Have your leads become a lot harder to convert?
If you're in business, then you know that leads are the lifeblood of your organisation. The home development industry has its unique set of challenges when it comes to lead generation. How to convert leads into sales is a common question we're asked by clients and potential new business, and an issue that we see time and time again. Your product or service is valuable, but your leads are not converting into sales. This could be due to a variety of reasons such as poor-quality marketing campaigns and/or ineffective lead nurturing strategies.
And now, businesses encounter a plethora of external challenges that hinder their ability to convert sales and impact customer decision-making processes.
The over 35s demographic has certainly been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic over the last couple of years with restrictions and increases in the costs of living.
Never mind the availability of products, materials and pretty much everything! The cost of everything within the home and garden improvement sector has seen a dramatic increase in consumers' pockets and timeframes!
However, as restrictions have eased and the situation has improved, businesses within this sector aren't just competing against their rivals, their consumers now have a full range of choices again when it comes to deciding where to spend their money!
This age group now has a range of choices available to them. For example, they can now plan holidays and trips that were previously impossible due to travel restrictions. They can also socialise with friends and family again, whether going out for meals or attending events and gatherings.
Additionally, many people have used their time at home during the pandemic to complete home improvement projects, meaning they can now enjoy their upgraded living spaces. And now the main priority is making the most of their time by spending it with their family, friend and loved ones.
As experts in the home development sector with over a decade of experience helping companies in this area, we have seen that many businesses struggle with poor ROI from their marketing budgets.
This is usually down to a few common factors such as, a lack of understanding of ROI and how they can measure it, dealing with multiple agency partners that are disjointed and don’t communicate well, and a poor pipeline with no clear lead generation options.
Additionally, businesses often struggle when they lack a clear communication strategy and fail to consistently engage with their customers. This can result in disjointed and ineffective marketing efforts that miss opportunities for sales and growth. Also, not considering customers' needs can be detrimental to a brand's success. Consumers want to see how a brand can positively impact their lifestyles, and failing to address their needs can cause them to look elsewhere. To avoid this, businesses must prioritise creating a clear communication strategy that aligns with their customers' needs and values.
Simple tips to improve your conversions
To increase lead generation and sales conversion, businesses can leverage various marketing channels. It is important to ensure that the customer journey is as seamless and straightforward as possible. This can be achieved by developing an effective lead nurturing process, which may include automated emails or SMS messages. But first, creating a clear plan is essential.
Start with a strategy:
To ensure a cohesive and effective marketing approach, it's essential to start with a high-level overview of your strategy. Identify your target audience, brand messaging, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure success. Once you have a clear understanding of your strategy, you can then focus on detailed tactics to achieve your goals.
Define your audience:
If you're not targeting the right people, it's a waste of time and money. You have to make sure that your marketing is reaching out to the people who are interested in what you offer – and they may not be the same ones who would buy from someone else. The best way to do this is by creating customer personas: profiles of ideal customers based on demographic information (age, gender), psychographic information (values/beliefs), and behavioural data (what they buy). Once you know who these potential buyers are, it becomes much easier for you to craft effective campaigns aimed at them specifically.
Continuous customer touchpoints:
Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with a prospect to convert them into a customer. It's more than just sending out one email and hoping they respond. It's an ongoing, consistent effort that should be part of your marketing strategy.
You can nurture leads in many ways: through email, online, phone or in person (or all three!). The goal is to keep your brand top-of-mind for as long as possible so when they're ready to buy – and if you've done everything right – they'll choose you over competitors who haven't been paying attention at all times throughout their journey from first contact until conversion day.
Strong messaging and adding value:
One of the most common reasons for leads not converting to sales is that you don't have the right messaging in place. Messaging is how you communicate your value to your leads, and it can be communicated in person, online or both. You need to know what your messaging is and how it works so that you can measure its effectiveness at converting leads into customers. If there are places where this message isn't working as well as expected – maybe because of poor wording or lack of clarity – then fixing those issues will help improve conversion rates overall. You also need to give your audience the opportunity to interact. So, your messaging needs to have clear and consistent CTAs at every stage of the customer journey.
Tracking and measuring conversion:
If you're not tracking your leads at all, then there's no way for anyone on your team – including yourself – to determine whether their efforts are having any impact on business growth. You may have an excellent website and top-notch SEO strategy, but if you can't track which channels are working best for converting potential customers into paying ones, then you’re wasting your time and money on low-quality traffic sources that aren't converting at all.
Internal and external communications:
Ensure that your marketing communication and internal team are aligned with your messaging and offers to create a cohesive and effective marketing approach.
Are your salespeople following up with the prospects in a timely manner? It's important to follow up on leads as soon as possible. Ideally, within 24 hours of initial contact. If you don't get back to a prospect within that timeframe, they may feel like they've been ignored and move on to another retailer or solution entirely. Every time you speak with them after that point, confirm their interest in buying what you're selling and continue nurturing their relationship until they're ready to buy!
Does this resonate with your business? We’re here to assist you!
If you're experiencing poor lead conversion, it's time to take a look at what's going wrong with your marketing lead generation efforts.
Book a call with us now and we’ll review your lead generation strategy and give you one thing that you can do right now to improve your conversions.
