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Your audience no longer wants their attention bought — they want it earned.

This means lead generation strategies need to be revamped across the industry to better meet the needs of target markets.

The first step in this evolution is to create compelling content, and the second is to use that content to convert visitors into leads. Of course, this is easier said than done.

To highlight the importance of a powerful lead generation strategy, we are going to backtrack a little bit first. Are you familiar with the analogy of the professor who presented his class with the challenge of trying to fit rocks, pebbles, sand, and water into a jar as efficiently as possible?

By prioritizing the biggest items and placing them in the jar first, he was able to optimize the amount of space used. Your business should take a similar mindset when implementing lead generation tactics into your inbound marketing strategy.

The Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand of Inbound Marketing

Like the professor who challenged his class to neatly fit rocks, pebbles, and sand into a jar, your inbound marketing strategy consists of rocks, pebbles, and sand. Here’s what I mean by this.

What are the large rocks that are the most essential to your strategy? What are the pebbles that serve as secondary, supportive tools for your business? What small stuff or distractions are the “sand” of your business? Most businesses would argue that their customers are their “rocks.”

While it is indisputable to say that customers are essential to any business, I want you to instead think of them as the water that was used to finally fill the jar. The water was poured in only after everything else was firmly compacted in the jar. Your business can benefit from taking this same mindset in your inbound marketing strategy.

The 4 L’s of a Lead Generation Strategy

Your content is your rocks. Compelling content plays a huge role in generating leads. This includes the tools used to generate traffic, such as your blog, SEO, PPC, and social platforms.

Approximately 96% of business-to-business customers want content from industry thought leaders to inform their buying decisions. Creating compelling content is your key to establishing yourself as that go-to, educational leader in your industry.

You know what they say: you can catch a lot of flies with honey, but you can catch more honeys being fly. Try that cliche in a bar and it might end with a drink thrown in your face, but adapting that mindset in your inbound marketing strategy could not only improve lead generation rates, but also increase the number of qualified leads your business attracts.

This article will focus primarily on the step that comes after your rocks are in place -– your pebbles, or the best practices for generating leads using your content. You will quickly understand how companies that are hopping aboard the content train are generating 67% more leads per month than those who don’t.

1. Lead Capture

Odds are that about half of your visitors will never return to your site if you do not adequately capture some bit of information from them. A working email address is the best thing a marketer can ask for here, but visitors are not always willing to give this kind of personal information up. Call-to-action buttons like “Sign up here” have practically become synonymous with “We are going to spam you,” which is why marketers need to find new ways to obtain this information.

Nicholas Kusmich, a Strategic Marketing Consultant and Facebook Ads Specialist, suggests a new rule of thumb for obtaining visitors’ information. Kusmich suggests 2 golden rules be taken into account:

1. We must give before we ask.
2. Every step of the marketing process (advertisements and promotions) must be valuable in and of itself.

Kusmich goes more in-depth with these concepts in his article, “2 Golden Rules for The New Era of Marketing,” but for now let’s focus on that first rule.

Can you believe there was once a time, many years ago, where the opt-in email box was practically a luxury? It meant all the information you wanted would be delivered right to the comfort of your home. “What a time to be alive,” we all thought. That day is now long gone. We now find ourselves fending off information from all angles.

Somewhere between installing pop-up blockers and dumping our spam folders, we made an oath to never “Sign up here” again. It is time marketers start gradually breaking down those walls that potential buyers have put up, by using new, mutually-beneficial opt-in methods to acquire their information. The best marketing method for this technique of “giving before we ask” includes using lead magnets.

2. Lead Magnets

A successful client lifecycle requires optimizing the process for converting visitors into leads. Unfortunately, a hole exists between the traffic generation phase and the lead generation phase that often results in one-time visitors who neglect your attempts to capture their information and never hear from you again.

You can seal up that hole with lead magnets. Lead magnets are tools that provide value for your visitors in exchange for their contact information. Businesses use lead magnets such as email opt-ins, subscriptions, and social media follows to fish for some sign of interest from their site’s visitors.

The goal of this is to receive permission from visitors to follow up. Some examples of lead magnets include free:

• Training video series
• Free trial
• Webinars
• ebooks
• White papers
• A set of bonus tips
• An interview with an expert on a relevant topic

These free-of-charge educational tools will confide your visitors in your offering, allowing you to both obtain their email address and educate them on your business.

