Lead Generation Tips from Michael King and Alex Harris – #Pubcon Liveblog

Want to up your ante when it comes to generating new, quality leads? It’s a high priority for all brands and businesses, and the gentlemen speaking in this “Lead Generation” session at Pubcon Las Vegas 2015 have tips that can take your #LeadGen game to the next level. Without further ado, here’s the lineup:

• Michael King, founder of iPullRank
• Alex Harris, creative director at AlexDesigns.com
• Moderator: Mindy Weinstein, director of training at Bruce Clay, Inc.

Alex Harris: Winning at CRO

“I’m not a fan of the term CRO — I prefer ‘marketing optimization’ because that’s what we’re doing. Trying to make our marketing more efficient,” says Alex Harris (@AlexDesigns).

Harris came up with a five-point “Marketing Optimization System” to get better results in a shorter amount of time. Here are his steps:

1. Discovery
2. Hypothesis (prioritize your efforts based on your top goals)
3. Execution (wire frames, rapid iterative testing, testing redesigns)
4. Review (use conversion analysts, determine the quality vs. quantity of leads, build history of wins/losses)
5. Scale (clone wins for more campaigns, create ads based on voice of customer, content-based)

Deep Dive into the Discovery Phase

You’re probably already using Google Analytics and have information in your CRM platform. But what are you doing with that data? There are two kinds of data: quantitative and qualitative.

“Every site works on an 80/20 rule — you’re making 80% of your traffic off 20% of your pages,” says Harris. “Understand your top landing pages report — that’s where they’re going directly, and you need to take that existing traffic and make it convert. Those top pages are the pages you should focus on optimizing.”

Digital marketers must also know how they’re getting there in terms of device. You don’t want to optimize for mobile if the traffic’s not actually coming from there. Don’t make assumptions.

The secret to converting them lives in your customers’ minds. This is where qualitative insights come in.

Qualitative tools he likes:

• UserTesting.com
• SurveyMonkey
• HotJar
• oLark
• LuckyOrange
• Qualaroo
• ClicTale
• Inspectlet

CRO Quick Tips

• Add credibility signals. For example, having a Better Bureau Business icon is a credibility signal.
• Have text that is easily scannable.
• Provide social proof with things like video testimonials or embedded tweets.

Michael King: How to Generate those Leads All Day Everyday: Like a Bawse

Two things are certain when Mike King (@iPullRank) takes the stage: He’s going to share really smart tips, and he’s going to move really fast. I kept up as best I could, but check out his slide deck below to get the full effect of his preso:

“We do a lot of one-night stands in lead generation and not enough long-term relationships,” says King.

Don’t be a one-night stand. Nurture your leads. Think about how to upgrade your content. Idea: Launch ebooks as pages rather PDFs, and then relaunch them as PDFs with lead capture forms.

Tactics that Usually Work

• To get lots of marketing qualified leads, create a guide. Put it as a guest post on someone else’s site and link it back to your site. You get a ton of leads. It’s like magic every time.
• Pop-ups. You hate them, but your feelings don’t matter. Pop-ups work.
• Fly-outs can work.

Advanced Hacks

• Pre-browsing directives. You can load things before a user clicks them. Google uses it in the SERPs. King saw a 27 percent increase in page speed when he implemented this on his own site.
• Stop retargeting the wrong people. Use a browser fingerprint. It’s a string that represents a computer. A string that is 83 percent original is created, and it stops retargeting from happening.

Data-Driven Personas

You must understand and prepare user personas. First, understand different user types by looking at different traffic types. They come in via different segments. Here’s how you examine it all fast:

 Get your mailing list.

1. Run it through FullContact. This will append users based on their emails. You’ll end up with a nice spreadsheet of their demographic data.
2. Use Demographics Pro.
3. Upload your mailing lists to Facebook’s Audience Insights Platform. (You can also do this without a mailing list and do it by interest.)
4. Segment your data.
5. Use Acxiom’s Personicx data.
6. Check against your Google Analytics data.
7. Build your personas.
8. Personas dictate your acquisition mix.

Ultimate Content Audit Quick Hit

1. Align personas with readability scores.
2. Compare difficulty vs. page value. Pages that are easier to read tend to generate more money.
3. Use URL Profiler to find the readability score.
4. Determine your audit size and decide if you’re doing a population-based audit or sample audit. Use ScreamingFrog.
5. Edit your copy based on readability scoring, which you can activate directly from Word.

Qualifying Leads You Generate

1. Use FullContact via Webhook to qualify leads based on demographic data.
2. You can also use this for data around firms.
3. For call tracking, use CallRail. Their API is incredibly easy to use.
4. As far as scoring leads is concerned, 80–100 is highly engaged. Less than 40 is very low. 40–80 is medium.
5. SiteSpy is a great tool for WordPress for lead scoring.

Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound, professional copywriter, and social (media) butterfly. Currently, she is a senior SEO content writer for Conde Nast. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Formerly, she was the social media editor at Bruce Clay Inc.

See Kristi's author page for links to connect on social media.