Attract Prospects

22.01.2018 | 0

Episode #6 of the course Drive sales with inbound lead generation by Roy Harmon

At the Awareness stage, your prospects don’t know you. They might not even know exactly what their problem is.

But without these people, you’ve got an empty funnel and no one’s buying. So, how do we get to them?

The Awareness Funnel

Traffic Sources

SEO is a great option if you can rank highly for relevant terms. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult for most people and it takes time, so we’re going to focus on paid traffic sources in these lessons.

Paid social (e.g., Facebook) and native advertising (e.g., Outbrain) are great for this stage. The best choice depends on the targeting options you need. If your target market is fairly broad, native advertising might be a great choice. You can do some targeting, but you usually can’t get as granular as you can with Facebook or LinkedIn, for example.

A blog post can work especially well at the Awareness stage. It can build your brand and increase your credibility. And perhaps most importantly, every person who visits your blog will be thrown into your remarketing list.

Call-to-Action

Be sure to include at least one call-to-action somewhere in your blog post. Often, you’ll see the call-to-action as a graphic at the bottom of a blog post. But a HubSpot study found that only 6% of leads came from graphic CTAs at the bottom of blog posts, and between 47% and 93% of a post’s leads came from the anchor text CTA alone. (An anchor text CTA is “a standalone line of text linked to a landing page.”)

For the blog posts that you use to put together your core funnels, the CTAs should lead to the landing page for the offer that corresponds to the stage of the buyer’s journey you’re targeting with the post.

With other blog posts, your calls-to-action can take them to blog posts, your social media accounts, an email signup, etc.

Landing Page

You’ll want to use a very short form for Awareness stage offers. First name and email address only, unless you absolutely need more information for some reason.

The key here is to get their email address so you can contact them again in the future. If they leave without giving you that one piece of information, not only can’t you contact them, but you also won’t have any idea what else they’re doing on your site.

Certain tools (e.g., HubSpot) allow you to track a user’s movements on your website and their interaction with your ads. For instance, you could see that a user found you through a particular ad for a particular keyword, and then they filled out a form to download an Awareness stage offer. It’s very powerful information (we’ll talk more about how to use it in a later lesson), but you can’t track it if you don’t have a contact to track in the first place.

Offer

At this stage, stick with something simple, like a checklist (e.g., “Top Ten Things to Look Out for When It’s Raining”). The offer should be related to problems you solve.

Thank You Page

Here, you’ll include three things:

1. access to the offer

2. a way for prospects to share the offer through email or social media (make sure it sends them to the landing page, not right to the download—you want to collect their friends’ emails too!)

3. a second offer

The second offer can be another Awareness offer to allow you to collect more information on the prospect, or it can be a Consideration offer so you can see if your prospect is ready to move onto the next stage of the buyer’s journey.

Trapdoor Email

This email serves as a trapdoor to drop them into the next stage of the funnel (if they’re ready). It will include a link to a Consideration stage offer. You’ll want to send these from time to time to make sure the top of your funnel doesn’t get clogged up.

In the next lesson, we’ll talk about your Consideration stage funnel. It will look similar to the Awareness stage funnel we talked about today, but it will vary in important ways.

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