Turning Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine

Today’s buyer has virtually unlimited access to information. They have the power to find and discover products at their convenience and direct their own paths to purchase. Buyers mainly do this online, which means that your website has become your most valuable marketing asset.

The better you know your customer, the better you can shape your site to serve up targeted messages and tailored offers that will convert an anonymous site visitor into a known prospect. In other words: you can leverage your website to generate leads.

Market with Powerful Content

Building your marketing strategy around content creation can offer valuable information to your prospects, as well as create a relationship with your brand by encouraging their engagement and interaction with you. Before planning what content you will offer, it is important to understand your targeted audience, the culture of your company, and your products and services.

Various approaches are available: you can use traditional techniques, such as magazines, white papers, eBooks, or webinars. Choose the best method for your audience, according to the channels they prefer.

However, you must keep in mind that in most cases, web users will reach out to you when they have a problem to solve. Therefore, the content of your website determines much of how they perceive your company and your product or service. Content that educates, informs, or entertains helps visitors to get to know you and encourages them to begin a relationship with your company. It can also nurture existing customer relationships.

SEO: Get Found and Get Known

You want your business web pages to show up when a potential buyer looks for the kind of product or service you offer. Being on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP) is an excellent goal but you should aim to be the top result on the first page.

To achieve these results, you must:

1. Have great content that fulfills the user’s intent and expectations.

2. Optimize your website for search. Search engine optimization (SEO) is complicated, so it is better to have a professional staff or consultant you can trust to help, especially when it comes to link profiles and schema. The average marketer can do a lot to enhance SEO.

Use well-chosen keywords in natural language patterns, bolstered by synonyms and rich semantic context. Next, crisp headings and images with all-text tags will help guide the reader through the text. Finally, your meta-data (page title, description, and so on) must be the right length and communicate your message. When used well, these factors can make you competitive in the SERP ranking.

Optimized Landing Pages

About half of new visitors to all sites are landing on the home page rather than a page that showcases site content. Setting up links this way means marketers create missed sales opportunities. The people who click in are probably more interested in how to reach their goal or solve a problem rather than general information about your company. Set up your landing page to help them.

Your home page is an entrance point.  Think about it like a store entrance, with a visual menu of content which highlights key areas that might appeal to buyers. When a new user shows interest, you must immediately take him inside and guide them to the exact shelf and product they need. Use landing pages to direct web page visitors to the exact content that will solve their problem, meet their need, or answer their question.

Always test your pages to ensure the best possible chance of lead conversion on the landing pages to which you are directing traffic.

A/B testing is the preferred method for marketers to test best-performing landing pages and emails. It checks elements like layouts, headlines, calls to action, buttons, forms, and much more. Isolate each variable and test one at a time. A/B testing will incrementally improve your results so that you can get the maximum conversion rate on your web pages.

Direct Attention with Calls to Action

A “call to action” (CTA) is used to let the reader take that critical next step with you, via a button, image, or phrase. Its purpose is often to offer something valuable (a white paper, video, survey, webinar, etc.) in exchange for the reader’s contact information. CTAs are, therefore, a critical component of lead generation and list-building.

You can use CTAs anywhere: email, social media, ads, and on your website. Envision the action you want your audience to take to create the perfect CTA. Even if it does not have a hard sell, like a “buy now” button, it has to state what your audience should do next clearly.

Use only one focused CTA per page. Put them in buttons, banners, images, or text. Make sure to test CTA colour and placement. Testing is the only way to know for sure that your audience will respond. Make sure your CTA messages are consistent and make the same offer.

Capture Data with Forms

Your online forms offer a place on your website to capture contact data provided by a willing prospect. You can gain permission to interact with a potential customer and obtain useful information about him. Form-related actions you can take include:

– Collect prospect data during event registration or survey sign-up.

– Add a form to a landing page and drive traffic there using links in emails, social media, and ads.

– Set customer-facing automated trigger responses to form fills, such as confirmations, thank-yous, and download links; set internal responses such as alerts to the sales team.

You can have an enormous impact on your conversion rates with proper form creation. Here are some best practices:

– Make the value proposition clear. Let the reader know what’s in it for them, and use headings and sub-headings to describe the benefits of filling out your form.

– Make sure your form fields are clear about their requests. If a user is confused, there is a chance he or she will not complete the form or may enter bogus information.

