are interested in their business needs.

Physically tell them what you can provide to them, how much it will cost and why they should choose you.  Human interaction from someone who knows their stuff is a very powerful tool in converting non leads to leads.

Lendformly helps create great enquiry forms; I recommend you go and do the same.

Less is more

This is based around publishing less frequent articles and instead focusing on creating lower quantity but higher quality material.

The advantage to this method is that you can build an audience through thorough expertise in the field instead of putting out wishy-washy content for the sake of it.  In-depth content created on your site will boost your reputation, increase your credibility and entice business leads.

I suggest that when you create your content, it should take a lot of time to do.  It should also take a long time to create. This will show to leads that you have thought a lot about what you have decided to publish and have put in considerable research.

By being involved with a less is more content strategy, you will attract higher quality leads.  This is because they will have followed you all the way through your piece and are able to understand it on a higher level.  Better quality leads drives better quality work and more revenue for your business.

Have you ever heard of the 10X principle?  It’s based around in order to get 10 times successful, you need to put in 10 times the work.  You will not get extra results without giving extra effort.

Long-form content is also an excellent way to build links, get better rankings on Google and boost your inbound lead generation.

Create your own learning material

As we mentioned in the first technique, people trust someone who knows exactly what they are talking about.  People also love getting something for nothing.

Creating learning material and offering it out for free shows that you hold a position of authority.  Examples of which include as creating a YouTube video or writing a blog.  If you keep releasing genuinely useful content on regular basis, you will be able to build a loyal and engaged customer base as well as attract more top-of-the-funnel traffic.

By providing sound and accurate information in your material, you create valuable content for the visitor to use for themselves.  This creates a mutual trust between you and the customer and they will be likely to return to you for help in their business going forwards. If they like what you have to offer, they are likely to contact you for more.

Also, how many times have you watched a video or webinar and the creator says something along the lines of “the first x amount of people that sign up using the following link will get bonus material not available to anyone else”?

This is a great technique of how to generate leads that you should be using too.  This drives people to beat out the rest of the competition as they want to gain an edge; if they can get information that others can’t, that’s a big win for them!

This means that users can’t find it elsewhere, not even in a Google search. Hosting a webinar and linking to it from within your post is one of the ten most effective ways to promote your premium content.

Here at HQ SEO, we run training courses every quarter about the most requested topics that range from eCommerce queries to local SEO campaigns.  It’s all about gaining a connection with potential inbound leads and building rapport.

If your content proves to be a hit with your customers, chances are they’ll share it with their social networks, giving you extra exposure and potentially driving more traffic to the site.

Run your own meetup events

Going out and meeting people at networking events is a good way to is connect with a variety of potential clients.  Unfortunately, there will be many more just like you and in a general meetup environment.  There no guarantee that clients are looking for what exactly you have to offer.

In contrast, running your own event means that potential clients will be turning up looking for exactly that.  You know why there are there and because it is your event, you automatically hold the key position of authority.

You are able to control who can attend the event itself which in itself has benefits.  You can restrict the competition that can attend, isolating yourself as the natural solution.  Do some background research so when it comes to talking to them, you  already know their business.  This is an important weapon in your lead generation marketing arsenal.

I would even suggest on starting the event with a time slot designated to you speaking about a topic of choice.

Speaking to an audience will instantly convince people that you are an expert.  Being considered a guru is a sure fire way of getting more inbound leads.

Your audience members will be able to take note of you and spread the word to their own network of clients and professional people.

You may get invited to speak at other events or perhaps write a guest post on a website which will increase your reach.  Getting exposed to different audiences will increase the amount of inbound leads to you and your website.

This leads to the growing your network.

A lot of the time, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Being apart of a network of professionals enables you to establish yourself as the go-to guy.  

Get yourself connected with :

Groups specific to your niche: if you are a tax professional that are specialists in international tax law, it would be a good idea to associate yourself with businesses that operate overseas.

Social media groups:  nearly everyone that has access to Facebook, Twitter, etc has one.  There will be groups that you can search and join easily that will be looking for what you have to offer.  You could even create your own page.

Competitors:  if you think about it, this is actually a good method.  Not all businesses are able to take on extra clients for one reason or another so they could recommend you as a provider.   As an example, a good SEO agency will often be at capacity meaning that there will be opportunities for another to take on that client.

A/B test your webpage

Scratch that. You should be A/B testing everything you do.

This tip is pretty much self explanatory.

Even the smallest changes can have a dramatic impact on obtaining inbound leads.  This could even be location of the enquiry box from the left to the right of the page.

The benefit to doing this is so that you can understand what customers prefer.  This is the only method that can keep your page constantly updated and running to the best of its potential.

Do not think that once you have built the page, that’s that and time to move on.  You should go back and look at what is doing well on the page and what isn’t.

Summing up

And there you have it: 7 effective ways to increase inbound lead generation. 

With all this being said, there is one important factor that no one except YOU can control, and that is by taking action.

Without it, your business will continue to generate the same level of interest that it is now.

