How to capture leads from website?

[IM_Learner]

Hi,

We have a contact and a registration form on our website to capture leads/enquiries. However, I have come across many websites who give away many resources for free i.e. without asking for any user details. In this case, how do they track or capture the data of people coming to their website and interacting with the content?

There are other methods we well like CTAs, pop-up on exit intent etc., but these are different to what I have asked above.

Regards

[IM_Learner]

Awesome response! Thanks a ton Patrick. There is no room left for a follow-up question

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Shailendra

What you are are seeing is marketers utilizing positive engagement - associating their brand with helpful and useful in the minds of prospects. What that means is by having content open and available to the public, they do the following:

• Search engines can index this content

• Makes it easier to find said content

• Makes it easier for users to find organization

• Having content available produces positive engagement (check out this Whiteboard Friday)

• More users to site

• Repeat visits

• More pages viewed per session

• This gives users time to form an opinion about your organization / services

• Prospects do lots of research before giving over information - that's just a fact

• Since not you are not pushing every visitor to convert...

• This means those that do become leads are more likely to convert

• Gives sales more opportunities to focus on those leads and nuture with more focus

• Eliminates chasing prospects and users that were just "browsing"

One way to look at form or form-free content is like this: Awareness, evaluation, and purchase.

Awarneness - Purely educational and not promotional. These types of content can usually be open and free to public.
Evaluation - More specific to your product / services, data sheets, demos, case studies, etc. This information tends to be form driven.
Purchase - These are even more specific - free trials, demos, consultations, estimates, etc. This information definitely is behind a form.

You can ask yourself questions (source) about the content to help you judge if the content should be behind a login or not:

• Does this content address product implementation?
• Does this content answer a question we usually get while engaging prospects?
• Does this content answer a question we get often from current customers?
• Will the lead benefit from having a direct conversation about this?
• Have you earned the right to contact this lead about your products?
• Does A/B testing show a stronger conversion rate requesting lead info now?

Look at your site as a series of macro conversions and a macro conversions. Your contact and registrations are still conversions because they are handing over information to you. Another way you can look at conversions are phone calls (you can use services like Website Call Conversions or Marchex) or particular page views (although this tends to be inflated and so on). You can also use services like Wistia to capture leads in videos or lead users to product pages.

More often than not, these companies that provide free content are doing so in the hopes that the leads they do get are farther down the line so less work is involved and prospects are more likely to convert.

Another couple of great resources for you to level out your marketing efforts is The Customer Journey to Online Purchase from Think with Google, as well as The Content Marketing Funnel: Using Different Types of Content of Single Grain.

Let me know if this all makes sense or if you need more help. Good luck!!