Updated September 24, 2021
Advertising agencies that convert a high percentage of their leads tend to have a much easier time hitting their business goals. But of course, this is something that’s typically easier said than done. Our initial article laid out eight strategies that an agency can use to boost its conversion numbers – but there are more ideas you can try to improve conversions. Here are three additional strategies an agency can use to convert sales leads and improve conversion rates.
Original Article
If you run an advertising agency, prospects are the lifeblood of your business. But even if you get tons of website visits every day, you may still feel like you’re not converting as many of your sales leads as you should be. If that’s the case, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve put together a list of eight new strategies you can try to convert sales leads at a higher rate. Keep reading to see how you could benefit from implementing them.
Several Ways Ad Agencies Can Convert Sales Leads
Incentivize your prospects
A number of your prospects might be considering your ad agency alongside a few of your competitors. Or maybe they think they’re going to hire your company, but they’re putting off doing so for a reason.
One way to break through these sales leads is to offer them some form of incentivization. The key idea is to offer them something of value in the hopes that it will entice them enough to bite and hire your agency right away.
There are a number of different incentivization tactics you can try. The right choice for your agency will depend on what you’re comfortable with offering and how the tactic aligns with your broader efforts. That being said, here’s a list of potential incentivization options that you can consider deploying:
- Buy one get one free
- Contests or sweepstakes
- Loyalty programs
- Exclusive add-on services
- Limited-time discounts
Remember, your offering doesn’t have to be particularly expensive. You certainly don’t want to hurt your business long-term. The point of incentivization is to remind people of your business and the products or services you offer. One little reminder, paired with a simple push, can convert hundreds of leads.
Ask the right questions
If your ad agency is struggling to close leads, it could be because its salespeople aren’t asking the right questions. There are a number of questions that you need to ask every prospect during the early parts of the sales process.
Your goal should be to show that you care about their unique needs and are interested in gathering the information necessary to propose personalized solutions to their problems. This takes some practice to get right. But it’s something that’s worth working towards, as asking the right questions to your prospects could help you build a stronger relationship with them from the beginning.
Of course, you’re probably wondering what “the right questions” are. Try starting with these:
- What are the top challenges your team or company is currently facing?
- What are the results you want to achieve and how do you want to achieve them?
- How does your company make decisions?
- What metrics will you use to evaluate the solution we can provide?
- Are there any obstacles that might impede?
To ask even better questions, you must know your ideal client like the back of your hand. Take the time to research your target market and their most pressing concerns. With more data, you can create better offers and questions to convert your leads.
If you would like to get to know your leads better, but don’t feel like there’s enough time in the day to run your business and do the extra legwork, trust LeadLander to automate some of those processes for you.
If you’re not qualifying your leads, now is the time to start
You probably get a lot of website visits every day. This can be a fantastic source of sales leads. But not everyone who visits your website is a prospect that you should pursue. The process of distinguishing worthwhile leads from duds is called lead qualification. And it’s something that your ad agency should absolutely be utilizing.
There are a few different ways to do this. Lead scoring is one method that you might try. It involves assigning a point value to each positive characteristic that you want to see in an ideal lead. The higher a prospect’s score is, the more time and energy you should invest in pursuing them.
But you don’t need to use lead scoring right away if that sounds like too much in the present. Instead, uncover the answers to these five questions to better qualify:
- Is the company truly interested in my service?
- Do they have a real use for my service?
- Can they afford my service?
- Is now the best time for them to purchase my service?
- Am I speaking to someone who can make a purchasing decision?
Don’t make your leads wait
You could have the best sales tools in the world, but they won’t mean a thing if you’re making your leads wait to hear from you. Prospects can vanish just as quickly as they appear if you don’t act quickly. It’s super important to set up internal routines that your company can follow with every new lead it identifies.
One good strategy is to direct emails with prospect alerts to an email address that multiple people can access. That way your success or failure with a new lead will never come down to whether or not one individual had enough time to reach out to them immediately. Coming up with strategies like this to act on leads quickly can help you avoid losing them to your competitors.
And don’t stop with just one follow-up. According to a study done by Propeller, “44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up,” but “80% of sales require five follow-ups after initial contact.” Don’t quit after a single email or call – keep finding ways to contact your leads if you’re dedicated to converting them to sales.
Keep your leads warm
Even if you contact a new sales lead immediately, they won’t always be ready to buy. If you get a “maybe later” from them, then it’s important to keep in touch. This is a process called keeping your leads warm. It could be the secret to converting your prospects into paying clients at a higher rate.
The idea is to check in with prospects every so often. Social media is great for this. But you can also use email-based outreach or even phone calls. Regardless, try to make the messages you send personal.