Having a variety of techniques is will almost guarantee an increase in sales.  You’ve just got to go and do it.

At HQ SEO we’ve been involved with some amazing Ecommerce clients around the world. Many of these clients are also selling on a number of channels away from just Google. One of the most common Ecommerce channels for businesses now is Amazon as I’m sure most reading this are aware.

This is one of the reason we created our Amazon SEO services with our sister company AmazonSEOConsultant.com a little less than a year ago. Which now ranks #1 worldwide and generates over 100 leads a month!

But in this guide we wanted to outline just 3 elements that all sellers need when it comes to selling on Amazon. The 3 Stages to becoming a successful Amazon seller. This is very beginner friendly content, if you are looking for some more advanced information check out the site mentioned above as we’ve written a highly highly technical blog for Amazon sellers looking to get to the next level with their business, and get in touch if you have any questions.

1.) Emphasise Your USP

Gone are the days where you can make 7 figures on Amazon by having an “OK” Product and being first to market. I saw people make a lot of money in this time and we even helped a number of these too but in 2018 it’s too late. You are too late to the party if you are only looking to get on Amazon and not build a real brand.

Amazon is just a platform, and as such it needs to be treated like it, similar to Google, you can rank a website but it becomes 10 times more difficult (and expensive) if you are not building a brand, writing good content and growing naturally externally. If you’re just in this for the money now it’s going to be a tough one to crack.

As a result you now need to emphasise your unique benefits of your product inside your listing, you will still need help for initial traction (this is where we come in) but once achieved the quality of your product will result in a fast growing business. Emphasise your unique selling points and ensure you aren’t just looking to generate some quick cash with a crappy product because its not even possible anymore! And obviously not recommended.

2.) Generate Initial Sales

We get close to 25 leads a week into the Amazon site, this is awesome but it’s also quite worrying at the same time that so many sellers need help. I think one of the reasons is the basic information around on-page optimisation for Google is quite easy to understand and implement into a site. Of course there’s a ton of misinformation in the marketplace regarding more advanced technical SEO and link building, but the basics are there and easy to understand.

But the problem with Amazon is that this same basic level of understanding doesn’t seem to be present. So in very very very simple terms, to rank on Amazon you have to generate full priced sales from external sources, this will increase your organic ranking, which leads to increasing your organic visibility… Which leads to generating sales through Amazon organic search… EASY Right?!…

Some ways to do this:

• Paid marketing.
• Adwords.
• Facebook Advertising.
• Asking your family, friends, anyone you’ve ever met (although this is technically against Amazon’s ToS.)
• Content marketing
• Guest Posts
• Link building (to the Amazon page itself)
• Amazon sponsored products.

Without these initial sales your product (no matter how good) will never rank and hence… Never make any sales! And you’ll be doomed to the 80% of Amazon sellers that make very little.

3.) Track, Tweak & Optimise

Not too long ago I wrote a beast of an article over 10,000 words long that outlines the best tools for Amazon sellers. This post is getting a lot of attention as it’s just a nice definitive list. USE TOOLS! They help you so much!

The core areas where I would recommend softwares are;

Inventory management

Inventory management just allows you as a business owner to see what’s going on a lot more clearly. This is something that just the generic Amazon seller central accounts does not show in enough detail. There are dozens of inventory management solutions, for the price I recommend AmzPing as my selection. It’s very easy to use and powerful at the same time.

Organic rank tracking

Tracking where you rank inside of Amazon for your organic rankings is essential. It’s something that is not talked about enough in the seller community but something that is potentially the single most important lead KPI signal that determines how profitable your Amazon business is going to be. The recommendation here is KeyworX this was built by our team to be the top solution for sellers.

Those are the 2 most important elements, aside from those you can get away with not using much else. Things like Jungle scout and other estimator tools are great but they are not essential for a successful campaign.

Cheers for reading and let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Tom.

Ranking in Google in 2018 is no longer a tick each box game.

You don’t just build some citations, build some links, do some on-page and just rank magically.

The reason why is because Google now wants to see that a business or website is an authority. This is why authority style sites are doing a lot better when related to organic rankings than mini niche sites that might be slightly more relevant to the actual content or query. Google views authority as the primary factor and relevancy second.

This is why when you write a post that might have no competition and is perfectly optimised on-page for a specific keyword that you get no organic traffic or rankings.

You have to first tick Google’s authority box. If you do not then you aren’t going to rank however well or relevant your page is.

It’s About Creating A Picture To Google

This is the same reason why some sites with seemingly 0 links rank highly for what is a very competitive (usually local) keyword. Just because they do not have links, does not mean they do not have authority.

You tend to see this all the time in local rankings.

When someone looks at a very hyper locational keyword in a medium sized city. Usually an “industry + city” style keyword, everyone thinks it will be very easy to rank. Oh on-page, build some citations, Google business page and local links and BOOM ranked.

Although that is how easy it is for us nowadays, it is very much not the case for the majority as they miss a very very key element.

They do not build a picture for Google.

Timing

Timing your link building or SEO efforts are so important nowadays.

