Generating leads from your website is at the heart of running a successful business these days. However, it can be difficult to enhance the user journey to deliver the number of leads that you need to be successful.
You must ask yourself: How will people find you if you don’t have any roads leading to your product offering?
Typically only 2 per cent of website visitors leave their contact details and you’ll be left wondering who they were and what they were looking for.
Your website should be designed to generate leads! The days of the ‘brochure’ website are over. You need to focus on turning your website into a lead generation machine.
Ditch your brochure website
I would always recommend that businesses look at content creation and inbound marketing over so-called ‘brochure’ websites.
In a 2016 survey, 76 per cent of B2B marketers said they would produce more content in the coming year and a whopping 88 per cent said they currently use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy.
New content is a key factor in how Google ranks your website. It’s all very well having a beautifully-designed, static website. However, it may not be serving your business objectives.
Content creation should be the centre of everything. Construct a ‘value path’ that offers something useful to the visitor at every stage. From here, the journey should develop naturally into lead generation.
Have calls to action (CTAs) everywhere
The visitor journey must be clear and concise. There must be CTAs strategically placed throughout your website.
You should have CTAs where you have most visitors, like at the end of a blog post, in sidebars and as banners. You can check which CTAs or further reading links perform best with a tool like the Page Analytics Chrome extension by Google.
Direct potential customers to a free trial or demo. Don’t try to close the deal there and then. You will find that you are much more successful in business by trying to help people, rather than trying to immediately take their money. Generate leads first and the sales will come naturally later.
Use the 80/20 rule for content
Around 80 per cent of your website should be educational or helpful for your audience; 20 per cent should be promotional.
Websites that are developed specifically for lead generation can often lack the helpful content that keeps your audience engaged. If you lose the attention of your target audience, you will damage your ability to generate leads.
It is important to realise that once you create content you should share it over and over again, not just for driving readership but also to boost SEO. If you don’t do that and you don’t have great organic reach for your blog then your content will be forgotten.
Concentrate on high-quality traffic
One of the aims of a website that is focused on lead generation is to drive high volumes of traffic. However, if the traffic is completely irrelevant, you are wasting your time. Instead, you should concentrate of bringing high-quality, relevant traffic to your website.
A good backlink can go on to create a lot of leads for your business. A recent article about Leadfeeder in Entrepreneur.com generated ten times as many sign ups as a regular referral.
When working on your keywords strategy, make sure you aren’t throwing money away by bidding on words that aren’t highly relevant to your business, product offering or brand.
Use the right tools and technologies
Using a content management system will make things so much easier when looking after your business and I would also recommend installing and using live chat on your website. (Our trial sign ups have increased by 3.5 per cent since we introduced a live chat function to leadfeeder.com).
Conclusion
Remember to have a clear value proposition across your whole website, using content and CTAs that engage your visitor from the moment they land on your page.
Make sure you follow the 80/20 rule to deliver the right balance of helpful and promotional content for your audience.
Ultimately, high quality traffic is the key to efficiently converting page views to sign ups. Don’t forget that there are a lot of tools out there for digital marketers who are looking to make their business a success.
Otto Peura is business development manager at Leadfeeder.
Further reading on generating leads
