Leading your prospects down the conversion path...

Leading your prospects down the conversion path

A conversion path is the series of steps a prospective buyer takes that ultimately leads to a form submission. Conversion paths vary depending on a customer’s lifecycle stage. For example, a person who has never been to your website before needs a different conversion path than someone who has done business with you many times. Conversion paths provide intelligence about your new business leads, help segment your online traffic, and can position you as a thought leader in your industry.

Inbound marketers use conversion paths to advance prospects through a sales and marketing funnel. To create a conversion path, decide which steps you want a visitor to take, then design content to support that conversion goal. Include your sales team in this process. Common conversion goals include collecting personal data, obtaining customer feedback, sharing industry information, and encouraging more social shares. You can write a series of blog posts, share a collection of resources or provide an online toolkit. Ask yourself, “How can we help our prospects get the information they need most at this stage in the relationship?”

There are four main parts to a conversion path/process:

Content - This needs to be relevant to what your customers are looking for. Ask yourself, 'What are our prospects looking for and how can we make this simpler for them?'
Call-to-Action - Its the way that your prospects are going to get to the landing page from your website and start the process. Its the Key that unlocks the door! Because of this it need to do exactly as it says: have an action, so make sure you use actionable language and that they jump out of the page.
Landing Page - This is the part where the conversion starts. So your landing pages need to present the benefits of your offer/content, remembering that you need to focus on the problem that you are trying to solve for your prospect!
Thank You Page/Email - This marks the end of your conversion path. Its the final tool you need to lead your prospect (website visitor) down your conversion path.

Here is a great example from Hubspot, they've got their peice of relevant content, made a persona-appropriate landing page and sent a thank you to the lead, all ready for the sales team to give them a call:

The Conversion Process