Lead Magnet Strategies; a 3-Step Conversion.

Are you seeing a steady traffic flow to your website but not converting those leads into customers? Or worse, are you not seeing adequate traffic to your site to convert in the first place? Many business owners are great at what they do; the rigor of running a successful ag business is in their DNA. Yet, many people have trouble understanding how to use content marketing and lead magnet strategies to boost conversion rates.

The adage “build it and they will come” tends to be an unfortunate, albeit widely adopted marketing ideology where business owners believe the act of simply building a website will bring with it a stampede of buyers.

Additionally, many business owners expect to close deals on the first point of contact with a lead or potential customer. Unfortunately, that’s incredibly uncommon and often results in unnecessary frustration for business owners simply because they don’t understand consumer habits or buying patterns.

In 2022, it takes approximately eight marketing touchpoints until a potential buyer is ready to commit to your product or service. A more effective form of marketing is to attract website visitors with the right content to serve as the perfect lead magnet and then fulfill those marketing touchpoints using automation. Marketing to attract, engage, and convert your target audience follows a specific process. One that requires research, planning, and strategic execution.

The Ultimate Guide to Hiring an Inbound Marketing Agency

There are three essential steps to a lead magnet strategy: generating leads, capturing leads, and nurturing leads so you can continue the conversation until they are ready to buy. Remember, just because you are prepared to sell doesn’t mean the customer is willing to buy. The trick is to continue to offer value, build trust, and nurture the relationship until your leads are ready to commit.

This inbound methodology is often referred to as “the customer journey” through the marketing funnel in 3 distinct stages: Attract, Engage, and Convert. Every potential customer operates on their own timetable. The trick for businesses is to give them the freedom to choose in their own time while engaging them with meaningful content that continuously earns their trust.

Step One-Attract: Content Marketing

There are as many ways to market and advertise as there are products and services in the marketplace. Yet, content marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate a steady stream of qualified leads to your website. In addition, content marketing is one of the best ways to rank in search engines, drive organic traffic, and capture that traffic with target-matched lead generators.

Content marketing is a strategy where businesses create helpful content for their target audience. This content is designed to help them rank higher in search engines. Ag business owners generate first-rate content such as landing pages, pillar pages, videos, blog posts, articles, and social media posts aligned to their target audience’s needs, interests, and search queries to achieve a higher ranking in search engines. Building a content strategy might feel overwhelming, but the roadmap is quite simple.

Identify your ideal target audience
Research keywords to discover the words and phrases used for your product or service.
Build content using those keywords and phrases.

Using the right keywords, key phrases, and SEO tactics, businesses can boost their profile in the search engine results pages (SERPs), leading to necessary exposure and increased organic website traffic. Content marketing can help Ag businesses:

Achieve higher search engine ranking
Gain visibility online and on Social Media
Create Lead Generation streams
Build trust and brand loyalty with target audiences
Establish their business as a thought leader and industry authority
Magnify brand awareness

Step Two-Engage: Crafting an Offer & Capturing Qualified Leads

What will you trade in value to capture incoming leads? Qualified traffic alone isn’t enough to lead to a conversion. You need a way to engage your qualified leads with supporting marketing materials such as a drip campaign or nurture campaign. You can only do that if you have their contact information, such as an email address.

Once you start generating qualified leads through effective content marketing or other forms of advertising, you need to create an asset with which you can “trade value for value.” This is known as a lead magnet. Simply asking your website visitors to “sign up for your newsletter” isn’t a compelling enough call to action to get them to trade their valuable contact information.

So, you need to create a type of lead magnet that is interesting and important to your target audience, which you can trade for permission to use their email address. This can range from a free trial, special report, case study, white paper, or e-book in exchange for your potential customers’ contact information. These serve as great lead magnets.

Step 3-Convert: Creating a Conversion Path

Once you’ve engaged your lead with an offer, now what? What is the best way to nurture and convert leads into customers? In most instances, this involves a nurturing or drip campaign strategy.

Drip or nurturing campaigns deliver automatic email messages to your target audience at predetermined intervals. These emails “drip” into your lead’s inbox, establishing your ag business as a trusted authority over time. These automated campaigns are a great way to deliver your sales message in timed, easily digestible, bite-sized pieces.

Every message in the nurture sequence creates an opportunity for you to:

promote the benefits and features of your product or service
address your audience’s pain points and overcome objections
educate the reader on why your brand is the best option
execute calls to action that will encourage the lead to convert

The beauty of building an email drip or nurture campaign is that once written, it can be fully automated, personalized, and tracked for conversion. So, you create assets once, yet you are paid repeatedly from the resulting conversions.

CRM tools like HubSpot allow you to create automated campaigns triggered by a particular action. For example, suppose you offer an e-Book download in exchange for a lead’s contact information. In that case, the act of filling out a web form creates a contact record inside the CRM and triggers the email campaign to begin sending a pre-written sequence of drip or nurture emails to your leads. These emails are welcome messages in their inbox because they specifically sought out your information and gave permission to contact them. Every time a lead receives your emails, they

Drip and nurture campaigns are targeted to move the lead down a particular action path along their customer journey. In the overall inbound marketing cycle of attracting, engaging, and converting, your automated email campaigns are intended to move customers through the marketing funnel to the ultimate goal of converting into customers. This is known as a conversion path.

Effective campaigns often contain calls to action that drive leads to your social media, landing pages, and blog posts. These are examples of indirect calls to action. In contrast, more direct calls to action might involve “asking for the sale,” such as scheduling a consultation or taking advantage of a timed promotion or coupon. Follow these guidelines when creating content or campaign messaging for the best results.

Are your content and campaign messages aligned with your ideal customer’s needs?
Does your messaging position your brand as an industry expert?
How well does your messaging align with your company’s core values?
What are you doing to differentiate yourself in the marketplace?
What calls to action would generate the best conversion?

Want to explore content marketing, but you’re not sure where to start? Then, connect with a content marketing specialist like Anthem Ag to help you define and execute your own content strategy.

Discover how Anthem Ag supports agribusiness clients through inbound marketing and custom agricultural technology solutions.

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