July 2017 - Leverage Marketing

How To Increase Your Lead Form Conversion Rate

July 26, 2017/0 Comments/in Web Design /by Leverage Marketing

For a lead generation business, a lot of pressure rests on the humble online contact form. It’s responsible for collecting the information the sales team needs to follow up with qualified leads, and if it can’t convince site visitors to submit their information, the flow of leads can quickly dry up.

Fortunately, an underperforming lead gen form isn’t a lost cause. The beauty of online forms is that you can regularly tweak them and track their performance to see what contact form version gets the highest conversion rate.

So where do you start when you want to improve your contact form conversion rate? If you’re relatively new to form creation and inbound marketing, we recommend checking out our blog post on lead form best practices. If you’re already using simple forms on your website but want to get more out of them, check out our tips below (think of this as Lead Form Best Practices 201).

Make Sure You’re Tracking Lead Form Conversions Accurately

Before you start tinkering with your lead gen form, make sure you’re tracking your lead form conversion in Google Analytics. The easiest way to track your conversions is to set up a Custom Goal that registers as completed after a visitor fills out your form and lands on a Thank You page. To do this:

Create a Thank You page for people who complete your form. (Make sure it’s a unique thank you page, not one you’ve used for other forms or purchases.)
Go to Admin in Google Analytics.
Go to Goals and click +New Goal
Give your Goal a name and select Destination as the type.
Set the destination as equal to the URL of your confirmation page.

With your new Goal set, you’ll be able to view the contact form conversion rate by going to Conversions–>Goals–>Goal URLs in your Google Analytics Reports.

When setting up your Goal, you can also turn on Funnels. You’ll be prompted to enter the URLs for the funnel steps, i.e. the path through your site you expect users to take to get to your lead gen form. You can then start using the Funnel Visualization report, which makes it easy to see if users are dropping off at certain points of the funnel.

funnel visualization in google analytics

Example of Funnel Visualization report in Google Analytics

Try a New Location for Your Form

If your lead form has a lower conversion rate than expected, it could be because it’s not getting a lot of visibility in its current location (you can use Google Analytics to check traffic to the page with the contact form). Test out your contact form in a new location to see if traffic and form fills increase. You could also try creating a pop-up form using a tool like OptinMonster. You can set up the pop-up form so that it’s triggered by a specific user action (such as scrolling 50% of the way down the page or staying on a page for a certain amount of time). That way, you’re presenting your form to users after they’ve had some time to engage with your site and familiarize themselves with your products or services.

Pop-up lead gen form on OptinMonster’s site

Earn Trust with Social Proof

Site visitors may be wary about sharing their information unless they know they’re getting something of value in exchange, and one way to prove the value of your offer is to use social evidence. If you’re trying to get visitors to fill out a contact form to receive a downloadable asset, tell them how many people have already downloaded it. Consider having your web developer add a counter above the form so that visitors can see the number of downloads updating in real time.

When asking site visitors to fill out a form to receive any offer or service, you can build trust by displaying short testimonials from happy customers. If your customers give you permission, consider displaying small photos with each testimonial so that site visitors can see that the testimonials are coming from real people.

mHelpDesk uses customer videos as social proof.

Incorporate Autocomplete for Location Fields

According to Google, adding autofill attributes to forms allows users to complete those forms up to 30% faster. When forms take less time to fill out, users experience less friction and contact form conversion rates go up.

Autocomplete is most useful for location fields (such as Country or Street), where users might otherwise have to choose an option from an extensive drop-down menu or type out their full address. When you add autocomplete, the user should only have to type in a few letters before seeing a drop-down with the most likely options. You can add autocomplete for locations with the code for the Google Places API, which you’ll find here. If your site is built on WordPress, you can simply install a plugin that doesn’t require any coding.

Keep Your Design Minimal

If a lot of site visitors are making it to the page your contact form lives on but failing to get any further, you may need to take a look at your page and form design. If there are too many buttons and graphic elements on the page, visitors could be getting distracted and drawn away from the lead gen form. You can remedy this problem by redesigning the page so that there’s more white space. This will cause visitors’ eyes to go to the contact form immediately and will make it easier for them to scan the form fields.

Zendesk uses a simple, professional design to keep eyes on their lead gen form.

