More Engagement, More Leads: The Nuclear Fusion of Sales
Engagement and leads are the first two steps to earning a sale and, at scale, driving larger sales results for your company. The two work in tandem to set the series of events in motion that converts interested prospects into paying customers. Smart companies implement strategies to optimize engagement specifically for lead generation, knowing this combination is the key to truly boosting sales results.
In this article, we’ll go over why the relationship between engagement and leads is so crucial to your company’s sales performance and 5 ways you can optimize engagement for more leads and conversions.
Quick Takeaways
- Companies with higher website engagement often earn more leads than competitors, even when they have lower unique visitors.
- Targeting the right audiences increases the level at which users engage with your content.
- It is critical to know your top lead sources and focus your efforts in those areas.
- Users engage more with visual content than with text content (especially video).
- Engagement efforts should continue after lead generation with strong sales engagement strategies.
Engagement and leads: what’s the relation?
We already know that creating great content earns you higher search rankings and drives more organic traffic to your website. Other tactics help, too — social media and PPC ads, for example.
But traffic is not enough to generate leads. To do that, you need web visitors to actually engage with your site.
Engagement and leads work together to create a domino effect that can boost your company’s sales potential. It works like this:
- When your website sees high engagement, you generate more leads.
- Generating more leads enables you to engage more with potential buyers.
- More leads and higher sales engagement help you increase sales.
- Increased sales lead to opportunities for retention, upselling, and referrals.
That first domino to drop and get the entire stack moving is engagement. In the next two sections, we’ll cover how to optimize your engagement potential both before and after lead generation for higher sales and revenue.
How to optimize engagement for lead generation
Target the right audiences
It’s impossible to optimize engagement for lead generation without targeting the right audiences. This primarily means knowing your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, then creating content specifically for those audience segments.
Why is this so important?
Because research has shown that companies with higher engagement earn more leads than those with lower engagement — even when they earn less traffic to their website! In the chart below, you can see that many of the highest or mid-range lead generators actually have lower numbers of unique visitors.
Know your top lead sources
Another way to target your engagement efforts for better lead generation is to know your top lead sources. When you do, you can adjust your strategy as needed to increase lead generation from sources where it should be higher and maximize your ROI from sources where you’re already succeeding.
Organic search is by far the top lead source across industries.
Having a strong content marketing strategy is key to earning more traffic, higher engagement, more leads from Google and other search engines. Beyond that, companies should track traffic and lead metrics to understand where their leads are coming from. You can do this using lead tracking software, your CRM system, and by asking leads how they found you.
Presumably, the sources generating the most leads are also seeing more engaged audiences. When you target your efforts toward these sources, you’re likely to see higher engagement and watch that domino effect take place.
Create visual content
Users remember and engage more with visual content. Incorporating visuals into your content across channels — blog, website, email, social media, and more — is one of the surest ways to get noticed and increase engagement and leads.
Video in particular is the way to earn the best results. Cisco predicts that by the end of this year, video will account for 82% of all online traffic.
This doesn’t mean you should stop creating the content you’re already creating. It does mean you should incorporate video into it for higher engagement. Some ideas:
- Product demos and overview videos for your website
- Incorporating videos as supporting content on your blog
- Creating social media stories
- Running online events like webinars or interviews
- Sharing videos on social media
Include strong CTAs in all content
What better way to get your website visitors to engage than to tell them exactly how to do it? Calls to action (CTAs) put your potential customers on the right path of action.
The first step to creating strong CTAs is knowing your sales process. In other words, what do you want customers to do in order to move to the next stage of the buyer journey? It could be as simple as signing up for an email newsletter. Maybe it’s starting a free trial or scheduling a free consultation with a member of your sales team.
Your CTAs should vary by which audience segment and stage of the buyer journey it targets. The overall takeaway is that CTAs increase engagement and spur action (action that often equates to a lead generated).
Encourage email subscriptions
Email continues to be the most preferred method of brand communication by consumers across industries.
One smart way, then, to marry engagement and leads is to encourage email subscriptions and have a strong email marketing strategy in place. Once a user is subscribed to receive your emails, you have direct access to cultivate that lead. You can implement better targeting, launch lead nurturing campaigns, and follow up personally to top prospects.
In short: email access to potential buyers puts you in the driver’s seat for converting them into a paying customer.
Our outbound email software and lead generation services are custom-built for startups, consultancies, marketing agencies, and other B2B organizations. Schedule a quick call with us and find out how we can help you win more clients.