The rise of mobile device dominance requires a new view of online lead generation. Today, lead gen strategies need to be ready for the unpredictable micro-moments. One of these micro-moments, the instant need to do a search for knowledge, a product, a how-to, or a service can strike at any time – while a prospective customer is walking down the street, hanging out with friends, or even sitting at home watching TV.
The impulse of a micro-moment can fall anywhere in the lead gen spectrum. On the street, it could be a quick revenue opportunity (conversion). With friends, it may only be info gathering (traffic/awareness). In the home it could be a full lead nurturing opportunity with a more leisurely, but non-committal, search.
With online search only an arm-length away day and night, an understanding of both the customer and the many ways to reach her is essential for successful online lead generation. Here’s three elements essential to lead gen in a mobile world.
Some customers may search for an immediate need while others prepare for a future one. B2B or direct to consumer, ideally you want to position yourself in the locations where each type of prospect will seek out what you offer.
For example, retail and restaurant can capitalize on both mobile “near me” local searches and local listings to capture immediate conversion opportunities. Other ways to capture leads of customer’s ready to buy include click-to-call, Google Shopping, and user installed mobile Apps that can drive value and repeat business.
Display ads, social media and SEO remain powerful tools in the quest to locate and nurture those interested in your offering but not yet ready to buy. Google Answers is another way to drive lead gen. Also known as the Google Answer Box, this answer box that appears in response to a search demonstrates your authority and has been shown to dramatically increase conversions.
Lead gen is not just about who any longer. It’s also about where. Paid search and social ads create highly specific geo-targeting opportunities where multi-channel businesses can not only target and find good prospects, but reach great prospects – the ones in close proximity to a brick-and-mortar store.
RFID and App technology also enables multi-channel retailers the ability to connect with potential customers who walk within a certain perimeter of the location. A mobile App with active notifications can alert a user to a sale when he or she walks past a store running a technology like iBeacon.
Now, that’s not to say demographics and content aren’t important to connect with a prospect, they are. With so many ways to contact and connect with a prospect, it’s vital to know your target audience intimately and deliver quality content. It’s just that now strategies need to account for where as well as who.
Lead gen today needs quality, detailed analytics. New ways to connect and the emergence of “where” entering the lead gen equation in addition to “who” make it necessary to go where your customers are. As always, this includes all steps of lead gen process from traffic generation to lead nurturing and conversion.
It’s just today, where is more localized and the technology has made hyper-localized marketing possible increasing the demand for more personalized content. To stay on top of this changes in online lead gen, mutli-channel, pure-play eCommerce, and SMBs need to understand and use their data to inform their marketing decisions.
Attribution modeling, or tracking the success of each step of the marketing effort, make this possible, but requires “crunching” a great deal of data to produce actionable recommendations. The upside of all this data available to every business is the opportunity to get to know one’s customer’s much more intimately. The downside is how best to capture and interpret it.
In the end, we’re living in a mobile world. And it’s a world where every online lead gen opportunity is always just an arm-length and an impulse away. All you need to do is capture it!
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