10 Ways to Make Your Website a Lead Generation Machine
You can get more leads from your website! In today’s economic environment, sales and marketing teams have to do more with less. This means it’s critically important that you leverage digital assets like your website.
With the right strategy, your website has the potential to be a significant source of lead generation for your business or organization. You can attract more people to your brand, provide valuable resources to your sales team, and encourage visitors to connect with appropriate calls to action.
Lead Generation Tactics for Your Website
1) Answer Questions
We’ve all become accustomed to “asking” Google questions to solve our everyday problems. Having the answers to your common industry questions and solutions on your website can raise your search engine visibility significantly.
A lot of our customers, like Neckerman Insurance, do this really well. In fact, they consistently rank well on Google for common customer questions and even appears as a featured snippet for some. Their marketing team shared an important tip when it comes to their content marketing strategy:
“A lot of our ideas come from recent questions from customers. Our sales and service staff share these questions/comments with me and it sparks great blog ideas.” – Megan
2) Create a Guided Journey
Your website should provide visitors with a clear path to the information they need. This can be supported by keeping your main menu simple, incorporating white space within your page layouts, strategically cross-linking related content, and making calls to action obvious.
3) Tell Your Story
Everyone loves a good story. Your website provides the perfect spot for you to build a narrative for who you are, who you help, and how you help them. A great way to incorporate this content on your website would be to include areas dedicated to exploring your team, testimonials, and past work. Including impactful graphics like images and video throughout will help make your story even more powerful!
Fun Fact: People like to know who they will be working with! Analytics show that team pages are commonly in the top 10 pages viewed on a website. Here is a great example of a team page from the Filament website, which showcases the personality and expertise of their employees:
4) Watch Your Language
It can be easy to alienate your audience by using industry jargon and generic calls to action. Be sure to keep your ideal customer in mind, presenting their goals and needs with their own words. Check out this Tidbit Tuesday video to get an idea of how you can better think like your customer:
5) Provide Social Proof
As the social creatures that we are, having social proof on your website can increase your conversion rates. Having testimonials and case studies can provide valuable social trust, and increase your lead generation. In addition, positive Google reviews can encourage clicks and improve rankings.
Here’s a great example of incorporating social proof direct from Naviant’s website. They leverage video as much as possible and dynamically showcase relevant customer feedback throughout the website (not on just one page).
6) Create and Share Lead Magnets
One great way to engage with prospects early on in the buyer’s journey is to provide valuable resources. This will help you build trust and differentiate the value you offer from the competition. You can gate a handful of these resources to create lead magnets.
A lead magnet is a unique resource that offers immediate value offered in exchange for contact information.
The Result: Using the Powderkeg team as an example, we leveraged our New Website Planning Guide to double our lead count last year. We like creating “guides” but lead magnets can take lots of different forms! You could always try sharing webinars, demos, checklists, or industry white papers with your target audiences. Here’s a great example from the Criteria For Success website:
7) Encourage Soft Conversions
Even if a website visitor is not ready to buy, you can still convert them to an identifiable lead through a soft conversion. Take some time to consider what action a prospect can take at each stage of their buyer’s journey.
8) Keep Content Accessible
It would be tragic for your marketing and sales team to dedicate their time creating amazing content for it to end up being difficult for your audience to access. That’s why website accessibility should be part of any lead generation strategy. At its core, website accessibility is the ongoing practice of removing any barriers that would prevent website visitors from accessing and engaging with your content. The Powderkeg team actually created a checklist you can use to benchmark your current level of website accessibility and determine which areas need improvement.
9) Track and Remarket
By adding tracking scripts and setting up remarketing campaigns, you can recapture leads and send them back to your website. You can get creative with where these ads lead to. For example, you can promote those valuable resources you’ve already been working so hard to create to support your content marketing strategy. This is a great way to keep prospects engaged, especially in industries with a long sales cycle.
10) Leverage Custom Landing Pages
In general, you want your content to be relevant to your customer’s needs. When running campaigns, be sure to make your landing page(s) as targeted as possible. Focusing on content that directly relates to your campaign message and target audience will help you create a strong marketing funnel.
The Axley team does a great job of this! Their landing pages have a strong, primary call-to-action that aligns with their ad copy:
Next Steps to Improve Your Website’s Performance
As you evaluate which of these tactics make the most sense to implement, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team with any questions. We also have plenty of other resources here on our website, so be sure to check those out as well.
