5 Smart Website Lead Generation Strategies
Last updated on January 16, 2020
Are you looking to get quality leads? Grab attention? Catch interest in your products or services? If you answered yes to one, most or all of these questions, the solution is to create and execute smart website lead generation strategies.
Why? The life blood of any business is its ability to turn qualified leads into customers. A lead generation website is a marketing tool that will promote your business all day, every day. It never takes a break or goes on vacation. It also works on holidays and doesn’t take sick days.
Despite the importance of a lead generation website, 65 percent of businesses say that generating traffic and leads is their biggest marketing challenge, VentureHarbour reported.
If your website, content and social media profiles don’t show up, while prospects are searching the Internet for information, you aren’t in the game and don’t have a shot. However, even if all of that shows up, the second hurdle to overcome is that close to 96 percent of visitors who come to your website aren’t yet ready to buy, Marketo stated. Therefore, creating an opportunity to capture their information allows you to follow up with them later through email marketing. This approach will maximize your website lead generation efforts.
The strategy behind a lead generation website is different from an informational website, which doesn’t generate leads. Smart website lead gen strategies start with the end-user in mind—the customer. You must understand who they are, as well as their demographics, psychographics, buying behaviors and pain points.
Building a customer avatar, also known as a buyer persona, is crucial in determining:
- Key messages
- Target audience
- Web design
- Type of website content
- How the website content is delivered
- How the website lead is captured
- What happens after the visitor fills out a form to get contact information
One of the many advantages of developing website lead generation strategies, is that it will force you to look at your business from a different perspective. Many businesses know their business and industry inside and out. They also know all of the jargon.
Yet, many often don’t take the time to look at their website through the eyes of their customers—who typically aren’t searching for branded solutions. Instead, they’re searching for their problems.
Unless your website speaks specifically to those problems and how your business can be the solution, they’ll never find you. In order to have a lead generation website, it must systematically walk visitors through their problems. This will enable them to relate to your business, then shift to how it uniquely can solve their problem.
Here are 5 smart website lead generation strategies:
1. Include a contact phone number
You might think that including a contact phone number is common sense, but for many businesses it’s not common practice. Be sure to include a contact phone number, that’s easy to locate on your website. Depending on your sales process, leveraging your phone number as a call to action could be the perfect option.
2. Add simple contact forms
Handling contact forms is two-fold. First, add simple contact forms. This will help the user easily and quickly complete them. Second, include contact forms on more than just the website contact page. Landing pages for your specific products and services are good locations for contact forms.
3. Provide clear calls-to-action (CTA)
Don’t employ hope marketing. Provide clear CTA, on your most important website pages. If you don’t know what those pages are, start by reviewing your website analytics. What pages are people visiting? It’s likely that most visitors are only visiting two or three pages on your website. You should have lead capture forms on those website pages.
4. Produce and give away valuable information
That includes whitepapers, case studies, blog posts, and webinars, which provide valuable information. They are excellent lead generation magnets. Unless you’re running a retail website, where visitors can purchase directly from it, visitors are looking for information. It’s the job of your website to give away this valuable information, answer frequently asked questions and entice them to want to know more. This can be facilitated by offering expanded information and education, for download, through a lead capture form.
The strategy also will help your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. SEO is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website, by making sure that the site appears high on the list of search engine results. Through using certain keywords, providing useful content and making your website search-engine friendly, you can drive qualified traffic to your website.
5. Test and measure
The importance of testing and measuring was a marketing best practice for 2019 and continues to be, as you head into 2020. Thus, businesses can always improve their lead generation efforts. If you’re not testing and measuring, you’re going to severely diminish your chances of increasing traffic and conversions. Test everything including your website design, landing pages, headlines, CTA and subject lines. There are many tools that can assist you in understanding your metrics on a deeper level.
Following are some website measurement tools to consider:
- HotJar – Enables you to test website performance, to see how visitors are really using your website and collect user feedback.
- Google Optimize – Offers A/B testing, website testing and personalization tools to help deliver engaging customer experiences.
- Google Analytics – Helps you understand where your traffic is coming from, along with what visitors are doing on your website and across landing pages.
One of the most imperative areas to test and measure is your lead capture form. Hubspot shared critical components of lead capture forms. Some include the importance of the lead form’s positioning on the landing page, which should appear above the fold, to asking only essential questions. By just changing a single word or shifting the location of a form, you can increase conversion rates up to 300 percent.
Closely examine your conversion rates. Conversion rate optimization is the process that enables you to lower your customer acquisition costs by getting additional value from the visitors you already have. It also increases the chances of your prospects moving to action. You can modify certain elements of a webpage or pay per click campaign, to increase the chances that those prospects will convert into a lead or customer.
Website Lead Generation Results
CMA delivers digital marketing results for its customers, by utilizing these website lead generation strategies. For Amerlux, a national lighting manufacturer, CMA increased conversion rate by 401.6 percent through a landing page redesign.
For another customer, International Card Manufacturers Association (ICMA), CMA executed a website redesign. ICMA is a global transaction card association. Results included an 80 percent increase in users and average session duration.
Website lead generation is crucial to successful digital marketing campaigns. The days of just having an informational website are gone. You must have a website that’s a lead generation machine, along with a strong marketing strategy, to turn leads into qualified prospects.
You can’t look at website lead generation as a one-time project, but as an ongoing effort. It also requires expertise in testing, measuring and continuously optimizing content, design and traffic generation strategies to fill the sales funnel. That’s just one of the reasons why choosing the right marketing agency to partner with is key.
Do you want to generate more leads from your website? Contact us today, to begin the conversation.