3min
Turning your website into a lead generation machine is easy in theory but is more complicated when you come down to it! Here are four areas you need to get across to do it.
Traffic
The most logical place to start is with traffic generation. This might sound strange, but the number one issue we find with websites trying to generate leads is a lack of traffic! If no one is coming to the site, then you aren't going to get leads, no matter what else you do. And it's not just about traffic either, it's essential to get the right sort of traffic.
We'd rather see low levels of highly targeted traffic that converts, than loads of poor-quality traffic that doesn't.
There are basically two ways to attract traffic to your website:
- Paid for traffic
Paid for means Google advertising (other search engines are available) or Social Media advertising. Google ads, search and display are very powerful tools that are easy to mess up. It is possible to learn to do this for yourself as there are loads of resources from the advertising companies themselves, and lots of independent advice around too. But we think it's a really good idea, especially if you intend on spending a lot on ads, to get someone who knows what they are doing to help you set up and manage your ad campaigns.
Social media is maybe a little easier to get started with. It makes sense to sponsor posts to get them to reach more people. But it does get a little more complex when you start looking at different audiences and stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Organic traffic
Sometimes called 'search' traffic, this is traffic generated by people choosing to view your pages because search engines offer them up as solutions to their queries. Search Engine Optimisation is a massive industry designed to 'cheat' the algorithms that chose what content gets served to the person making the query, and so get them to view your business's pages directly.
Today, the algorithms are getting so sophisticated some people think its sufficient to target your client and answer their queries as well as you can, without having to worry too much about what words you use to do this.
High levels of organic traffic are the holy grail, but it's really hard to achieve as there is so much competition out there for content.
Conversion
Once that traffic is there, it’s not enough to expect it to throw itself on your waiting cash registers and payment gateways! We must work as hard on the site to convert traffic as we do to get it. In many respects, given we can 'buy' traffic, it's harder to get it to convert than it is to attract it in the first place.
People these days, familiar as they are with sales techniques, funnels, and other marketing techniques, are very careful about where they engage and who they give their information too. Simply asking people to sign up to a newsletter is likely to get short shrift from the average website user.
People don't want spam, and they vote with their feet on any website that looks like its aim is just to send endless emails 're-targeting' them and trying to get them to buy.
When it comes to conversion on your site, think utility. People will respond and engage, and yes, even submit data if there is a powerful enough reason for them to do that, and the most powerful reasons are based on providing them with high levels of value - first, up front, before they buy.
Live chat is a great engagement tool and a feature of high conversion websites. But also look at FAQ's, a knowledge base, good navigation to show people around the site, and clear and concise web forms that take the minimum amount of data needed to answer your potential customers questions.
Measurement
If it's not measured, it's not managed. This is the most straight forward of things to do on a website as there are a plethora of tools you can use to measure traffic and engagement levels. But an amazing amount of people don't even bother to monitor the traffic they generate. Or don't generate as the case maybe!
If you are not measuring your website traffic and conversions, you should ask yourself the question - why have a website in the first place?
Test and Iterate
Closely related to measurement and the REAL secret to a high performing website, with lots of traffic and plenty of conversions is the requirement to test your strategies and tactics and change them according to what the data is telling you!
This is why measurement is so important in the first place. We need to know what pages are attracting traffic, or not. We need to know what landing pages are converting or not, and what calls to action work or not.
And when we know what works and what doesn't we can do something about that. Even changing the colour of a 'call to action' can massively impact the amount of people that click on it!
You should think of your website as a living, breathing, changing, and adapting extension of your business. