It’s all about lead generation!
Lead generation is a hot topic in our office at the moment, the number one question we get asked is “how can I generate more leads through my website?”. There are a couple of stages to go through in the process so we will look at each in turn here.
Attracting the right audience
First off, you want to get the right traffic to your website, it’s not always about the number of visits, more importantly it’s the quality of those visits. It’s about getting the right people to find you. For example, if you have a high end product to sell then there is no point receiving lots of enquiries from people that don’t have the money to spend. It’s a waste of your time and theirs.
But how do you attract the right visitors?
The first thing to think about is the things that they are interested in. A few years back, this would have involved keyword research and then creating pages around those keywords. Whilst keywords are still important, your website needs to be geared towards answering the questions that your potential customers may have.
Depending on your business, your potential customers will be looking for different things, so working out what that is and focusing your website around what is important to them, rather than you will help to attract those quality visitors.
You could say to yourself, what is the point of creating content when I could just run a pay per click campaign. That is true, but what happens when that paid click goes through to a website that doesn’t answer the needs of the person searching? They will simply click on the next website making the whole campaign expensive and not particularly effective.
So, we are back to content again. Content can be anything that provides information to your visitors so don’t think you have to write thousands of pages to get results. Whilst this is definitely a good strategy. Most businesses have neither the time or resource to churn out page after page. The key is to really understand what your potential customers want and make sure you provide all the information they need to be able to take the next step along the buyer’s journey.
Converting visitors into leads
So, now you have got the right people to visit your website. What do you do with them now? You need to make it very easy for them to take action. This could be clicking through to another page, filling out a form, researching a product, calling you or requesting a quote (and so on).
This is where call to actions come in (or CTA’s as they are commonly referred to). These are buttons that link through to another page, or buttons that encourage actions. They will be placed above the fold on a web page or at the end of a blog post or piece of content. These CTA’s help to funnel those visitors through to take the action that you want them to take. They also allow you to collect information about that visitor that then helps you to continually improve the user experience on your website.
Be prepared to give information away for free, this is the best way of collecting vital information, creating trust and credibility and most importantly turning that visitor into a lead for your sales team to follow up with.
