How to Turn Online Leads into Loyal Customers

Unless you’ve already honed your digital marketing strategy, you might be feeling like there’s a bit of a disconnect between your online customers and your business. They’re hard to track..you might not know who they are, what they look like, and what brought them to your business in the first place. And if you don’t know these details, you probably don’t know how to keep them coming back. Never fear, because there are plenty of ways you can transition those faceless online consumers into customers that regularly support your business.

In this article, we’ll discuss 4 strategies to help you turn your online leads into loyal customers using the latest in digital marketing trends and technology.

Get found

First thing’s first. If you want to generate leads online, you have to make it easy for internet searchers to find you. The process digital marketers use to support this is called SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is a strategy that encompasses a variety of elements of your company’s digital presence including:

• Your website’s authority online
• How fast your website loads
• The content on your website
• Your use of keywords

All of these elements can impact where your website appears in search rankings when an individual searches for a keyword that’s relevant to your business. For example, if you own a stationery shop and someone searches “buy greeting cards online,” search engines will consider the aforementioned signals and rank your website accordingly. In theory, if your website follows SEO best practices, your website would show up first and you could generate leads from this web traffic. A general SEO strategy can work for local, national, and even global brands, but if you want to pursue a local market, you’ll want to focus on local SEO.

Local SEO combines the general SEO strategy with keywords that are relevant to your area. If I were looking for a company to manage my business’s SEO for example, I might search for “San Diego SEO services.” When I add the city name into the query, this signals to the search engine that I want to find SEO services in San Diego, not Boston, Denver, or anywhere else. A local SEO strategy would incorporate local keywords on your website to help direct local traffic to you.

Try retargeting

Have you ever noticed that when you search for something online just one time, you seem to get countless ads on your Instagram, Facebook, or even your email? This is called retargeting. Companies do this by installing cookies/pixels on their websites that can effectively track a customer as they browse the internet. Creepy? Yes. Effective? Arguably.

Track your analytics

So maybe you’ve tried a few of these tactics already and you’re just not sure what’s working out and what’s not. In order to allocate your marketing dollars to the right places, you have to track your analytics. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways you can do this, no matter what type of campaign you’re running.

Here are two examples to help you make the most out of your marketing money:

• Tracking phone calls: If your business is listed on any online directories (Yelp, Facebook, FourSquare), it’s important to track where your customer phone calls are coming from, especially if you’re spending money advertising on these sites. Use a call tracking system to determine where calls are coming from and whether or not the leads are qualified.
• Online Campaigns: For all of your other online profiles and campaigns, you should have a dashboard to host all of your marketing analytics. This will allow you to compare previous years, quarters, even weeks’ worth of data.

Keep them engaged with content

Let’s review. You’ve gotten leads online. You’ve retargeted. And now, you have the data to support and refine your marketing efforts. What’s next? Ultimately, you want your leads to become returning customers, but how do you do that online? With content, of course!

Whether you send out emails, post to your social media, or implement direct marketing strategies, it’s important to keep that connection with your customers. This keeps your brand at the top of their mind next time they want to make a purchase.

Takeaways

Implement these strategies and you’ll start seeing your leads turn into customers before you know it!