Leads, Leads, Leads! As a B2B business house, your website is one of the most important channels for filling your pipeline. Potential and existing customers interact with your site at every phase of the buyer’s journey, whether they are going through an early-stage research, or making a final purchasing decision. It is absolutely essential that you serve them a personalized, customer-friendly website that will guide users down the path to purchase. So, how can you make sure your website is good for lead generation?
There’s no shortage of lead generation tactics, But here we are going to focus on one channel you are more likely to use than anything else i.e. your website.
You can drive all the traffic you want to your website but it will not result in a noticeable uptick in leads unless you provide the visitors with a compelling reason to complete your website forms.
Optimizing your website for lead generation is a “No-brainer”.But it is not as simple as throwing a “click here” button on your home page and then watch the leads pour in.
1. Optimize your content.
Content is what typically creates the opportunity of the first point of contact with your target audience. It can be a blog or social media post, an email, podcast episode or YouTube video.
First and foremost, you will need to create content that is relevant and valuable to your visitors. Without that, you will not be able to turn most visitors into leads.
Second, you will need to optimize on-site content so that users can easily find your website in search engine results. Keep in mind that ranking for a highly competitive term is extremely difficult and time-consuming. Do your homework and find long-tail keywords that can help you realistically rank.
Lead generation begins with a simple step of attracting target customers to your website. When the content serves your visitors proficiently they are more likely to take the relationship to the next level by opting-in for your offers.
2. Add Forms to the Pages That Get the Most Traffic
It is essential to benchmark your current state of lead generation before you begin, so you can easily track your success and determine the fields where you need improvement the most. Some of your pages might make excellent lead generators without your realizing it.
To begin, conduct an audit of where most of your online traffic and outreach comes from. Here are some of the common places where your business might get visitors:
- Email Marketing: Traffic might come from users who click through to your website from one of the emails
- Social Media: Traffic might come from users who engage in a campaign through one of your social media profiles or your social media advertisements and connection.
- Live Chat: Traffic might come in the form of users who reach out to your customer service team through a live chat window on your website.
- Blog Posts: Traffic might come from your highest-performing blog posts on your website.
Once you can easily identify where your leads are coming from, you will make sure that the pages they are landing on are doing everything they can to nurture a visitor’s interest.
For example, if, through your analytics tool, you realize most of your potential prospects are clicking on inbound links to your website from your Facebook page, your next step will be to update the pages they are visiting with content that keeps them on and engaged with your website. On your most visited website pages, add longer-form content so that visitors can easily access through the forms that can solicit their contact information.
3. Avoid Clutter
Many small business owners try to fit in as many pieces of information on the page as possible. This is a rookie mistake in web design, which leads to a noisy page that pushes visitors away and prevents conversions. For effective lead generation, take advantage of negative areas and transform them. By leaving plenty of room between elements on your website, you can increase the visibility of more significant things, like your calls-to-action or vital pieces of information. Consider a redesign to improve optimization and customer experience.
4. Create landing pages for specific campaigns
If you are embarking on a highly targeted Pay per click campaign, you are going to want to create a dedicated landing page for those efforts.
As Neil Patel explains in his Beginner’s Guide to Landing Pages, a landing page focuses the user’s attention on a call-to-action and streamlines their path to conversion:
“Rather than directing visitors from those sources to your general website (where they may have a hard time finding what they’re looking for), you can direct them to a specially-designed landing page that steers them in exactly the direction you want them to take.”
How do you create an attractive landing page? While you can just make a basic landing page using whatever interior page template your website already has, but if you are looking for ways to create something more dynamic and eye-catching, you will probably need to either (a) get in touch with your developer to design a new template for your site, or (b) look into a landing page builders, which are very easy to use and offer many options for personalization.
5. Conduct A/B testing.
If you have done all the right things, but still aren’t seeing the conversion success as you were hoping for (or if you are curious and you plan to take it to a step further), you may want to consider A/B testing.
Hubspot defines A/B testing as an “experiment that shows two different versions of one piece of content (such as a landing page, email, or call-to-action) to two similarly sized audiences to see which one performs better.”
You can perform A/B testing on all sorts of marketing assets and elements — both on and off your website. Off your site, you might want to do A/B testing on your inbound marketing campaigns (such as email campaigns or pay-per-click ad campaigns). By pushing out slightly different versions of your advertisement or email, you can smoothly determine which versions do the best job of enticing users to your landing page.
Once a visitor reaches your website through one of these inbound marketing vehicles, you may want to A/B test various elements of the landing page to see which encourages more conversions. The list of things you can A/B test is pretty extensive — page layouts, body copy, call-to-action copy, button color, images, videos, contact form placement, and even the “Thank You” page that a user is generally redirected to after submitting a form.
6. Add a “content upgrade”
Never leave your readers hanging halfway. Any time they get to the close of a blog post, there should be another related piece of content waiting just for them. Maybe it is a white paper or a research report or maybe it is an on-demand webinar or another blog post.
But never leave them hanging. There should always be the following step :
Whatever the next step is, it should probably be “gated” (i.e., behind a form), which means users will have to hand over some of their information if they want to see the product. And that, of course, is where your lead is generated.
As usual, the bad news here is how much business is being lost. The good news is it is an easy fix: Get some gate-worthy content together as soon as possible and add those lead gen boxes. However, not all the piece of content should be gated.
7. Building Trust Factor
Nothing beats the idea of winning the trust/loyalty of the customer. Once the customers are fully satisfied with the product’s quality and features, then they will buy that particular product. Website designs sophisticatedly displaying the seals of the organizations, combined with guaranteed delivery of the mentioned product or service will surely make a huge difference. The extent of the promise made must be such that it must compel the customer to avail the service.
Also, the success rate of such portray of promise will largely depend on the intensity of the delivery. If there is a good synergy between the display and delivery of product or service, then nothing can stop the customer base to leap. Word of mouth publicity will attract a new audience.
8. Use of Active Words
Positive words appeal directly to your readers. When readers see the headlines which guarantee something, they tend to get attracted towards it. The customer always spends their time and cash on things that give them a sure shot promise. Passive words can create confusion in the mind of the customer. He/She then start exploring other business houses in the same segment, who are more precise and confident in their delivery. Therefore, it is mostly advisable to use more action-oriented words. The website designs must incorporate the need to use active words that hits on the mind of the audience.
9. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Mobile views always count for a respectable portion of your traffic and knowing how to choose a technology stack that will make it easier for your website to work on mobile devices. Professionals can develop your site to make it more compatible with all of the major mobile devices and operating systems to give it the greatest visibility, for landing pages will be difficult to fill out if they are not customized for smaller screens. Having a robust infrastructure will allow your web pages to work reliably outside of a computer so that videos play well, the text reads easily and links work without breaking down.
10. Add a Chatbot
Finally, a chatbot can also enhance your entire website by giving visitors a unique opportunity to get any type of help that they might need. Chatbots can be used to provide vital information and also to take down a visitor’s contact information for you to reach out to them later. These artificial intelligence programs have come a long way in terms of development and are inexpensive to deploy. Although they can not replace live agents yet, their capacity to respond quickly to visitor’s requirements is beneficial for website owners who need to respond to a large volume of inquiries.
Learn: How to add a messenger chatbot on a website.
In conclusion
Websites are the most vital part of the lead generation for any business. You can start by keeping your conversion path simple and making sure your prime content is above the fold. Avoid clutter and emphasize more on your calls to action (CTA), and make sure to have specific landing pages that clearly state your message. Take advantage of search engine marketing by optimizing your website’s code and quality content to improve organic traffic. Tell us in the comment section which tips will help your business the most?
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