Considering that the economic climate looks set for an even more challenging period ahead, you may want to start reviewing your current marketing stack to ensure your budget is spent as effectively as possible.
One concrete way to do so is to see how you can reduce the amount of waste of potential leads across the entire user journey. I like to use the inbound methodology provided by HubSpot as a baseline from which to break up the stages and look for areas to improve effectiveness or reduce waste.
To help you start the process, here are six applications you may not have previously considered that could be helpful in improving ROI at each stage of the funnel.
1. To Improve Your Message-Market Fit: GummySearch
Improved audience research can have two effects:
- First, improved audience knowledge can help ensure that the lead magnets and creative you have on your website are more aligned with your target prospects’ interests.
- Second, having better user insights will allow you to ensure that the copy you are using on your website uses your prospects’ language. That can help improve your overall conversion rates, increase the number of consultations, or increase engagement with your content.
GummySearch is a Reddit audience profiling tool. It allows you to quickly determine relevant Reddit communities for your keywords, such as your product or service. It also allows you to search conversations happening on the platform by type.
Here are some things you could look for:
- Popular discussion topics
- Trending questions
- Advice requests
- Solution requests
For example, you could use GummySearch to see what questions are being asked in relevant subreddits, then use that intelligence to form your lead magnet content or adapt the copy on your website.
2. To Identify Nonconverting Visitors: Leadfeeder
The average-performing website has an approximately 1-2% conversion rate. There is a significant opportunity to generate more ROI by identifying the 99-98% of leads that do not convert.
Leadfeeder will help you discover what users are visiting your website, even if they do not opt into a piece of content in return for providing their email address.
Using Leadfeeder, you can identify prospects your business has been targeting and share them with your sales team to begin nurturing or contacting. That can help you increase the amount of business you can generate from nonconverting leads.
Some examples of how you can implement Leadfeeder into your funnel:
- Identify returning target accounts in ABM
- Identify new target accounts for your sales team
- Profile the types of companies already interested in your top-of-funnel content
3. To Increase Content Performance: Convertful
It can be a pain to keep track of all your content offers and how they’re performing on each page. Tools such as Convertful can help by allowing more advanced targeting features on content offers that are made based on behavioral criteria, as well as by better page targeting. That is particularly handy if you have hundreds of pages.
By using the correct targeting options, you can improve your overall conversion rates by offering the right offer to a better-targeted prospect.
Some targeting options:
- URLs
- On-page keywords
- Dwell time
- Referrer URL
- User country
If you are not already using an advanced lead capture application, consider looking at Convertful for better targeting of your content.
4. To Engage and Convert via Chatbots: Continually
Chatbots may have gone past the peak of their interest phase, but they are definitely still relevant in 2022 if used correctly. In practice, chatbots are a useful method to engage prospects in a format for users who prefer that type of interaction. There will always be a segment of users who prefer live or automated chat to submitting a form or making a call.
Continually is a no-code chatbot platform that allows you to build chatbots using drag-and-drop to engage and convert your visitors.
Examples of where you can use chatbots:
- Service pages, to reduce concerns
- Pricing pages, to clarify options
- Homepages, to support navigation
There is a long-form guide from CEO Paul McKeever on chatbots but the strategy in short is to think through users’ intentions for each page and develop and deploy chatbots to support them.
A successful chatbot will be engaging; it should be capable of discovering the user’s intention and prompting the user to move to the next stage of the funnel.
5. To Personalize Copy Based on Source: markettailor
Website personalization has always seemed tricky. Typically, tools have relied on making individual elements different based on users who have been cookied.
Recently, I discovered a tool I quite like called markettailor. It allows you to personalize your website content based on a range of factors, without having to implement more than a single tag.
The process is to identify and create segments of users inbound or outbound to your website. For example, you can segment users by location, or incoming campaign UTM parameter. Then you can customize your website to match that particular type of user, similar to how Google Optimize does.
That approach is different from customizing which lead magnet or content offers are displayed on your website. Instead, it covers changing the wording of buttons, headlines, body content, or images used.
That kind of personalization can increase your conversion rates by adapting the copy to particular segments. For example, you may use it to better target accounts with custom headlines for people visiting via UTM links in an ABM email campaign.
6. To Enrich Leads: Snov
Having identified leads using some of the methods mentioned earlier such as chatbot or Leadfeeder, you now need to research and detail those leads for your sales team. There are various lead enrichment tools out there, but one of the best is Snov.
The platform can be used as a standalone lead enrichment tool, but it also offers the option to execute your follow-up sequence via personalized sales team messages.
Once you have identified the leads and uploaded them to Snov, you can process them for additional enrichment by adding details such as position title, company, phone number, etc.
Starting a sequence is fairly straightforward after you’ve enriched your leads. You select the contacts that you are interested in and then build an outreach sequence composed of emails and delays, as in the following screenshot.
Those two processes used together make it easier for marketing teams to enrich and warm up leads for sales teams.
Closing Notes
Although it doesn’t make sense to profile all the available lead generation tools that can be used to improve ROI, I hope this provides a starting point of inspiration for your own research.
Start with this list, and also review your funnel from the different stages (as outlined by HubSpot). You’ll find that there are other interesting tools you can use to improve your performance in each stage.
More Resources on Lead Generation Tools
Five Interactive-Content Tools to Engage Your Audience and Generate Leads
Five Inexpensive Direct Mail Tools to Generate Sales Leads Fast
