Consistent Lead Generation Requires a Solid Marketing Foundation

Could your leads be more consistent? More qualified? And at a higher volume? Are you ready to generate leads at scale? The answer lies in these four questions:

1. Is your brand consistent? 
2. Does your website score “10s” across key performance indicators? 
3. Are you truly leveraging SEO? 
4. Do your marketing programs leverage the same automation platform?

If you answer no to any of these questions, you are missing opportunities and “throwing good money after bad” in your lead generation efforts. 

Yes…this is a strong statement, and one we stand behind at Markentum. 

When our partners (yes, we think of our clients as collaborative clients) ask us to generate leads, we take them back to the marketing basics: consistent messaging, solid tools and trackable calls-to-action.

Is Your Brand Consistent?

A brand is much more than colors, logos and taglines. A brand encompasses your personality and vision, the buyer personas you want to attract, and the feeling you want to evoke. Your brand is the same for your employees, your residents and their family members, and your investors. Your brand should be consistent across your website, advertising, social channels, sales material, resident interactions and employee communications. And it should be something that everyone associated with your organization can describe. 

What images do these brands conjure for you? 

• Southwest
• Nordstrom
• Amazon
• Disney
• Netflix

If you’re not sure your brand encompasses your true company value, ask five people what your company stands for. If they don’t give you the same answer, then a brand workshop could help. 

Does Your Website Score “10s” Across Key Performance Indicators?

It is true that your website needs to be beautiful, informative and have clear calls-to-action. It also needs to meet minimum performance standards: page speed, mobile responsiveness, security and SEO:

• Speed – Page size, page requests and page speed all play a critical role in the speed at which your website loads for viewers. Why is load speed important? Because website conversion rates drop by an average of 4% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5). Image size, caching, redirects, and the level of software compression also make a difference.
• SEO – Your web content must be informative, engaging and use the right keywords to attract the search engines the right way. Companies often limit their SEO efforts to meta and page descriptions and descriptive link text. SEO is so much more. See the section below for more information.
• Mobile – Traffic from mobile devices accounts for more than half of web traffic today. For Markentum, a digital marketing agency that specializes in lead generation for senior living, almost 60% of our web traffic comes from mobile. Your website should be built for mobile first and look great on any mobile device (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc), buttons and links should be easy to see and use, and copy should be legible on any device. 
• Security – Visitors to your website should trust that it is secure, authentic and trustworthy. Make sure it includes the latest plugins, scripts and technology. 

Curious about your own website? Use the Hubspot website grader to identify key improvement areas.

Are You Truly Leveraging SEO? 

Did you know that the single biggest factor in your search engine ranking is your SEO? I will admit that when I led the design and development of a large company website a few years ago, I vastly underestimated the value of SEO. I don’t anymore. 

Are you tracking your keyword rankings regularly? They change daily. To keep up, you need to update your content regularly. That means refreshing your copy, adding keyword-based blogs, and creating crawlable content designed just for search engines. You can no longer afford to “launch it and forget it;” a well-performing website needs constant upkeep. 

Do Your Marketing Programs Leverage the Same Automation Platform?

Are you using a marketing automation platform? Email marketing campaigns, lead magnets, lead nurturing and event marketing can and should be automated within a single marketing platform. But don’t stop there. Are you automating your landing pages for paid media (Google, Facebook, Instagram, print ads, etc), to give you instant trackability? Are you feeding those leads directly into a CRM for sales follow-up? Are you pulling move-in data back out for true ROI reporting? 

All of this can be done when you leverage a marketing automation platform. 

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Lead generation should never start at the promotion level. Yes, you might get a few quick leads, and you just might miss more leads than you capture. Creating a consistent and repeatable lead-generation program starts with a solid marketing foundation. If you’re not sure you are ready to generate leads at scale, ask Markentum for a digital marketing evaluation.