3. Landing Page Conversion Techniques

Another huge asset to your business when trying to convert visitors into leads are landing pages. This can be any page that someone lands on after clicking on an advertisement or other online marketing elements. It is also important to note that landing pages exist separately from your company’s website, and typically are used as a tool for a single marketing campaign.

A free, basic course on creating successful landing pages can be found on thelandingpagecourse.com. You can also learn lots of landing page tips and best practices from HubSpot’s existing blog posts on landing pages. We will go over some of the basics of effective landing page design right now, but definitely check out those resources later on for a more in-depth breakdown of the different components involved.

Landing pages serve the dual purpose of capturing leads and warming up potential customers. Both of these are essential stepping-stones before moving a customer further down your sales funnel. Additionally, there are two types of landing pages:

Lead generation landing pages are used to capture a user/company’s information in exchange for something. This relates back to the concept discussed earlier, of “giving before we ask.”

Click-through landing pages are used to attract the visitor to the specific product or service that you are trying to sell. The goal is to educate your visitor with enough information that they proceed to make a purchase.

Landing pages have one call-to-action in mind. Instead of overwhelming visitors with information regarding your business and all the products and services you offer, it is essential that you narrow the focus down to one specific goal in mind. Be sure to cut out any excess information that isn’t essential to the campaign, and be sure to include only one form or call-to-action link for them to utilize.

The most important element of your landing page is that it delivers the promise that your ad source made. If your ad says “Get 50% off computers here,” you need to reassure the visitor as soon as possible on your landing page that you will deliver that.

One way to do this is to make the call-to-action on your ad source the headline on your landing page. Another way is to make sure the font, coloring, and images used in your ad are duplicated on your landing page to some degree. 

4. Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a component of marketing automation software that helps prioritize your leads according to their levels of engagement with your inbound marketing content and ultimately help you figure out who is ready to buy. It can also help you identify what they are interested in if setup correctly.

This technique is used to quantify interactions that prospects have with your content by assigning points for different types of engagement. An example of the different types of engagements and their point values might look like this:

• Download an ebook – Add 5 points
• Watch a product overview video – Add 7 points
• Job role not a good match – Deduct 10 points
• Fill out opt-in form – Add 7 points
• Unsubscribe from a list – Deduct 7 points

Surprisingly enough, 79% of B2B marketers have not established a lead scoring strategy. Lead scoring provides your company with real-time feedback on how responsive your leads are to your marketing efforts. It can also indicate people who are ready to buy from you, but haven’t yet been in contact with you.

This point-based approach to recognizing and analyzing a company’s hottest leads will save your business time and money when reaching your target market and capitalizing on sales opportunities. With your hottest leads identified, your business can communicate with these leads confidently knowing that they are already aware of and interested in your business.

Lead generation plays a role in every business’s marketing strategy. Think about how many business’s sites you have visited since the dawn of the internet that you will never return to again. Not only did those businesses fail to capture your attention at that given time, but they failed to reconnect with you in the future.

This is a result of neglecting the lesson discussed in the jar analogy –– prioritizing the different elements of your marketing strategy so that a foundation is in place for you to build an efficient and effective approach around.

With your content in place, your business can begin using lead magnets, lead capture, effective landing page design, and lead scoring to optimize lead generation rates and create an overall better performing inbound marketing strategy.

“Make good things together.”

That’s the phrase that flashed across the screen at the start of Google I/O 2018, the company’s annual conference for developers. Many experts predicted a focus on “responsibility” in light of the recent shrapnel from Facebook’s data-sharing and privacy scandal.

But, if there was one theme over the nearly two-hour keynote in front of 7000+ people at Google’s Mountain View amphitheater, it was machine learning and the need for the keepers and developers of tech to navigate its waters “carefully and deliberately.” Here are 12 of the biggest unveilings from the event.

The 12 Biggest Announcements from Google I/O 2018

1. Updates to Gmail

Many of us have already experienced subtle changes to our Gmail inboxes over the past few weeks, but there’s more to come. This flagship product is being redesigned with artificial intelligence (AI), giving consumers tools like Smart Compose, which uses machine learning to suggest phrases in real time as you’re composing email messages.

Type a subject line about Taco Tuesday? Smart Compose will suggest body text like, “How about we meet for tacos,” and “Does next Tuesday work for you?” These updates will roll out to consumers over the next few weeks, with G Suite users waiting a few months.

2. A more conversational Google Assistant

Noted as “The biggest thing we’re tackling with AI,” Google Assistant is getting a voice-lift, so to speak. The system’s current voice, Holly, will be joined by six new voices (available today), each of which is more conversational.