You’ll probably still want to include some visuals—such as branded graphics or product photos—on your contact form page. Just make sure any visuals you include fit seamlessly with the rest of the page and draw the viewers’ eyes toward the form, not away from it.

Want to know more about website improvements that can increase your conversion rates? Set up a call with the Leverage Marketing team—we’d love to talk to you about how our digital marketing services can help you meet your lead gen goals.
In the meantime, subscribe to our newsletter for more actionable marketing advice.

The Secret to Creating Viral Content

July 19, 2017/2 Comments/in Content Marketing /by Bob Kehoe

What is Viral Content?

In today’s content marketing landscape, writing viral content for your company is integral to your success. But what is viral content? It’s a word bandied about so frequently, but what truly makes content stick, and circulate rapidly from one web user to another? Viral content is compelling, and it comes in many forms. Viral content spreads across social networks like a virus, as people continuously share it with their friends.

A piece of viral content possesses those traits that demand to be shared: specifically, it should be impactful. Neil Patel summarizes Aristotle’s concept of the three principles of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. A viral piece of content should either:

Contain some form of ethical petition
Appeal to your audience’s emotions
Possess a request that is justifiable and logical

Creating viral content means arousing emotions in your readers, giving useful advice, and often striking a positive note. However, viral content isn’t a simple concept. While there are techniques for how to write viral content, it can be difficult to predict whether a piece of content will take off or not. However, there are steps you can take to increase your chances of having widely-shared brand content. Our guide will walk you through viral content marketing: how it works, how to create it, how to tap into your readers’ emotions, and more. Learn how virality works and the secret to creating it for your company.

What Makes Content Go Viral?

How do content creators across the Internet manage to create viral content? This question has frequently been asked in the past, and Berger and Milkman performed a study in 2015, analyzing hundreds of New York Times articles for virality. They found that:

In general, positive content is more viral than negative content.
Positive content that arouses surprise, amusement and awe is more commonly shared than other types of positive content
Negative content that evokes anger and anxiety is more frequently shared.
People share content for many reasons, including as a chance to raise their social status, to get something back, and to help other people

These results about viral content are still relevant today. People share content because it brings out emotions in them and they want to allow others to experience the same feelings. Viral content marketing is about producing content that challenges the norm, which captivates and persuades.

If you want to get people to share your content socially, you want to arouse their emotions, either positively or negatively. The more stimulated they are, the more likely they are to share your content. Content that doesn’t inspire emotional provocation, or inspires low arousal, such as sadness, doesn’t have the same viral potential.

How Can I Create Viral Content?

Now comes the most crucial step: applying viral content creation to your business. How do you write viral content that connects with readers? There are several important steps to consider when beginning to create content:

Determine the best medium for your content. What topic are you covering, and who is the intended audience? Is the content piece best suited for a video, infographic, or article format? While most viral content is still written, videos, infographics, and new alternative content formats are breaking into audience’s minds. Experimenting with the latest content types can be a boon, yielding additional shares on social media.
Headlines are vital—test your article title in tools like to determine the best title for your piece of viral content
Understand the importance of visual content. Whether you’re creating a video, written piece, or infographic, images are vital to the virality of your content. Choose them carefully, creating original graphics if necessary.
Gather as much data as possible from your site and social media accounts. The more you post, the better you’ll be able to ascertain which post types are popular and determine trends you can use in the future. Creating viral content is about knowing what your customers enjoy reading, watching, or listening to.
Build links in intelligent ways. Develop relationships with popular websites, and your content will get linked back to. This process can help boost virality.
Write about practical topics. While viral content marketing that taps into high emotions is talked about most often, practicality is another essential element of viral content. People love sharing an article about something they need in their life, something helpful or necessary.

Creating viral content is all about utilizing your customers’ emotion potential, determining what they’ll best enjoy and share with their friends and coworkers. Follow these tips, and you can be on your way to becoming an expert in viral content marketing.

The Leverage Marketing content team knows all about creating viral content. Learn more about our content marketing services and find out what Leverage can do for you. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest in digital marketing.