– Put your form above the fold so that it can be seen and filled out without scrolling.

– Shorter forms are usually better, but it is nice to experiment with form lengths. The more fields, the fewer people who will sign up – but they may be better qualified.

Always remember to test your web page’s forms with every aspect of lead generation.

Identify Website Visitors

While most website analytics programs, such as Google Analytics, look for valuable information about your website, pages, and traffic patterns, website visitor tracking is very different. It reports on individuals, giving you actionable intelligence about potential buyers. It shows you:

– Who is visiting your website.

– Why they visiting your site (inferred from their trackable behaviours).

– Indications of their issues, interests, and/or pain points.

– Where they may be in the buying process.

If the visitor is in your database, their activity history records their tracked behaviours. You can set alerts to notify you when a particular person or company visits your site or even a specific page. You will be able to gauge where a prospect is in the sales cycle, and when an existing customer becomes ready for an upsell.

If the visitor is anonymous and not already in your database – the tracked behaviours are still noted. If the visitor provides contact information later, his or her previously tracked history will attach to the new record.

If a web page visitor behaves like a very hot prospect but hasn’t provided contact information yet, there are other options. Act-On integrates with data systems that do reverse IP lookup. That means you may be able to see which company is linked to a specific IP address and research a list of staff to find the likely prospect.

Generate More New Leads

Once your website is optimized for prospects to find you, and your well-crafted content is pulling in users legitimately interested in your product or service, it is time to turn those visitors into leads.

The people who fill out a “contact me” form on your site are clear prospects and you should have a mechanism in place to immediately add them to your sales priority list. Among the rest of your visitors, there are some passersby, but also others who are interested but not quite ready to talk to your sales team. This group is doing the research, and you should take good care of your nurturing program. However, first you have to get their contact information, and this is where your landing pages and forms come into action: this is where you generate leads. If these visitors care enough about the focus of your content, they will trade their contact information for it.

Launch a coordinated social media campaign across all of your networks. Send an email campaign through a third party. Run pay-per-click ads. Hold a contest on your website and use traditional media (TV, radio, billboards) to publicize. Be proactive, and help people discover your website.

Based on which offer a user responds to, you may already know their interests, and you might be able to segment them. If you want to learn more about the prospect before doing so, keep track of their activities to be sure about their individual concerns. This will make your communications more personal, and more productive.

Use Act-On to Generate Leads

Landing page creation and testing: Without any knowledge of HTML, Act-On‘s intuitive tools let you create a landing page quickly. You can turn an email into a landing page fast, helping to ensure consistency across channels. Then you can test landing page elements and calls to action, with the ability to push a page live as soon as it is a clear winner.

Website visitor tracking: captures buyer behaviours and actions, and records them in individual contact and lead activity histories. Salespeople can tell, in real-time, when prospects or customers visit your website by setting alerts to get notifications. They will engage when prospects are actively looking for your products or services.

Campaign results and conversions: Marketing becomes accountable for a portion of sales revenues with marketing automation reports on campaign results and conversions.

Form creation and database integration: Create forms easily and quickly. When they are filled out, the data is automatically transferred into the marketing database and synched with a CRM database if those details meet specific criteria. Trigger emails can automatically respond to form submissions to acknowledge leads and offer him or her further relevant information

Marketing database access: The marketing database can receive data forms, and attributes and actions can be scored. Salespeople can access entries in the marketing database to see demographic and behavioural data. These actions notify the sales rep that the customer is ready to buy and what topics of interest will foster a warm and useful conversation.

Inbound marketing: Use SEO Audit to improve your website’s findability. Act-On can track AdWords conversions, providing intelligence and guidance for media buys, budget establishment, and keyword optimization for organic search.

To get more best practice of lead generation, I strongly recommend to download this free eBook.

Generation of high-quality leads remains the top challenge, more significant than lead volume, and even generation of public relations “buzz.”

In the past, lead generation was a two-part function; B2B marketers used advertising, direct mail, and other means to create awareness of brands. Salespeople, typically insiders working with telephone numbers and personal email addresses, would prospect for leads. Websites were often static. As buyers have increasingly turned to the web to educate themselves, a company’s website has become the most efficient way to attract attention and create interest: to generate leads. Act-On can help.