Getting visitors to your website is the primary goal of digital marketing. It’s how you get prospects to make a purchase and become customers. You can get plenty of visitors to your site through paid ads – if you don’t mind paying for it. But with the power of search engine optimization (SEO), you can bring in a consistently growing stream of visitors without spending a dime. Sustained leads with digital marketing should be a key part of your strategy, and today we’ll tell you why and how to do it.
What Are Sustained Leads in Digital Marketing?
Sustained leads are leads that come into your business in a way that builds momentum over the long-term. These leads come in via organic search engine results because your content is ranking highly on Google or Bing through your SEO efforts.
Unlike quick leads, which cost you money but get you results fast, sustained leads are low-to-no cost but take time to work. Investing time in getting sustained leads should be a key part of your lead generation strategy.
Sustained Leads vs. Quick Leads
Quick leads are a form of paid ads, and they get you results fast. They’re great for businesses just starting out. This is because they get leads in the door right away by getting your ads to the top of Google search results or social media feeds.
But sustained leads work in a different way. They work over time by carefully creating a thoughtful digital marketing strategy and using SEO best practices. Then, you can get your content to naturally come to the top of Google search pages and therefore bring visitors into your site. This approach doesn’t have any built-in costs, unlike quick leads.
But it also takes a lot longer to get you results – 12-18 months or more to rank your content organically. Once you’re ranking highly, your content will keep bringing in leads without an additional dollar invested. You can combine the power of paid and organic content if you’re looking to build your business quickly and keep it going in the future.
For more info on sustained leads vs. quick leads, check out our video on YouTube.
How to Get Sustained Leads for Digital Marketing Success
The key to getting sustained leads is through search engine optimization. This is true for any industry – for more examples, see our guide to sustained leads for healthcare practices.
The pillar of SEO is making sure your content can be found by people who are looking for what you sell, and that search engines can understand what is on your site. You want to optimize your content for both the search engine algorithms and your potential customers. It’s not easy, but it’s vital to the success of your digital marketing strategy.
Sustained Leads and SEO
Getting sustained leads is dependent on your SEO efforts with a solid strategy. Hence, no matter how long your website has existed or the quality of your products, if no one can find you, they can’t become a customer.
But using all three types of SEO helps your website be found by your customers via search engine traffic.
The Role of Content Marketing
Content marketing should be a part of your digital marketing strategy if you want to get plenty of sustained leads. Why? Because creating fresh, SEO-friendly content regularly will give you lots of opportunities to rank highly in Google and bring in more visitors and leads.
Effective Keyword Research
How can your content marketing be as effective as possible in getting sustained leads? Writing articles on topics that just come to you isn’t enough.
You will want to do keyword research to find out what your target customers are searching for – what phrases do they use, and what questions do they have? What are the solutions to their problems? Then, build articles around those topics or questions using those keywords.
Targeting High-Quality Leads
If you’re writing articles that attract plenty of visitors who are not your target market, you’re wasting your lead generating efforts. You want to target your content to the people who are most likely to become a customer to bring in quality leads.
A thoughtful lead generation strategy will raise your conversion rates and make sure your content creation efforts have a measurable impact on your bottom line.
Creating Content on a Budget
If you run a very small business, you might be concerned about who will create all this content without a marketing team. You can hire a content marketing service that works for your budget to do the keyword research and content creation for you. This saves you time, and is a smart investment in your business.
But you can also use your own expertise to write content yourself – as the business owner, you have plenty of expertise to share. And there are plenty of free resources to help you find good images to include in your post or create graphics yourself.
How to Rank on Google
To maximize your chances of ranking highly when your website is newer, look for keywords that have high search volume but low keyword difficulty. It’s easier to rank for those, so you’ll see results faster even if the search volume is a little lower than more competitive keywords.
Nurturing Sustained Leads in Digital Marketing
Of course, getting website visitors isn’t enough to convert your sustained leads to sales most of the time. Most people who find your website the first time aren’t ready to make a purchase or a decision right away. The next step once you’ve gotten that boost in website traffic from your SEO is to create compelling lead magnets on your website.
Check out our in-depth video on the top ten proven lead generators for your website.
You want to give your visitors reasons to give you their email address, so that they can:
- sign up for updates
- save on their first purchase
- get additional information
Then you can add them to your email marketing campaigns and nurture them to a sale. Email marketing is a very effective way to convert those sustained leads into a sale, or at least into a qualified lead for your sales department.
Thinking Long-Term with Sustained Leads and Digital Marketing
Getting sustained leads through SEO costs you nothing, if you’re a small business who writes all your content and handles SEO yourself. It’s more sustainable over the long term than continuously spending money on expensive quick leads. But it takes much longer to see results – at least 12-18 months, in fact. It’s an investment in time instead of dollars.
Even though it takes time to write quality content and wait months for results, it’s the best way to grow your business over the long run. You’re investing your time in the future of your company so that you will see real and sustained growth over the next few years. And this is how you build a business that lasts.
Digital Marketing Solutions that Work for You
Want to get more sustained leads and optimize your site and content for search engine traffic? Not only is it a good idea, but it’s an investment that will pay off.
Looking for more personalized help on your digital marketing strategy right now? Schedule a free business review here to find out how we help businesses grow. You can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.
