According to Forrester, a new kind of company is emerging. The insights-driven business. Growing at an average of more than 30% annually and on track to earn $1.8 trillion by 2021. These “customer obsessed” firms symptomatically harness insights across their business and implement them to create competitive advantage.
These businesses create closed-loop insights to optimize every customer engagement, to continuously improve outcomes. The value of data insights has literally never been more important for businesses trying to stay ahead of their competition.
There are vast areas of opportunity for insight data, this blog is exploring just one, and that’s the impact of a form strategy on lead generation and marketing performance. In depth data insights are how businesses will remain competitive and grow market share. This level of insight is particularly important when it comes to global enterprise organizations because just shifting the dial by 1% can result in a significant uplift in sales and a significant impact on revenue.
Forms are forms. They’re not something most businesses focus too much attention on. But at GatedContent.com we’re quite the opposite. We’re obsessed with the power and impact that good, cleverly considered forms have on buyer behaviour; lead nurture and revenue. Here we’re going to explore five ways a solid form infrastructure and strategy will save you money and enable agile activity, positively impacting marketing performance.
1. Increase Speed to Market
One of the challenges with the traditional approach to inbound marketing campaigns is the lack of autonomy marketing professionals have to change and A/B test different tactics. Often the marketing team will need to rely on a web dev professional to deploy changes to forms or landing pages which can take time. Building a form infrastructure that enables marketers to be in full control of technical changes means marketers are able to test, deploy, review and adjust all inbound activity quickly.
2. Reduce Costly Developer Time
For marketing and sales, the solution to developing a robust compliance strategy is a cloud-based consent process that covers all digital assets. This must work in tandem with a cross-regulatory compliance strategy that has predetermined how the data privacy regulations relevant to your business overlap, in order to synergize compliance efforts throughout your organization.
3. Redistribution of Spend in the Sales and Marketing Funnel
In most organizations marketing investment focuses on top of funnel awareness activity. PPC; SEO; free trials; content strategy etc. this makes sense when generating the volume of leads required to meet revenue targets. But what happens when you have high volumes of leads coming into the funnel, but there’s room for improvement on lead quality and bottom of the funnel conversion?
This is where investment in technology and insights to fine-tune your conversion rates can have a big impact. If you can improve conversion rates by even 1 or 2 percent that’s a significant boost to the bottom line. Testing and tweaking form types; time of day; opt in; progressive profiling and pre-population through technology like GatedContent.com is an arguably more effective investment than top of funnel activity.
4. Data Enrichment
Simply put, data enrichment refers to tools and processes that enhance, refine, or otherwise improve raw data. With several data-points feeding into your CRM, you’ll have a more robust profile of every contact. This allows you to improve your lead scoring and account scoring models and find the right talking points for every customer interaction, improving your overall customer engagement and ultimately conversion. Using form strategies like progressive profiling and multi-step forms allows businesses to gradually build an accurate profile of the prospect over time, meaning you can target them with increasingly personalized content over time.
5. Reduction in Friction
A major hinderance to web conversion is friction. Would you be able to quickly evaluate high friction forms vs. low friction forms and the impact this has on conversion rates? Are all of your forms asking for similar volumes of information? Do you know the percentage impact two fields vs. five fields has on performance? These are all questions you should be able to answer if you’re taking a strategic approach to gating your content and form building.
Using multi-step and progressive profiling can reduce friction because you’re asking for a low level of commitment every time someone downloads a piece of content, making it far more likely they’ll complete the action.
Use our web conversion optimization calculator and find out how, by analyzing your current web conversion rates and optimization practices, GatedContent.com can estimate your projected uplift in leads.
GatedContent.com is the world’s number one enterprise web form and content gating platform. Providing global data governance whilst scaling inbound lead capture for marketing automation.