Your website is an essential business and marketing tool - used well it can generate your business a wealth of leads, phone calls or foot traffic through your door.
Click here if you need help increasing your websites lead generating power.
So how can you build a website to drive lead generation and business growth?
1. Understanding the purpose of your website?
What are the goals of your website? What do you want users to do when they get there? What actions would reap your business the most benefit?
Determining this helps you to build a website that focuses your users’ actions on completing the goals you want.
2. What’s in a lead?
There are a number of types of leads and your business objectives will guide you on which ones you should strive for.
Email leads.
Capturing your users email address is effective and simple as the entry barriers are low; you only need an email address. This is usually obtained when subscribing to a newsletter or requesting a document download. These types of leads enable you to harness the power of email marketing, to overtime build brand trust and convert subscribers into customers.
Contact leads.
Contact leads come from filling out a contact form or product/service enquiry form and will provide you with a lot more information. They can be more difficult to obtain, but offer a higher conversion rate as the customer is more invested in the engagement process.
Offering free e-book downloads, free quotes or reports are a good way of incentivising your calls to action.
3. Attracting traffic to your website
Now you have clear idea of who you want to come to your site, it’s time to create a strategy on how to get them there. This can include:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - there are millions of searches conducted each and every day and there are people looking for you products and services.
- Content Strategy - Content is king. It is primarily why people visit a website. Having great engaging content is critical to engage and convert visitors.
- Pay per click advertising - Google Adwords is a quick, paid option to get inbound traffic started. You can start generating traffic the instant you turn on a campaign and it is a great way to run market research.
- Affiliate marketing and advertising -
- Link building - You can organise links from high authority sites that are related to your site. It can be time consuming to organise good quality links but in terms of the traffic and page rank generated for your site it is well worth it.
Need help with your online marketing strategy?
4. Make it as easy as possible for your customers .
Make it as easy as possible for your customers to use your site. Your user interface should be easy to use and a way to lead your customers to your website goals.
The following can help you generate great leads:
- Great, relevant and engaging content will ensure that your users stay on your sight and feel inspired to fill out your form or call your business.
- Make sure your calls to action are clear and easy to identify. If your page is about great gluten free recipes and tips on healthy eating, make your call to action to subscribe and receive free tips, tricks and recipes.
- Having your call to action a number of times throughout your page and content increases the chance of a lead generation. As your users read down the page their needs are fulfilled at different points.
However, if your website is hard to use or people have to think to hard about trying to complete an action or find what they are after they will leave and go elsewhere.
5. Auditing, analysing and reporting
If you already have a website, Google Analytics is a great place to start. It provides a wealth of information about your websites performance - what is and what is not working.
A high bounce rate or exit rate can imply that your content may not be relevant or engaging enough for your target traffic. It may also mean that your user interface is hard to use.
If you have goal tracking setup (and you should), you can determine which pages, campaigns or traffic channels are working or not working.
All that data can be over whelming. Need help finding those nuggets of information?
6. Test everything
You can draw many assumptions from data and analysis, but did you know that you can test these assumptions. A / B or multi variant testing enables to test small changes to your site such as different titles, calls to action, images and button colours.
7. Keep it up to date
If your website looks old and your information is out dated, what message are you sending to your prospective customers? Testimonials are great for increasing customer confidence, but not if they are from ten years ago. A fresh image with up to date, relevant content says you are on the ball and know what you are doing.
Not only will keeping your site relevant and the technology up to date increase customer confidence, but it’s also a great way to keep your position in the Google search engine results.