When you apply inbound marketing to your financial service firm, having a lot of traffic come into your website may be thrilling at first, but without any of them converting to a lead, your sales opportunities from this source are close to none. The next step that you need to work on is the 2nd component of the Inbound Marketing Methodology which is CONVERT. This component focuses on converting website visitors to leads.
Let’s start by defining what an Inbound lead is according to the Inbound Methodology.
A website lead is a prospect or a website visitor who fills out a form for a request to be fulfilled. The most common request that most people would think of in the financial sector is to be contacted by a company representative by filling out a “Contact Us” form.
If your company’s website only has a “Contact Us” form to convert a visitor to an Inbound lead, it may be time to add other conversion opportunities to reach prospects who are interested in learning more about their investment needs and challenges but are simply not at the stage where they want to speak with an advisor yet.
There is much more that you can do than simply the “Contact Us” form request. If you want to reach visitors in all stages of the client’s journey, start by asking what content your company could provide that would be valuable for prospects who are in the different stages of the client’s journey.
Let's say you are a financial advisor for example. Do you have a Q&A presentation about alternative investments that you frequently use during a sales pitch? How about creating a webinar where people could register online to host a Q&A session?
Do you have an alternative investment guide that could help them identify the right investment solution in the industry which are given out during face-to-face meetings? Why not make it available for download by filling out a form?
Do you often have local sales presentations for potential investors? How about placing a form on your solutions page where they can register to receive a notification when there is one coming up soon?
Now that you know you can generate leads not only from the “Contact Us” form but can also do so through several other conversion opportunities, you need to start thinking about how to strategically get people to fill out these forms so that they will be registered in your system as an inbound lead.
You will want to do some reverse engineering. For every conversion opportunity (webinar, downloadable guides, event registration, etc.), ask yourself why someone would want to fill out a form and how you can encourage people to do so.
Let’s take, for example, the alternative investment guide that is available for download by filling out a form. Why would a prospect want to download it? Is it because they went on Google and found it? Did someone recommend it to them? Or maybe they read about the specific investment type that you and others offer in the industry and are looking to learn more about it?
In any case, if you follow the Inbound Methodology, you will cover all the possibilities of why a visitor would download your alternative investment guide because Inbound Marketing is all about providing the right content in the right context.
If you write content about alternative investments, how about offering your readers the option to download the alternative investment guide?
If you write a blog article about the reasons why people select alternative investments over traditional, how about inviting them to register for the Q&A webinar?
If you write a blog article about the performance of a specific type of investment in the industry, why not invite them to register for the upcoming local sales presentation?
By following the Inbound methodology, everything that you do will help you to think at least one step ahead. In our previous blog about the ATTRACT component of the Inbound Methodology, we focused on how to initially bring visitors to your website, but we were left with the question of what to do afterwards with all the traffic coming in.
Now that you know that those visitors need to be converted to leads by providing valuable content via filling out a form, you can now go through your website and identify new opportunities to make CONVERT happen.