5 Great Digital Marketing Practices for Driving Conversions

The ultimate reason we get into digital marketing is to drive conversions. That’s why marketers create content (and gate some of it), hang out on LinkedIn, and engage in a host of activities. These activities are supposed to attract leads, take them down the consumer purchase funnel, turn them into customers, and retain them. And even refer others.

Looking at all the digital marketing tactics available to marketers today, which ones generate higher ROI than others? We look at 5 great digital marketing practices geared toward driving conversions.

1. Market Segmentation

This strategy involves categorizing your total addressable market (all prospects that may find your solutions valuable) into unique segments with similar characteristics. 

You can segment your prospects according to their firmographics, tech usage, sophistication level, needs, value, price, etc.

Segmentation allows you to focus on the audience’s specific needs, meaning you’ll handle their needs adequately and satisfactorily. 

As you familiarize yourself with these prospect segments, you’ll start seeing things from their perspective and improve your solutions accordingly.

To find success with this strategy, consider the following

• Avoid limiting your segmentation to one type. Being open to other segmentation types expands your reach and ability to meet customer demands.
• Think about your data source to ensure it provides correct information for the segment type you wish to engage. Go granular to ensure your segment is unique to maximize message impact.
• Balance the time you invest against the reward you’re achieving. Remember segments require man-hours and resources to manage. If the segment doesn’t rope in high-value prospects or a considerable number of prospects, then it may not be that beneficial.

2. Understand Buyer Intent

“What does your ideal buyer’s digital shopping experience before making a purchase comprise?”

Do you take note of specific content consumption, visits to particular pages, time spent there, and the frequency?

To understand buying intent, it’s important for marketers to analyze these elements alongside the prospect’s online footprints on competitor pages. You can then gauge how close the prospect is to actualizing the purchase. 

Where do you find buyer intent data? You can collect it in-house using marketing automation platforms or web apps or get it from external providers who source data from cookies, IP lookups, etc. 

Combining both data sources provides a clearer picture of the activities buyers undertake before engaging your brand. 

What’s the payoff?

Your ability to intelligently “eavesdrop” on your ideal customer’s online shopping explorations allows you to map where they are now and where they are headed potentially. You can then get your team to approach these prospects ahead of the competition.

A solid understanding of buyer intent means you can present highly relevant content and context-correct messages to guide the prospect to your brand. 

Long after the conversion, you can track the search terms your current customers are using to know if they are looking up competitors’ offerings. In this case, renewed attention will be needed to retain them.

3. Cold Calling

Contrary to what’s out there, businesses are actually meeting their sales calls through cold calling. That’s because this technique has evolved with the times, leveraging data and other marketing intelligence to identify potential customers and reach out to them.

Depending on your size, you can set up a call center complete with SDRs or collaborate with a lead generation agency to maximize efforts. 

If you’re keeping things in-house, consider this:

• Product knowledge and belief in your solutions are important. People can hear enthusiasm and passion or the lack of it in your voice. If you can’t present your solutions convincingly, you’ll strike doubt in the prospect’s mind—about you and the entire brand.
• Put in some research. Find out who’s in charge and the best time to call them. Look them up on social for ideas on the things that interest them, which you can leverage to establish a connection.
• Small talk is fine. Jumping right into your spiel the moment the prospect answers the phone doesn’t do much for rapport building. Get a little personal. Share something you appreciate about them (that you learned from a public source and without being creepy) before engaging your pitch.
• Work with a script. We often only focus on the script that covers what you’ll share with the prospect. There are two other scripts worth keeping handy—the gatekeeper’s script and the voicemail script. You will encounter these two “obstacles” severally, and it pays to be ready.

4. Employ Conversion Marketing Tactics

It’s exciting to see people visiting your website and interacting with your content, but how many of them take desirable actions? 

A key advantage that digital marketing has over traditional marketing outreach is that you can track campaigns.

You can know how many people saw your ads, read your content, and visited your site. You can tell by their search what interests them, those on the brink of purchasing, and those who bounced. 

So, the goal behind this tactic is to help maximize your marketing efforts and desirable actions from potential customers.

Best practices include

• Test Landing pages and optimize them. These pages are solely for receiving audiences and converting them. Test different elements, including headlines, layout, form fields, color schemes, copy, CTA button placement, etc.
• Improve website navigation. Do site visitors get around with friction? Aim for a minimalistic design that allows people to find what they are looking for easily. While you’re at it, improve page load times for both desktop and mobile devices.
• Create a compelling value proposition. To grab attention and compel action, your value proposition copy needs to highlight your USP while speaking directly to your ideal audiences. As with landing pages, test copy continually until you find one that resonates.

5. Influencer Marketing

Most of us have someone (or several people) that we’ve identified as an expert in their field. We listen to their opinions and trust their advice so much so that if they recommend something, we’ll likely look it up.

By engaging a B2B influencer, you’re leveraging their expertise and credibility to sway their followers your way. 

How do you go about identifying a good B2B influencer? What characteristics should they possess?

• Authenticity. Continued exposure to misinformation over the years has led to increased skepticism over what brands and those who endorse them (celebrities and influencers) say. They evaluate what is being said and will dismiss your brand if they detect insincerity and misinformation. A good past reputation is essential.
• Community management. Savvy influencers think of their followers as customers. They continually cultivate and foster authentic relationships with their audience. This may include answering questions, keeping the group active, and managing differing points of view.
• Content creation expertise. By expertise, we mean the ability to put together appealing content that inspires followers to engage. Their content and tone need to resonate with your brand for credibility, otherwise, people might think you’re just leveraging the influencer’s influence for a quick gain.