How important is lead generation for your marketing strategy? For most organizations, it’s a critical part of customer acquisition. However, giving potential customers a compelling reason to share their contact details is challenging. 

When you use a virtual tour, you’re able to connect with your audience and bring your spaces to life around them. Highly engaged visitors are high potential leads, and a gold mine of opportunity for your business…if you have the right tools in place to transition that excitement into lead capture. 

Take a look at three proven tactics you can use today in your virtual tour, that customers are seeing major results from. 

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1 - Add a gallery with a call to action

Often a “contact us” button is just not direct enough to motivate your visitors to act. By adding a gallery scene within your tour, you can bring lead generation in front of your audience in a way that feels like a natural ask. 

In the example above, Conestoga puts this idea into practice.  They use a gallery scene to communicate the value of signing up for resources from their recruitment team, and position this scene further along on their tour, to be seen by more engaged visitors.

To boost this approach, offer something of high value to your prospect audience. Think about what resources are most requested, a chance to connect one-to-one with a member of your team, or an upcoming event that will answer their questions. The combination of a sought after next step and a form to take action right there is a sure way to boost submissions. Tours using the gallery CTA technique saw an increase in form submissions  of 40% . 

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2 - Pop up a form on entry‍

Taking a more proactive approach to lead generation can boost numbers even further. Showing lead forms on entry into your virtual experience is yielding 2x and 8x more form submissions. Visitors are still able to close the pop-up form and proceed with their tour but having it front and centre brings your call to action to their immediate attention. 

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For the highest impact, use enticing headline that captures what’s in it for them, rather than just stating “contact us”. Contests and giveaways have also been used with forms to maximize results.

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3 - Run virtual scavenger hunts 

Looking to increase leads while boosting engagement? Consider a virtual scavenger hunt inside your virtual tour. 

To promote the launch of their virtual tour, Red Deer Polytechnic did exactly this. They hid their mascot within one of the scenes in their tour and challenged visitors to find it for a chance to win prizes. This drove an 80% increase in engagement metrics – session time, pages per session, and time on page – during the contest period. Prospective students clearly enjoyed the contest format and spent much more time going through the tour, as well as sharing it on social media.

To maximize the contest reach, Red Deer Polytechnic utilized all social media platforms as well as paid campaigns to promote their tour site during the contest period. 

There are 6 steps to implement a virtual scavenger hunt:

1. Figure out the contest start and end dates, prizes, and objective
2. Establish contest rules and create a page on your site listing them - if you need some guidelines, check this out!
3. Photoshop your mascot or a hidden word into a tour scene 
4. Create a gallery in the Circuit CMS with details about the scavenger hunt with a link to contest rules 
5. Add a form to collect entries
6. Promote it widely across your digital channels
   
   

These are just a few examples of ways teams are increasing lead generation using Circuit today. If you are interested in implementing some of these tactics or want to get started creating a virtual tour that will convert your audience, reach out to our team today!