Track your results and learn from them
You won’t be able to learn from your mistakes unless you can clearly point to what they are. That’s why it’s important for your sales team to track its results and analyze them periodically. Doing this will help them learn which of their strategies are working and which aren’t.
For example, a particular salesperson in your organization may notice that they convert a higher rate of leads when they reach out to the prospects over the phone. With this information, the salesperson could make phone calls part of their sales cycle moving forward.
To be able to do this, your sales staff first needs to track each of the steps it takes during the sales cycle. You may want to consider finding a sales tool that will automate this process to make it easier for them to follow through.
Understand the competition
If you’re not converting leads at a rate that you’re happy with, then chances are that at least one of your competitors is. What are they doing that’s so different from your process? Is it something that you can replicate?
These are questions that you may want to start asking yourself if you notice a competitor is converting more leads than you are. It can be very insightful to learn why the sales leads that you’re pursuing are ultimately deciding to go elsewhere.
It’s possible that you’re losing out on business because of price. Or maybe your competitors offer a valuable service that you don’t. Either way, developing a better understanding of your competitors will give you a keener sense of the specifics you need to change in order to start winning more clients.
Use lead segmentation as part of your process
Lead segmentation is the practice of grouping your prospects together into clusters based on certain characteristics. This can be a valuable way to get more out of your website visits.
There’s practically an endless number of ways you can group your prospects. You might do so based on company size, industry, location, operating budget, or any other factor that you find relevant.
The key is that when you use lead segmentation, you can target specific clusters of leads in more targeted ways. For example, maybe you create a group of prospects that are all clothing brands. You could send out emails to that cluster with messaging focused on how your service helps advertise apparel.
This practice can help your marketing and sales teams become more strategic in how they interact with their prospects. It could even save them time if they repeat sales pitches or reuse marketing materials across multiple potential leads.
Improve your web effectiveness
One of the most critical steps to convert sales leads is to employ SEO best practices on your website. Your website will drive new leads and sales conversions, but only if it’s properly optimized. Instill the most effective keywords throughout your site, and check your website’s bounce rate. The longer a user is on your website, the more likely they will make a purchase the same day or in the future. As always, make your website as user-friendly as possible – do not plague it with ads or slow-loading media, and optimize it for mobile use.
Focus on optimizing your calls to action
If you’re not converting as many of your leads as you think you should be, one reason for that could be because your CTAs aren’t optimized. Without a clear and compelling CTA, your website visitors are forced to guess about the next step they should take to forge a partnership with your agency.
A prospect might hunt down the best follow-up information on their own, but they often simply give up and look elsewhere.
You can optimize your agency’s CTAs by utilizing the following strategies:
- Lead with actionable words
- Use interesting phrases instead of standard ones like “download now” or “purchase here”
- Create a sense of urgency with incentives
- Personalize your CTAs to match the specific page your prospect is looking at
Leverage your social media accounts
Social media can be an extremely powerful tool for your sales process, but you need to know how to best leverage your accounts. This is also a great way to get new leads into your sales funnel.
You might create a free group on Facebook that provides insights, tips, or recommendations your audience finds valuable. You give yourself a steady stream of warm leads to work with consistently by providing these for free.
Using social media to drive more conversions can also be as simple as regularly sharing valuable information with your accounts. By doing so, you begin to build a relationship with your audience. Fostering this type of relationship is an excellent way to push them closer to becoming one of your paying customers.
Consider revamping the structure of your sales team
You may also want to look into revamping the way your sales team is structured. It may make sense for your agency to split its sales staff into smaller groups that focus on a specific sales aspect.
You might have one group focus on turning cold leads into warm ones. And another group could focus on converting warm leads into paying customers. These groupings allow your sales staff to specialize in very specific roles, which helps them develop expertise in those areas.
You may also consider assigning sales team members to specific types of clients so that they become extremely skilled at closing leads with a certain set of goals.
Convert Sales Leads By Using LeadLander
Ad agencies need a steady stream of leads to keep themselves going. Your website is a fantastic source for finding undiscovered prospects. But it can be tough to gather meaningful data on your anonymous website visitors if you don’t have the right tool.
That’s why you should consider using LeadLander. Our platform was designed to help your sales team get the data it needs to convert more leads. We provide a powerful, intuitive dashboard that gives you actionable data in an easy-to-understand form. You’ll get detailed website visitor information that’s updated in real-time.
This means you can use LeadLander to identify your highest-valued website pages, validate interest from existing prospects, improve your pipeline accuracy, and so much more.
Using a powerful sales tool like LeadLander could be just what your ad agency needs to start getting more out of its leads. So why wait? You can try our tool for 14-days for free when you visit our website today. Signing up is as easy as giving us your email. We won’t even ask for your credit card and you’ll be free to cancel at any time.