Entrepreneurs spend incredible amounts of time and energy to generate leads and drive traffic to their website. One area that is often overlooked is increasing the value of existing marketing efforts. Think about it: if you wanted to double the number of leads generated from your website you could either double the amount of traffic to the site or double the site’s conversion rate. Which one is easier? Increasing the conversion rate is always easier than increasing traffic. In addition to focusing on the conversion rate, it is also important to take the current marketing efforts and automate ways to improve their value, much like improving the conversion rate.
Here are five simple ways to increase the value of existing marketing efforts:
- Retargeting – Retargeting allows you to show banner ads on a large number of different sites exclusively to people who have already been on your site (I’m generally against banner advertising with retargeting being the one major exception)
- RSS Broadcasts – Take an RSS feed of blog posts, press releases, or whatever else you like of yours and have Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn automatically updated when each new item is published
- Newsletter Sign-up Option – Add a sign-up link or text box on your site and encourage people to give their email address to get your newsletter (the contents of the newsletter should be repurposed blog posts)
- Live Chat – Engage with your site visitors through live chat to answer their questions as well as convert anonymous visitors into identified prospects
- Company IP Address Lookup – automatically identify companies on your site based on their IP address
Existing marketing efforts are easily augmented and improved with these tactics and more.
What else? What are some other ways to increase the value of existing marketing efforts?
David Cummings on Startups 