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If you run a company, you undoubtedly have a website. But what is it for? If you’re not using your website for online lead generation, then you’re missing a trick. Discover 10 ways your website could be working to find you new customers.
1. Understand your market
Seems pretty obvious right, but we mean *really* understand your market. Think about the type of services you offer and the type of customer you want to attract. Consider which parts of your business you want to grow. Be honest about your capacity. It’s surprising how many companies go out to generate more leads when they just don’t have the resources to deal with the volume of leads they are generating. Leaving prospective customers frustrated and unlikely to use your services.
Once you understand all the above you can tailor the rest of your actions towards your ideal customer and your business goals.
2. Sort out your navigation
Your website needs to be easy for visitors to find their way around. If they have landed on your home page they need to be able to quickly find the services or information they are looking for. Focus on making it simple to get to your high-value services to improve conversion rates.
3. Grab attention
If you’ve read anything about website ranking – where they appear on search engines – you’re probably aware that long-form content tends to rank more highly. However, you don’t want to overwhelm website visitors with too much information. Start each page with a clear, succinct description of what you offer and what it does for them.
Visitors can read more if they need to, but they should be able to almost instantly assess whether they want to stay on the page. Using bullet points together with a striking image may be enough to capture them.
4. Compelling CTAs
CTAS – Calls To Action – let your website visitors know what you want them to do next. ‘Call Now’, ‘Get Your Free Quote’ or ‘Arrange a Call Back’ are all examples of instructions to website visitors that make it clear what the next step in their customer journey should be.
CTAs should appear front and center of the vast majority of your pages, and as well as what the CTAs say you should consider how they look as evidence suggests some colors are more likely to encourage clicks than others.
5. Optimize forms
Forms capture information from website visitors. At their most basic they collect simple contact information and there is certainly a benefit in not asking potential customers to complete overlong forms. However, there is a balance to be struck between asking for too much information – and discouraging completion – and asking for enough information to make the information collected useful from a lead generation perspective.
For example, knowing what specific products or services prospective customers are interested in, can let sales teams finesse future marketing engagement. By and large, the more you know about prospects, the better.
6. Forms that aren’t ‘forms’
We know that forms are a valuable way to collect leads, but forms don’t need to look like forms. You might, for example, have a button on your website that asks a question such as ‘Are You Underinsured?’, ‘What’s Your Perfect Skincare Routine?’ or ‘Does Your Central Heating Need Servicing?’
You then take website visitors through a series of questions that will reveal the answer to that question. At the end of the questions, you ask for their contact details to email them their result. You then have their contact details together with information regarding the type of services or products they might be interested in. You’ve generated a lead using a form that doesn’t look like a form.
As with all collection of data you will need to ensure that you abide by all the relevant data protection legislation.
7. Keep content up to date
Regularly reviewing the content of your company website is vital both in terms of accuracy and in terms of your site’s performance in relation to your competitors.
SEO audits – that is checking how well your website fares in organic searches – will give you the information you need to make any necessary changes.
8. Use landing pages
Landing pages are standalone pages that support specific marketing campaigns – usually PPC ads such as Google Ads. They are designed to support individual marketing messages and this clarity optimizes the lead generation process. They are also much simpler to amend and refine, as you gather more data about their performance as lead-generation strategies.
9. Track & test
These 2 elements are intrinsically linked and crucially important. Tracking lets you know where your leads are coming from. If you are tracking leads through your website, you can then A/B test different versions of pages, different CTAs etc to see which are the most successful in generating leads. This lets you tweak messages as you need to.
The beauty of websites is that they are much easier to change than more ‘physical’ channels, such as leaflets, yet too many companies don’t use this to their advantage. Keep checking where the leads your website generates come from, assess which pages and tools are successful and keep improving.
10. Use reviews
Your greatest asset may be your existing customers, so if they’re giving you great reviews make sure your prospective customers know about them. Reviews can be easily pulled together from various platforms and displayed on your website.
These trust signals encourage website visitors to take their relationship with you further, thus generating leads. And remember tip number 3 about grabbing attention? If you’ve got hundreds of 5-star reviews, mention that early on your pages. If you don’t know where to start with generating reviews, read more about online review strategy now.
The cost-of-living crisis has made competition for customers even more fierce. Every company with a website can get an edge in that competitive market by making sure that their website is optimized for lead generation.
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