Site Redesign SEO: How to Not Lose Your Site Traffic

July 12, 2017/0 Comments/in SEO /by Bob Kehoe

Upgrading your site with a site redesign or a site migration can be a great way to take your business to the next level. However, if performed without an eye to SEO, site redesigns can also be a great way to lose site traffic, loyal customers, and new leads.

At Leverage, we often hear from prospective clients who have performed a site redesign or site migration and watched their site traffic and conversions dry up rapidly ever since.

This site’s visibility took a plunge after this site migration–while their pages were showing up for 210 search terms before the migration, they were only visible for 77 search terms the month after the launch.

It is possible to recover from a big drop in SEO visibility after a site redesign. As you can see in the graph below, the client above started ranking for even more search terms than before once we implemented an SEO recovery strategy:

However, it requires a lot of hard work and some serious professional expertise to recover from a drop in SEO visibility, and your site will take some time to get back to it’s previous level. It’s much easier to just circumvent this sticky situation entirely. By taking some steps before, during, and after launch, you can redesign your website without losing the SEO value you’ve been building up over the years.

Take Stock of What You Have

Before you do anything else, you’ll need to collect information about your current site. Analyze the site’s SEO-related performance before the site redesign or migration. Not only does this help mitigate any issues or confusion later, but it also helps you take stock of your site’s strengths and weaknesses so you can get a better idea of what your new site needs to do better.

Start by making a list of every URL on your current site. Yep, all of ‘em. This may seem like an awful and overwhelming task (especially with a large ecommerce site), but there are a number of tools that make it less of a headache, such as our SEO team’s favorite, Screaming Frog. Crawling tools like this can dig into your site and find all the URLs you forgot you had, and it can do it in about the same length of time it took you to open that Excel spreadsheet you were about to copy and paste every URL of your site onto.

Make a Redirection Plan

Once you’ve made a list of your URLs, you can create an SEO migration plan for “forwarding” them on to your new site. If you’re only changing your site’s design, this hopefully won’t be too tough a task. In this scenario, most of your URLs will likely be staying the same, so you’ll just need to take stock of the ones that you’re not planning on keeping on the new site and decide if you want to redirect them to active pages or (in the case of a page that doesn’t get any notable traffic) just let them die off.

If you’re changing your domain name, things will be a little trickier, and you’ll need to coordinate your web redesign team with an experienced SEO consultant or two to ensure that nothing goes awry when redirecting one domain to another.

Monitor the Vitals

If you’re not tracking your site with an analytics platform and technical monitoring tools such as Google Search Console, you’re probably going to miss some big stuff when your site transitions. Having a good grasp of your site’s current SEO performance is critical to surviving a site redesign.

You’ll want to use your analytics and site usage data to identify the most important pieces of your site. You can see what pages users most often enter your site through and identify pages that are linked to from other places on the web. These entry points are critical for your site, and you’ll need to have a plan for ensuring their preservation and their functionality upon launch. You don’t want one of your site’s “front doors” to lead to this ugly thing, do you?

“That’s annoying. I’m going to their competitor’s site.” -your customers, probably

You’ll also want to use these types of tools to monitor and identify problems that inevitably pop up when launching a new site, such as broken links and search engine crawl problems. By setting up basic SEO tools before a site redesign or migration and monitoring them before and after launch, you can rest easier knowing all the cogs are turning.

Bring in the Experts

Oftentimes, preserving SEO value during site redesigns or site migrations is just too important a task to wing it and hope for the best. When it comes to SEO, taking a gamble on site redesign can be a fatal choice that buries your site under pages of search results and hides it from hundreds or thousands of customers. That’s why it’s often a good idea to bring in the professionals to ensure that things go smoothly.

However, not every team is the right fit for a smooth and SEO-friendly site redesign. Many web development teams are lacking in the type of SEO expertise that you’ll need to ensure that your site retains its value, but choosing an agency that doesn’t perform a lot of web design tasks may not be the best equipped to provide the kind of site you’re looking for. Start your search by asking the right questions to identify consultants that have the right stuff.

Not to toot our own horn, but Leverage Marketing is pretty good at performing SEO-friendly site redesigns and migrations. Check out what the guru of our SEO department has to say about site transitions, or learn more about our SEO services today. Not ready to take the jump? Subscribe to our newsletter for more digital marketing goodness today.

