The Leaky Bucket Syndrome: Are You Set Up To Handle Inbound Web Leads?

Do you have a leaky bucket? Even if your business doesn’t use physical buckets, you do still have one when it comes to your Web presence.

This figurative “bucket” is your sales funnel, the “liquid” it contains is your inbound Web leads, and the “leaks” represent the leads that don’t become revenue. At best, a leaky bucket represents lost opportunities. At worst, it can prevent your business from attaining growth and profitability.

While it’s virtually impossible to turn 100 percent of your leads into conversions, you can alter your inbound marketing strategy so more of those curious consumers become loyal customers. Here are a few tips on how to do it.

Understand Your Audience

Obviously, you need to understand your target audience in order to generate leads in the first place. But leveraging that understanding is perhaps even more crucial once those potential customers come to your website.

Ideally, you want to accomplish this is by creating well-researched personas and tailoring your site’s information architecture and content to resonate with different steps in the buyer’s journey. According to an article published by Hubspot last year, “Mapping your content against your personas — and how many leads fall in each persona and life cycle stage — can be a great way to prioritize what to create next. If you have 1,000 contacts of persona X who have been sitting at the ‘lead’ stage for a long time and a lack of content to entice them to move to the next stage, that’s your starting point.”

Define your target audience by thinking about things like their age, affectations, location, political views, needs, values, etc. Use the resulting persona as a base for adjusting how you pursue inbound leads. Doing this not only can increase the number of leads you take in, but it will also enhance the quality of those leads.

Respond Quickly and Often

A few years ago, Forbes found that companies wasted about 70 percent of their leads, and that was in large part due to a sluggish response time. While the numbers may have improved since then, the fact remains: you should grab hold of your leads and do all you can to prevent them from slipping through your fingers.

Internet marketing isn’t a passive proposition. If you want to win conversions, you can’t just launch a website, sit back, and wait for the leads to roll in. You have to respond to inquiries and cultivate interest in your business.

Monitor social media channels and regularly email people who have opted into your email list. You also should follow up with these leads the old fashioned way — that is, on the telephone. Keep in mind, though, that you don’t want your efforts to be spammy. Always offer something of value.

Re-evaluate Your Website

How do you expect your customers to interact with your site? Where do you want them to go and what exactly do you want them to do?

Don’t hesitate to place a call to action above the fold on your website. You should also succinctly answer common questions that leads will have about your business, such as questions about your prices and the exact nature of your product or service.

If you find that your website has some rough spots, you don’t necessarily have to throw out the entire thing. As IT World Canada observes, “just because your bucket is leaky, the answer isn’t necessarily replacing it with a whole new bucket – try putting a few patches in place first.”

On the other hand, though, there are some cases where a complete redesign will be necessary. You probably won’t be able to generate many leads if, for example, your site isn’t mobile-friendly or if black hat SEO strategies have ruined the domain. Only with expert analysis will you know if a brand-new site is needed.

At Mediagistic, we know the Web is a living laboratory, and we test different tactics and layouts to find the ideal website design. Our team continually makes adjustments to ensure our clients’ sites are optimized to handle the inbound traffic and maximize the opportunities that traffic provides. Find out more about what our Internet marketing team can do for you.

Image via Thinkstock

Justin Littlejohn is a Digital Strategist for Mediagistic. His past endeavors include web development and IT, e-Commerce management, entrepreneurial ventures, and search engine optimization.