Watch the YouTube video or read a transcript below:

Hi, welcome to our Magnetic Point channel. I am Paul Montwill and in this video I will explain how to turn website visitors into potential clients.

The key question that both marketing experts and relative newbies face is, "how to best use the potential of thousands of visitors coming to their websites" - how to engage them and turn them into properly qualified leads or direct customers.

There are 4 steps to consider:

1. Bring quality traffic to your websites
2. Engage your visitors and obtain marketing consent
3. Nurture leads up to the moment they become potential clients interested in your offer
4. Pass hot leads over to sales departments

Step 1 - Bring quality traffic to your websites

In the past, marketing departments were focused on bringing as many people to their websites as possible. The higher the number, the better it looked in the reports.  But times have changed.

Nowadays, it is more about acquiring high-quality traffic that we can engage with and turn into clients over the long run. This way, we can avoid overspending on our marketing budget, while focusing on the right people who have a real potential interest in our offer.

We want our brands to be noticed once clients start looking for answers surrounding the products we offer. We do this through paid campaigns as well as content marketing published in various channels such as social media, industry websites and remarketing campaigns.

Step 2 - Engage your visitors and obtain marketing consent

Once we have the right people drawn into our portfolio of websites and landing pages, we want visitors to complete a desired action - which could be just about anything - what we call a “conversion”. In this way, they are no longer just free floating visitors who come and go, but somehow tied to us, however lightly, with some basic commitment of interest from which we can engage and build relationships with our brand

We do this through various conversion types:

• Subscribing to newsletters
• Downloading ebooks, white papers, reports
• Submitting a web form with offer requests
• Watching videos
• Making a purchase online

In the best-case scenario, we want visitors to leave their personal data and marketing consent so that we can start on-going marketing communications with them.

Step 3 - Nurture leads to the point where they become potential clients interested in an offer

Once we have our potential clients’ personal data and marketing consent, we have many options for lead nurturing through "1-on-1" personalised communications - similar to a face to face meeting with a sales manager except it happens online and is fully automated.

To make this happen we need a Marketing Automation solution that gathers demographic & behavioural data about clients.

We want our potential clients to only receive the ebooks, videos and articles he may be interested in, based on past behaviour and demographic profile. We only want to provide advice on products and solutions actively sought and be ready with our assistance once a prospect is preparing to buy.

One of the solutions we recommend to our clients is Mautic running on the Acquia Marketing Cloud, which is a marketing automation solution that offers excellent value for money and allows companies to launch their personalisation campaigns within days & weeks instead of months.

Step 4 - Pass hot leads to sales departments

A B2B buying process can take from 3 months up to even 2-3 years. It all depends on product complexity, price, industry and target groups. And, of course, how well you manage the process.

Clients’ paths these days are more complex because users gather information and interact with brands through many different channels that were not available 10 or 20 years ago.

Our role is to accompany our potential buyers on their customer journey, and once they are ready to make a purchase, we pass these leads to our sales team. As we have nurtured our leads for months through various engagement techniques, website visitors become hot leads, having an established relationship with our brand. Now is the time for customer representatives to do their magic and close deals.

This is why the synergy of Sales & Marketing departments is so crucial in the digital era, as marketing can provide sales teams with great leads while salespeople deliver feedback to them on potential clients, customer interests and Customer Lifetime Value.

Takeaways

And now, have a look at your organisation and analyse the following:

1. When acquiring traffic, do you focus on bringing high-quality traffic through personalised marketing campaigns?
2. What kind of actions (conversions) do you offer to your visitors and developing prospects on your website(s) to maximise engagement, harvest personal data, and get their buy-in via marketing consent?
3. Have you considered using a Marketing Automation solution to gather demographic & behavioural data and build both individualized and categorized “1-on-1” content personalisation for visitors?
4. How can you improve the cooperation between your sales and marketing departments to maximise your efficiency, while aligning both content and messaging with lead nurturing and revenue?