2 sites that do the exact same optimisation elements but at different times or in different orders will likely have 2 very different results when it comes to organic rankings.

This comes back to building a picture for Google. Is it more likely that you build your social accounts out first OR that you start guest posting? It would be a bit weird if you were guest posting on a? bunch of sites before you even had a twitter and FB page set-up. Google knows this. I know this and you will to.

Instead of just throwing everything up at once and hoping it works, think about the order of which you complete tasks.

For example it’s more likely that you set-up a Google business page before you start building citations. So do it in this order.

Ordering and timing of tasks is insanely important.

If you start building links before you even have traffic this is another red flag to Google. Focus on building traffic initially first (just pay for it from Google or FB) and see what converts. This will not only help a lot in the future (funnels, conversions etc) but it will also help you rank organically.

Google is trying to get closer and closer to integrating quality into user metrics and UX. For example if you have a really low bounce rate, high time on site, this would intercate that the site is quite trustworthy and that Google should rank you higher for your keywords as a result. There’s a good post on the benefits of this inclusive style marketing by sellerschoice for anyone struggling.

Non-linkable mentions

Diving into competition analysis nowadays is quite tough. We use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to help, but really they have no idea and are nowhere near as smart as Google and honestly they don’t need to be. They only need to show us an example.

The problem as it relates to rankings is that people think that because a site doesn’t have many links, it is not authoritative. The issue is that is just not the case for a number of reasons.

The most common reason is due to non-linkable mentions – This is where a website, lets say “Bob’s archery fun” is mentioned on the web, usually on local forums, directories, social, blogs etc but is not linked.

Google used to not value these mentions all that highly, BUT if these mentions meet Google’s picture and they are 100% natural. They are incredibly powerful!

This is also why you need to be very careful when you just track metrics, as they are totally useless.

The best metrics to track are search console – Internal links to site, organic traffic (inside GA) and most importantly in my opinion; organic impressions from the SERPS.

Conclusion

Google is getting further and further away from ranking sites on individual metrics and closer to a simple question (answered by AI): “Is this site relevant and trustworthy?” – If you past that first initial filter or “BS TEST” as I like to call it, then we get into the inner ranking metrics, On-page keywords, LSI, links to site etc etc. But if you fail that initial BS test then you won’t rank no matter how many links, how good your on-page is or how much you spend on “great content”

Thanks for reading.

Tom.

SEO has changed drastically.

However far back you look, things have changed.

In 2001 it was easy.

In 2009 it was super-easy.

In 2012 it changed a lot.

In 2018 it’s still changing.

Nowadays search engines are more like filtering programmes. They don’t start by searching, they start by filtering the cr*p out of results.

Engines primary job is to provide reliable, relevant results to users based on their initial search query. This is pretty clear, but how they do this not so easy.

We know things have changed in the past.

In this post I’m going to share my opinions on what I think is going to happen in the future, what I think will change in the next 3 years.

Continue reading “How Search Engine Optimisation Will Change in the Next 3 Years”

What makes a good SEO agency?

Pretty obvious right.

Results.

But what else?

Is there anything else other than results that makes up a good SEO agency. In my experience there is.

1.) Communication

But not too much.

One of the most frustrating things for SEO agencies is having clients that call up every single week asking why they are not ranked yet.

This is not actually the clients fault to be fair.

It’s the fault of the SEO agency in that they have not mentioned that results take a few months to kick in (unless you are target extremely uncompetitive keywords.)

So when you hire an SEO agency there should be a lot of expectation management, including pre-set times for calls and questions so there is not a lot of back and fourth via email which of course drains the energy and resources of both the client and the provider of SEO.

2.) Saying No

This one is an interesting one.

Saying no to clients is a very important skill to learn.

Avoid the specification encroucment that clients like to try.

For example if you are doing SEO and a client wants to go into PPC or FB ads for example and asks if you can do this. Say no.

Why?

Well 2 reasons.

1.) It dilutes your efficiency.

2.) It is not specific to your business or offerering.

It’s likely if you are good at SEO you will know how to do FB ads or PPC quite well.

But this is a real issue.

You do not want to dilute your efficiency.

3.) Building Campaigns for ROI

ROI is the single greatest way to measure business success.

Not Social followers, retweets, links, increases in organic rankings but ROI.

If we improve rankings by 10% but this results in ?10Million in increased sales and this only cost ?10,000…. Then that’s a great ROI.

If we increase revenue by ?2,000 and charge ?500. That’s not so good.

Build campaigns and pricing around ROI.

This is how we have built our proposals for the past 18 months and have seen some very good results for both our agency and our clients.

Because we don’t under-price our services, when we do get a client who comes onboard we actually have the funds to rank them for some incredibly competitive keywords.

Not just this but we actually build pricing based on the competition (and hence potential ROI.)

For example if a client can make ?100,000 a month by ranking #1 for a group of keywords, we want to charge in the range of 2-5% of this. For more information on this process visit HQ SEO.

This means even if they don’t quite rank 1st they are still making an insanely profitable ROI on their investment.

All marketing is an investment!