how to get more leads from russia

How to Get More Leads from Russia

August 30

2013 Lead generation is an effective Marketing strategy that enables a company to find potential customers interested in using its services or purchasing its goods

How to get more leads from the

Russian web space?

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How to get more leads from the Russian web space

© 2013 8A Solutions Ltd.| 8asolutions.com| 8asolutions.co.uk

Lead generation aims the attraction of visitors to the

website with the purpose of:

✔ Getting contact information that can be used to receive

feedback about services or goods;

✔ Receiving an order or request from a potential user;

✔ Selecting specific good or service.

In this book about lead generation in Russian web space

you will be introduced with three main topics:

Basic sources of leads

Methods for increasing leads

Assessment of the profitability of the invested resources

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There are more than 61 million Russian consumers that actively use

Internet.

These are active users and any interesting news and useful

information attracts their attention.

The market volume is 13 billion USD according to data from 2012.

The E-commerce market is growing rapidly and steadily with about

26-39% each year. The pace of growth of this sector is 10 times faster than

the pace of growth of Russian economy.

Yandex, the most popular Russian search engine accounts for 10%

of all searches in Europe and has a dominant role in Russia.

The social networks VKontakte, My World and Odnoklassniki are

visited by tens of millions of users each day.

You understand that this is a serious potential that can be used to

generate leads and significant increase in traffic.

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Where leads come from?

Sources of leads

A lead is a certain action of the visitor of the site, which gives

the owner of the site the opportunity to contact the respective

visitor. In any case a lead is a contact that creates an opportunity

for a potential sale.

Sample leads:

An order from the website;

A phone call;

A subscription for newsletters and news by email.

What is needed to get leads?

1. The main source are the visitors of the website. Sites that

direct targeted traffic to your website are the main sources for

attracting customers.

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2. The visitor’s interest of the site’s information is the next

required element for the successful generation of leads.

3. Third, the opportunity that the site gives to contact the

visitor and his/her desire to provide contact details are also

important.

What can help to attract new visitors and customers?

Contextual advertising

Search Engines and SEO

Social Networks

Media advertising

Email marketing

Content marketing

Telemarketing

Contextual advertising

Contextual advertising provides significant opportunities to generate

leads. When you use this tool you should consider what type of visitors

will go to the relevant page.

The landing page not only has to convince the visitor to take action,

but should also be a key component of working scenarios after clicking the

advertisement. Many advertisers, who use contextual advertising to attract 5 | P a g e



the attention of Russian consumers, fail to optimize the pages which the ad

is addressed to.

Visitors get there but do not take any action because they are not

offered anything specific and they are not interested to leave their contacts.

In these cases, contextual advertising is very expensive and

unjustified source of traffic.Lead generation implies thorough preparation of the page where

consumers will be directed to. Publication of CTA (calls to actions) in the

landing page is obligatory but calls to action should take into account the

stage in the process of purchasing where consumers are. In many cases,

calls for immediate purchase are not working and rather put off consumers.

The most appropriate platforms for publishing contextual advertising

aimed at the Russian audience are Yandex Direct [http://direct.yandex.com]

and Google AdWords.

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Advertisements published in Yandex, similar to Google AdWords go

through moderation. If they violate the requirements of the system or the

Russian legislation, they will not be published.

Besides advertisements, moderators identify the site to which they

are addressed, and if there is no clear data about the company or the

information is misleading it is possible the ad to be precluded.

Although rules may seem too strict, in fact they are an ease for any

serious company, which aims to attract quality traffic.

Contextual ads can appear both in the search results and in the

thematic sites of the search engine’s partners. An interesting and effective

option for sites that look for business customers is the publication of ads in

Yandex catalog.

Yandex catalog [http://yaca.yandex.ru] is similar to Yahoo directory

and is a place where lists of quality websites are published.

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One of the main errors in the publication of contextual advertising

targeted at Russian consumers is that it is set to lead to the main page of

the site.

The advertising is not adapted to the specific landing page in

Russian.

Thus, the logical transition from the advertising message to the target

page is lost and users do not receive the expected information.

This results in the generation of traffic but also to the unsatisfactory

results of the generation of leads.

A second major mistake is the bad targeting of the ads to geographic

regions in Russia and neighboring countries where there may be a growing

interest in the products and services.

The analysis of the current results of the ad requires prompt

correction of the advertising message. This includes making changes to the

geographic targeting to different regions.

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Search engines and SEO

Multilingual SEO can bring long-term benefits for each site and

increase in traffic and sales opportunities. Besides translating the relevant

sections, multilingual SEO requires a precise work on the site settings in

order to allow it to be indexed well.

When we talk about increasing traffic through multilingual SEO and

in particular to localize the site in Russian language, we should first

identify the main sources of traffic.

Search engines

1. Yandex

Yandex [http://www. yandex.ru ] is the preferred search engine of

Russian consumers for the simple fact that it provides better and more

relevant results in Cyrillic than Google. The website’s pages indexed by

Yandex, which fall within its results, can be extremely good source of

traffic.