Google used WaveNet technology to underline raw audio, allowing its voices to understand the human voice, syntax, and natural pauses to develop an assistant that’s more natural and comfortable to speak with. Oh, and John Legend’s voice will be available later this year … ?

3. Hey Google, what’s Multiple Actions?

If you’re tired of saying, “Hey Google” before each request you make, you’re in luck. Multiple Actions allows Google Assistant users to ask multiple questions at once. For example, you could say, “Hey Google, who was the governor of California when Kevin Durant was drafted and what team drafted him?” and Google would answer both of your questions without flinching.

4. Smart Home

Voice search paired with a visual experience was a big theme for Smart Home this I/O. When you pull up a recipe, for example, you’ll be greeted by text directions for the recipe and a video that audibly walks you through each step. Simple voice searches such as, “Who is Camilla Cabello” will also now turn up visual as well as audio results, giving users a more immersive experience Android devices this summer and iOS later this year.

5. Kiss phone calls goodbye

The wishes of collective America have come true and we’re one step closer to never having to call another human being on the phone gain. Need to make an appointment for a haircut on Tuesday morning between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m.? Google Assistant will take that information and actually make the call for you, schedule it, and share the details.

It even works if calls don’t go as expected. During one live demo, a Google Assistant called to make a reservation for four at a restaurant that required five or more for a reservation. The assistant uses deep learning to handle these situations “gracefully.” In the case of the dining reservation, the assistant knew to ask how long the wait would be without a reservation.

6. Android Dashboard

Another big theme of the I/O keynote was giving users time back as part of a digital well-being initiative. With Android P’s Dashboard, customers can see a user-friendly breakdown of how they’ve spent their day on their device and desktop.

YouTube will suggest you exit your cat video wormhole and take a break, and you can set an App Timer to limit time spent on apps. Once you’ve reached your limit, Google will grey out the app and suggest you exit. The idea is this will encourage users to put their phones down and actually interact with the world around them — because it’s come to that, folks. We actually need our devices to tell us when to put them down.

An updated Do Not Disturb mode will also silence your phone when you put it face down, and Wind Down Mode allows you to tell your assistant when you’d like to go to bed, at which point, your phone will turn to grayscale, which helps your brain wind down. Android P Beta is now available on seven flagship devices.

7. Full Coverage

Perhaps the strongest “stance” taken during this year’s keynote was that of all people having access to “the full story.” Google News’ Full Coverage feature gives readers a complete look at how a single story is being covered on a variety of news outlets — all in real time. To combat fake news or “tunnel vision,” everyone using this feature will see the same news at the same time, thereby giving us all the information we need to engage in a responsible and lively debate. Here’s hoping, Google.

8. Smart batteries

Android P also offers “adaptive battery” which uses on-device machine learning to discover which apps you’ll use now, later, and probably not today. Then, it spends precious battery life fueling only the apps you use giving you a longer battery life.

9. Google knows you don’t know which way South is

We’ve all been there. You pull up Maps, enter your directions, watch the arrow populate, and walk in a random direction until you figure out which way you should actually be going. No more! Maps now combines your camera, street view, and directions to provide augmented reality walking directions. Plus, they’re playing with fun avatars that may soon be bounding out in front of you and showing you the way themselves.

10. Watch out, Yelp

Now, everytime you rate a restaurant or shop on Google, Google will use that information, in conjunction with its own knowledge of your surrounding area to give local haunts a score based entirely on your preferences. So, if you’ve rated two nearby Ethiopian restaurants highly and given two Pho restaurants and a burger joint pretty low marks, Google might give that new Eritrean restaurant a high match score for you.

Coming soon, we’re adding a new tab to @googlemaps called “For you.” Designed to tell you what you need to know about the neighborhoods you care about, see new places that are opening or whats trending, personal recommendations and more. #io18 pic.twitter.com/CtqQsWFyot

— Google (@Google)
May 8, 2018

11. Google Lens knows what everything is

The new Lens is integrated with your camera and allows you to point your phone at virtually anything to find out what it is or where you can buy similar items. Want to know what that building to your right is? Point your lens at it and Google will tell you. Like that outfit in the window? Lens will break down each piece and tell you where you can find it. Just like the general style of that lamp? Style Match will surface results that are different from the original but still in a similar style.