How to Master Online Customer Service

July 7, 2017/0 Comments/in Branding, Social Media /by Bob Kehoe

As sales increasingly move online, it’s more vital than ever for your company to have stellar online customer service. Your web presence, including social media, online chat, and even forums, is your customers’ gateway into your brand. At Leverage Marketing, we know how necessary online customer support is, and have the online customer service tips you need for success. These brands go above and beyond when interacting with their clients, creating an accessible and fun web reputation.

Even just a decade or two ago, people would use BBB (the Better Business Bureau) and services like Angie’s List to find the best business for the job. Today, we use Facebook, Twitter, review sites like Yelp, and Google searches to find the best company. A brand with the best online customer service stands out and encourages using them time and time again.

Here are some of our tips for online customer service:

Why is Customer Service Important?

You might be asking why customer service is important in the digital age. After all, we interact face-to-face less than ever before. Customer service is important because it can be a critical step on the way to purchase or as a way to resolve an issue with an order. First impressions are important, and you want to make sure to get it right. Well-educated customer service representatives can help potential customers problem-solve and avoid negative reactions to your company. Most importantly, online customer support provides an easy and convenient way for your customers to interact with you. It goes both ways—you learn from current and potential clients, and they can have their questions and concerns addressed.

How Should My Company Engage with Our Customers?

In today’s constantly-on environment, it’s important to have multiple avenues of customer service for your clients to engage with you. While the basics are important—phone, email, and web chat– going beyond those are essential for creating the best online customer service. Being accessible to your customers and engaging with them helps make your company feel relatable. Determine which social media networks are useful for communicating your brand message, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest. Twitter and Facebook are most commonly used for complaints (and positive reviews), so responding to customer comments can be a key part of your engagement strategy.

Social media is a key part of developing your brand voice: you can decide to be snarky, always positive, or have a specific sense of humor. Wendy’s Twitter account has been making waves with their hilarious and often mean @replies, which can work for some brands, but not for all. Developing your brand identity through social media is key because it’s often your customers’ first look into your product or service. Help make potential clients feel comfortable engaging by responding to comments, using emojis and GIFs to create a casual atmosphere.

Companies Known for Great Customer Service

Here at Leverage, we know about the best online customer service. We work with companies every day that utilize our online customer support tips to help their clients and develop better relationships with their customer base. These are some outstanding examples of companies with great customer service:

JetBlue- While it’s certainly not the largest U.S. airline, JetBlue knows how to engage with its customers. Their customer service team realizes the importance of interacting not only with satisfied flyers but also with those who had bad experiences. They’re extremely active on Twitter, responding to @mentions as well as brand mentions. JetBlue’s commitment to customers is evident in its Customer Bill of Rights: “JetBlue Airways is dedicated to bringing humanity back to air travel. We strive to make every part of your experience a

s simple and as pleasant as possible.” With many forms of support, including phone, email, an online knowledge base, text updates, and a smartphone app, JetBlue has customer service covered. From in-person to online customer service, JetBlue takes care of its customers, leading to people using the airline again and again.

Zappos- Although Amazon now owns them, Zappos disrupted an industry (shoes) and has some of the best online customer service out there. They offer fast, free shipping and free returns for a year. Zappos puts their customers first—their company motto is that they’re a “service company that happens to sell shoes. And handbags. And more….” This attitude has helped Zappos succeed in a big way. The company puts its representatives through its School of WOW to inspire its leaders and teach them the best customer service philosophy. Most importantly, for an all-online company, Zappos puts its customers first. Whether a customer calls in, chats, or uses social media, Zappos is right there to help them whatever their concern.

How Can My Company Master Online Customer Support?

To become a company known for great customer service, you need to start with a customer-first philosophy. Leverage Marketing offers web design services and social media management services that support your customer service efforts. Contact us today to develop a strategy and get the tips you need for success.

B2B Video Marketing for Service-Based Businesses

July 5, 2017/0 Comments/in Video Marketing /by Bob Kehoe

You can spend acres of website real estate trying to explain the inner-workings and objectives of your service when you own a B2B business, but video marketing is the only way to demonstrate accurately what you can do for customers.

While it’s essential to provide text explanations of your service and its benefits to your potential customers, today’s service shopper relies more on visual media to consume information. The brain uses different processes to parse information from text versus video, and modern consumers have chosen the ease of consumption of video over the rigor of processing text.