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http://www.yandex.ru/

According to Yandex, the only way to increase the efficiency of the

site it to constantly work and improve the quality and convenience for

consumers.

Some of the most important criteria for good ranking are:

Attractive design

Convenient navigation and interface

Useful information

What to do when you are ready with your website or landing

page in Russian.

Yandex webmaster

The main features of Yandex webmaster

[http://webmaster.yandex.com] are adding your website for indexing,

validating the site, verifying the robots.txt, microformats and Sitemap.

Validating the site will speed up indexing by the bots. There are

several ways to validate including the addition of code pages or upload of

validation file in the main directory of your server.

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What to remember

Site indexing and its display in search results is relatively slower than

the analogous process in Google. The good performance of the site and the

high activity in social networks can help its faster indexing.

Ranking of commercial sites

Many commercial websites limit their understanding of the

growth of traffic solely to the use of social networks and the increase

of the number of links to the site. This approach is very limited and

in most cases is insufficient to bring good results.

Yandex’s assessors use the following formula to rate the site. It

includes the following possible meanings - irrelevant, relevant,

highly relevant, useful and vital labels.

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Yandex uses the following basic formula to determine the relevance

of commercial results:

Rc(q, d, s) = V (q, d) · (2T (s) + U(s) + D(s) + 2S(s)), [1]

where Rc(q, d, s) is the commercial relevance score for given query

q and document d from the site s.

T trustability, U(s) for the usability and D(s) for the design quality.

V- a quantity that provides an assessment of the range of products

available on the respective website and it has the following possible

parameters - small, standard and large.

Trustability and quality of service have four degrees in the Yandex’s rating scale: spam, normal, good, and perfect.

Improving the ranking of a site in Yandex is a process that is

undoubtedly aimed at consumers.

The good design, the customer support options and the wide range of

products are factors that are very important. 12 | P a g e



http://8asolutions.co.uk/

Some of the most important elements to

enhance the quality assessment of the site are:

Detailed contact information

Company’s pages in social networks

Absence of advertising

Number of different product items

Verbosity of products description

Availability of shipping service

Salesclerk service (email, phone, customer feedback)

On-line consulting system

Price discounts

Readability of domain name

Average URL length

Average page title length

Consistency of page title and page content

Average depth of the URL path

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2.Go.mail.ru

Go.mail.ru [http://go.mail.ru] search engine is a major and very good

source of traffic for a number of sites. Until recently Go.mail.ru was a

partner of Google and most of the results derived from sites indexed by

Google.

Today Go.mail.ru relies solely on its own results. Every month

Go.mail.ru users make over half a billion searches.

Go.mail.ru has approximately 10% share of the total traffic from

search engines for Russian-sites. The advantage of Go.mail.ru is its better

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integration with some of Russia's largest social network - My World

(my.mail.ru) and Odnoklassniki (odnoklassniki.ru).

Placing an application for indexing in Go.mail.ru is done through the

web master panel, which is in Russian. This panel has significantly worse

functionality compared to Yandex’s panel.

Indexing content by Go.mail.ru is significantly slower than indexing

done by Yandex. What is important for good ranking is both the relevance

of the content and the incorporation of social networks buttons and plugins

of Mail.ru into the website.

Mail.ru is an owner of one of the most popular messengers ICQ. So,

you should not be surprised if you find an ICQ On-Site plugin on their

plugin lists, which allows direct communication with your friends and

customers through your website.

One of the main mistakes that sites aiming at Russian customers and

visitors make is that they do not seek to improve the information available

to the benefit of consumers.

Creating a large number of links without assessing the quality of

these links is not the right tactics.

Another major mistake is the absence of any activity of the company

on social networks. This is taken into account both by the search engines

and the visitors of the site.15 | P a g e



Such kinds of errors significantly reduce the ability to generate

quality leads.

Social networks

Social networks are an excellent tool for successful branding

and attracting of targeted traffic for any company. Even more! The

use of Russian social networks can save you considerable

resources in terms of costs related to multilingual SEO and

contextual advertising.

On the one hand, social networks could complement the

above-mentioned methods to generate leads but can also be the

main sources of traffic.

It is important for every company to know well the profile of

the users in the network and monitor posts and comments on

topics related to the business of the company.

Publication of content should not only attract attention but it

should also be consistent with the interests of consumers and bring

them some benefits.

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It is well known that the social activity of a company has a

positive impact on the ranking of the website.

A strong factor for better ranking in Yandex is the publication

of relevant information in VKontakte and Twitter.

It is possible a business page in VKontakte to be ranked on a

top position only on the basis of the activity of the fans, the

interesting comments on certain topic and the quality of published

content.

Certainly, comments and likes are not leads but they are a

good basis for generating traffic of interested visitors to the site.

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VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki (Classmates) are the

leading sites in terms of attendance not only in Russia and

Ukraine.

