Increasing the number of leads is essential for growing your sales pipeline and the revenues of your company. Last year and this year, we experimented with different tactics to get more leads by presenting relevant offers to new and existing audiences.

Over the last few months, we doubled leads to around 100 to 150/month from 50/month previously. Below is a summary things we tried that proved successful. Most of these are relatively straightforward enough for you to try as well with your website or mailing list.

1. Links in the Blog Post Sidebar

Since we have set up conversion goals in Google Analytics for our white paper downloads, we looked at Reverse Goal Paths to see what pages visitors were on before converting. One of the most common pages people were on was the page listing all our white papers. We considered adding links in the blog sidebar and in blog posts to this page but decided to bring the content of the page (list of links to white papers) to the sidebar instead by listing all the white papers available for download.

2. Banners at the End of Blog Posts

Presenting an offer that’s relevant to what a visitor is reading on the page is more likely to be successful, than an offer that’s not. Keeping that in mind, we wanted to display banners for related white papers at the bottom of our blog posts to improve the number of downloads.

We used the free Ad Injection WordPress plugin, which allows you to “inject” custom HTML or PHP code at the top and/or bottom of blog posts. The plugin also lets you create multiple ads and assign what percentage of time to show each. However, we wanted to display the banner based on the blog post category, for example, if the blog post is about social media, then we wanted to display our LinkedIn guide, or if the blog post is about sales strategy, then we wanted to display our Building a Sales team white paper. Since the plugin allows custom PHP code, our development partner, KPDi, helped us add custom code that checks the blog post category before deciding which banner to display. This resulted in an offer that is always relevant to the topic of the blog post.

3. Linkedin Sponsored Updates

LinkedIn sponsored updates were something we wanted to try for a while now. To test out these ads, we used our Introduction to Inbound Marketing white paper as an offer. We created a separate landing page for this campaign to track conversions just from this campaign. The results turned out better than expected, with 10 downloads from 65 clicks, and an average cost per lead of $29 USD, which is relatively low for the B2B industry.

• Total spend: $290 USD (over two weeks)
• Clicks: 65
• Avg cost per click: $4.46 USD
• Whitepaper downloads: 10
• Avg cost/lead: $29 USD

One factor that likely contributed to the success of this campaign was how targeted the audience was for the sponsored post. The clients we work with usually have a particular profile; so for this LinkedIn campaign, we specified everything from the country, titles, company size and industry of the person we showed the ad to.

4. Sending Offers to the Entire Newsletter List

After we updated or created new white papers, in addition to mentioning it in our monthly newsletter which already has a large number of links to articles and events, we set up email campaigns featuring each white paper as the offer. The click-throughs for the white paper download on these emails were substantially higher than when it was mixed in with other links.

Sending the offer to existing contacts helps nurture the contact, provides value and is a way to stay on people’s minds without being sales-y.

5. Automation Campaigns in MailChimp

We’re increasingly taking advantage of the MailChimp automation. Previously, we didn’t do much to follow up with leads from white paper downloads unless we knew they were qualified. However, it’s often hard to positively identify people and unqualified leads can often become qualified in the future.

We created workflows for different segments of our leads, with workflows consisting of a sequence of emails, ranging from blog post articles to additional white papers that they can download.

What are other tricks you’ve used to improve the number, and quality, of leads for your business? If you want to brainstorm more ideas for increasing leads for your business, contact us today.