12. Self-driving cars are not going away

Proving you can’t keep an autonomous vehicle down, Waymo CEO John Krafcik ignored last Friday’s crash involving a car that hit a Waymo van and focused on the future. Much of the time was spent discussing measures to increase pedestrian safety, a common concern after one of Uber’s self-driving cars killed a Phoenix pedestrian in March of 2018.

Pedestrian safety is something Waymo claims they’ve increased by 100x, demonstrating their cars’ ability to identify pedestrians in blow-up dinosaur costumes, partially hidden behind planks of wood, and poking out of manhole covers. They also showed a Waymo van avoiding a collision with a car running a red light — something that might have come in handy during last week’s crash. Waymo also announced plans to launch its self-driving car service to all Phoenix consumers later this year.

Did we miss any of your favorite announcements? Were you surprised there was virtually no mention of security or information sharing? Sound off on Twitter!

*Header image source: CGM

For the past several months, Facebook has been on a seemingly endless campaign to associate its name with greater transparency: of its terms, its privacy policies, and how it approaches and ranks the content shared on its site.

Today, Axios reports that the latest suite of changes is coming: this time, in the form of required labels for issue-based ads.

Much of that began last fall, when it was revealed that the social network had been weaponized by foreign actors to spread false and divisive information in hopes of influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

That scrutiny was only heightened in March, when revelations were made about the (now-shuttered) consulting firm Cambridge Analytica improperly obtaining and leveraging personal user data. 

It was addressed in several ways, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress for two days of back-to-back hearings. And in the days leading up to that testimony, Facebook unveiled a number of reactive changes, including updates to its ad verification and labeling policies.

A Look at Facebook’s Changing Ad Policies

Where the Recent Changes Began

In October, Facebook said that only verified advertisers — those who submitted a government-issued ID and provided a physical mailing address to the company — would be permitted to run electoral ads, like those for a specific candidate running for office.

In April, it said that those ads would also come with a “Political Ad” label, specifying such details as who paid for it.

That same month, Facebook announced that this verification process would also apply to ads pertaining to issues that are often the greatest sources of debate during elections. But the announcement didn’t indicate that those ads would require labels –not yet, anyway.

New Labels for Issue-Based Ads

But as Axios reports, Facebook now plans to roll out such a requirement for ads that are based on hotly-contested issues, especially during election seasons.

And while the verification of advertisers behind this promoted content was a strong first step, the labeling of it could become even more imperative, as many credit issue-based content as having played the biggest role in the aforementioned efforts to influence U.S. elections.

When this verification was first announced last month, Facebook said it would partner with third parties to comprehensively determine what those issues are — a list that Axios says includes topics like gun control, immigration policies, and “values.”

Transparency Loves Company

The report comes on the heels of an announcement from Google last week that it, too, would roll out new policies for U.S. election ads. That would begin with a verification process similar to Facebook’s, as well as the future release of a Transparency Report that will delve deeper into who’s funding election ads on Google, and how much these individuals or groups are spending on them.

The transparency efforts will also include what Google calls “a searchable library for election ads,” which looks to be similar to the Political Ad Archive Facebook announced in April. That archive, Facebook says, will store the full text and imagery of any and all ads with the “Political Ad” label, as well as the number of impressions it received and demographic information about the audience it reached.

It’s important to note that Facebook was not the only online platform said to be weaponized for the spread of misinformation — Google, too, has faced its fair share of criticism for the same thing, which could be one motivation behind these latest ad transparency initiatives.

YouTube — which is owned by Google — has experienced its own challenges with the spread of divisive content, which CEO Susan Wojcicki addressed at SXSW in March.

And Twitter, which has come under fire for serving as a network rife with contention-spreading bots and bullying, has said that it’s undergoing efforts to address, measure, and improve the health of its platform.

Transparency and ethics are reverberating themes throughout the tech industry as of late. In light of the fallout experienced by Facebook from these various items — like misinformation and data privacy — it, along with many of its peers in the sector, has been going out of their way to make bold statements on ethics.

At F8 — Facebook’s annual developer conference held last week — ethics took center stage when discussing certain topics, like how the growth of artificial intelligence is forcing developers to address the bias of machine learning, for example.

And at Microsoft Build yesterday, CEO Satya Nadella set the tone for the opening keynote by proclaiming early on, “Privacy is a human right.”

Many expect similar themes to echo throughout Google’s own annual developer conference, I/O, which kicks off today with an opening keynote at 1:00 PM EST.

We’ll be covering the keynote later today, so stay tuned for those developments — and others that emerge along this undercurrent of tech responsibility.