They are on the 9th and 10th place in the rating of global social

networks, according to ComScore.

(Source: ComScore)

The social network VK occupies ninth place with 79.4 million

users, and Odnoklassniki is on the 10th place with 65.3 million

users.

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The social network Odnoklassniki (Classmates) is popular

because of its option to find classmates, fellow students or friends

from childhood. It is the second most important social network in

Russia.

Providing significant traffic is one of the mandatory

conditions for successfully generating leads. No matter which of

the above sources of traffic is used, the process continues when

the visitor comes to the target site.

(Image source: hubspot.com)

Here the initial interest of the visitor passes into a phase of

evaluation. What is the value? Is this the right site, is it reliable is

the information useful and reliable, are there opportunities and

benefits?

If the assessment is positive, the desire for contact is realized.

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http://www.hubspot.com/

The simplest way of contact is when visitors fill their email in

the form. It must be taken into account that the level of interest

may be different when leaving their email. It can vary from a

desire for further information to a request for quick purchase.

(Image source: lamoda.ru)

Include contextually relevant CTA

to motivate prospects to act!

The efficiency of leads depends on the level of interest. Leads

can greatly vary in their efficiency and conversion.

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Methods for increasing the amount of leads

Increasing the amount of leads is a challenge, especially for

small businesses that have limited budgets.

As mentioned above, when a visitors provides his contact

details he can contact you using the contact form, through an on-

line operator that serves help desk system or through a phone call.

The analysis of the channels through which leads are

generated is required. To do an effective analysis you need to set

very well the analytical programs that allow you to trace the path

and the actions of the visitor. The most popular programs that

provide good possibilities for this are Google Analitycs and

Yandex Metrika.

Such an analysis is also possible when visitors contact you by

phone. In this case you should pay attention to the length of calls,

the amount of calls and the traffic sources.

The information about the lead and the source is very

important because it enables the assessment of the effectiveness of

each channel.

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How the increase of leads can be influenced?

Sources of leadsa) More precise choice of advertising space and precise

geographical focus of the advertisement when using

contextual advertising.

b) Optimization of the time intervals in which contextual ad

will appear to users.

c) Regular update of the advertising massage and closer

relation with the landing page.

d) Expansion and diversification of the sources of leads -

Telemarketing, Direct Email Marketing.

di) e) Diversification of the forms of content that should

attract visitors - videos, images, infographics.

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Work on the site - converting traffic into leads.

Design - formation of trust, elements of trust.

Usability - easy and understandable interface, fast

loading pages, accessible and short forms for feedback.

Information - utility, sufficient information for decision-

making on the part of the visitor, adapting information to

visitor profiles.

One of the main reasons for low lead generation from

Russian visitors is the insufficient information on the

respective site.

For example, how the visitor can contact the company if

the delivery terms are not clear, the delivery time is not

mentioned or the possible payment methods are a limitation

to make a purchase.

When doing changes that aim the increase of leads, what is

needed is a systematic approach and comparison of the results

after the changes. 23 | P a g e



Before the maximum potential of the internal methods to

increase leads is reached, direct comparison of the resources spent

and the conversion is a wrong step.

Internal methods to increase leads, such as design, usability,

content, call to action messages are significantly underestimated.

Successful adaptation of the landing page to the corresponding

traffic sources and the specificity of the Russian-speaking

audience is a key to success.

(Image source: lpgenerator.ru)

Create targeted landing pages

for your CTA!

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Methods for assessment of the profitability of the

invested resources when working with leads

1. Sources – where customers come from to the website and

which are the most valuable sources.

2. What is the amount that is paid for generating leads from

the respective source?

3. Value of the leads

4. Value of the purchases done

5. Profit of the purchases

As a result of the analysis of these results it will be possible

to determine fairly accurately to what extent leads from a certain

source are profitable.

It is important to gather results systematically and summarize

them for various periods of time.

The fact that visitors provide their contact details does not

imply that they will make a purchase. The websites’ owners

should focus their efforts to continue the process by providing

useful information to consumers and appropriate proposals for

purchase. 25 | P a g e



The analysis of consumer interests could be useful for the

improvement of the content that the company publishes in social

networks.

Conclusions:Lead generation- is a process and formation of active

customer base and transformation of the targeted audience into

customers and partners. There are many methods for lead

generation, such as sending emails to customers, presentations,

webinars, PR-campaigns, Telemarketing and the above-mentioned

methods, such as SEO, contextual advertising and Social

networks. Each company that aims to expand and increase their

sales can use the potential of the Russian web space and the

possibilities it provides.

Choosing the right methods, preparing the site in advance and

adapting it to Russian consumers are major prerequisites for

success. The analysis of the results is an ongoing process that

determines what the results of the use of different strategies are

and what elements should be improved.

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REFERENCES[1] A. B. Albuquerque and A. D. Belchior. E-commerce websites: a qualitative evaluation. In WWW 2002 Poster Session, May 2002.

2013[How to get more leads from the Russian web space]

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