Luckily, video marketing strategy for B2B businesses fits right into the needs of those customers. Outbrain found in their State of Content Marketing 2012 report that social media, video advertising, and content marketing are perceived by marketers to be the most potent strategies for improving brand awareness, consideration, and affinity. The goals of customers and of marketers align beautifully when video marketing integrates with service-based businesses.

Considering a video marketing strategy for your B2B enterprise? Educate yourself with our short guide to video marketing for B2B service-based businesses.

Understanding the Objectives of B2B Videos

Just as clever and successful entrepreneurs lay down solid, achievable goals before setting off into the province of business, video marketers must mold the objectives of their videos to the dreams of their clients.

It all starts with the aims of B2B service companies and the common issues across which they run. Some of the broad objectives commonly sought in B2B video marketing include:

Building Trust

In early 2017, videos on a landing page were able to increase conversions by 80% or more. It’s a sign of trust – customers felt more comfortable with businesses that explained their product or service using a video on a landing page.

It’s like working with a salesperson who can masterfully demonstrate the proper use and value of the product that he or she is selling. Words can only do so much to build your trust – most of us have to see it to believe it, and video marketing for B2B companies provides the opportunity to do so.

Offering Transparency

According to Vendasta, 95% of unhappy customers will return to a business if that business resolves the issue in question efficiently. It’s a sign that even those customers who link your brand heavily with negative emotion respond to transparency.

You can win the loyalty of potential customers and help possibly unhappy customers understand where things went wrong by offering them a peek behind the scenes into your business. Show how you perform your service and why it is legitimate, and comfort your potential buyers by explaining your commitment to the process and why it works.

Improving SEO

The methods of SEO and customer acquisition practices lead to the same result: the provision of useful information to potential buyers. Note that blogs with video integrated into them bring in three times as many inbound links as ordinary posts without video.

Outside of blogs, videos have the potential to do even more to enhance overall site rankings in Google and other major search engines. Customers who are more inclined to watch your video from beginning to end provide search engines with the information they need to determine how effective your videos are at explaining your service and how that performance compares to your competitors.

Common Video Types for Service-Based Businesses

When you look up services in your area, you may notice businesses that offer services using B2B video marketing in the following ways:

Process Demonstrations

Process demonstrations enhance transparency, which improves customer awareness and loyalty.

But beware: people won’t be interested in a step-by-step re-reading of your business process manual. Pull the interesting parts from your services, show them in action, and enlighten your potential customers. Answer their frequently asked questions as you explain your process, and delight them with factoids and other engaging information.

Results Videos

Show what life is like after customers have received your service with results videos. Display the positive emotions of customers who are pleased and how your service improves their lives, workflow, etc.

You can achieve the effect using animation, actors, or the words and demonstrations of real-life pleased customers. When you can genuinely show your potential customers what’s in store for them when they put down money on your service, you gain an edge most of your competitors don’t have yet.

Testimonials

Maintaining a positive online presence and building a happy customer base are matters of course in business. But B2B companies that use video marketing have a distinct advantage: they can post permanent positive reviews that connect emotionally with customers through testimonial videos.

74% of consumers have said that seeing positive reviews for a local business makes them trust that business more. A testimonial video stands as an immovable positive review that appeals to an emotionally potent part of the brain in consumers. It’s a testament to a remarkable achievement made by you and your company, and your potential customers will laud it, too.

How-To Videos

How-to videos have a two-fold advantage:

They show customers how to use your service effectively
They get customers engaged with your service without overwhelming them

Your prospective customers can, at their own pace, enjoy and learn from how-to content provided by and branded with your company. Letting customers get hands-on with your service provides them the freedom they need to determine how effective your service will be to them on their own time.

Get Started Right Away

If you want to take advantage of the benefits of video marketing for B2B, formulate your strategy as soon as possible. If you can gain the edge on your competition, they’ll have a tough time catching up as you continue to evolve your B2B video marketing strategy, and the SEO advantages will have a strong head start, as well.

Leverage Marketing’s video marketing team is fully prepared to write, shoot, and edit all types of marketing videos for B2B enterprises. Watch our videos and find out more straight from us!