How do you generate leads from a website?
If you have a website, you want it to bring good leads for your business.
To do this, your website must be found by the very people who are actively looking for the things you offer and -most crucially- once people find it, it must engage them and convince them to give you their custom.
It needs to tell your story, be easy to navigate, responsive, mobile-friendly and well-integrated with your other digital tools.
Think well before you build your website and do not start building it until you are completely satisfied that it is exactly the way you want it; a bad start might mean having to do everything over
again. So, here are a few tips on how to generate leads from your website.
Tell your story and find your voice.
Think well about the story you want to tell with your website: who is your company? What makes you unique? What story are you going to tell and to whom? Always keep your potential customers in mind. Once your website is up and running, you cannot just leave it; you will need to perform regular maintenance operations which require technical knowledge and time.
Be yourself. Find your own style and tone: are you going to be formal, funny, sarcastic, allusive, direct; do you want to shout out your ideas or whisper them softly? Find your values, style, and uniqueness. It’s not just the “About us” section; your whole website must tell your story in a unique way.
Find your audience and engage with them
Who are your existing or potential readers/clients? What makes them tick? How often, and when, are they likely to engage with you?
Make all information on your site readily accessible; you only have a few seconds to capture your visitors’ attention before they leave, maybe forever. Simplify your users’ tasks on your site: give them a few, not dozens.
Make your material valuable to your target audience: it must be what they are looking for. Give all useful information and encourage them to make that call, or buy your products.
Engage your visitors. Ask for their opinions, recommend products, cross-sell; design your website architecture so that the information on your landing pages seamlessly leads to the pages where you want them to go and close the deal.
Make a content calendar
This is perhaps the fundamental activity to ensure your voice is heard consistently and regularly. It is about planning and scheduling a percentage of your content in advance so that your website is regularly updated, while leaving some space for last-minute additions. A constantly updated, informative website is not only a great user experience but it is also valued by search engine algorithms and will boost your ranking. Decide what type of material is best to represent you: articles, videos, photos, questions, contests, quotes. Will you use just your own material or are you going to consider using borrowed material? Will you have a blog? Make sure you have a good mix of informative, useful and funny material.
Do your SEO
Well-performed SEO goes a long way towards generating leads from a website, because it will get your web pages indexed and your website found. This is a very specialised sector where things evolve extremely fast and one which covers all aspects of your website: technical, on-page, back-linking, user experience, data analysis and data management. SEO is no longer an ‘if ‘question, it is a matter of how you do it and how much you invest on it.
My advice is to outsource your SEO from a specialised agency which will work in close communication with you and integrate it with your own marketing and sales strategy. It is not going to be cheap but the money spent on this may prove to be the best investment you have ever made.
Integrate your website with your social media
This builds trust and credibility and gives you extra channels to communicate with your audience and bring new traffic to your site. Besides, social shares and likes can be a powerful tool to boost rankings.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
A huge amount of traffic comes from mobile devices and the trend is increasing, so test your site to see if it renders well on different types of mobile; analytics tools (or just user experience) can give you a lot of useful information about this. If you want to read more bout this crucial issue, you could read this post about optimising for “Mobile First”
Provide useful information for free.
Nothing like this helps you build that crucial mailing list; very often people are happy to give you their e-mail address, if you give something useful and free in return. There are a lot of things you can give away for free: podcasts, whitepapers, even short courses. It will be a lot of work initially, but it will prove to be one of your most useful business tools.
Set-up remarketing campaigns.
Remarketing campaigns help you reconnect with people who have already visited your website. You can show them your ads as they browse websites which are part of the Google Display Network or while they search for terms related to your products or services. Some of these visitors may have left your website without buying anything or connecting with you in any way but, if they have spent time visiting you page and reading your information, this means you have something interesting for them. Maybe they are just not ready to make a decision; they are looking at the competition or simply have run out of time and must leave your site. From an analysis of visitors’ paths through your website you can see what pages they visited, what they like and in many cases understand why they left. You cannot afford to lose these potential clients.
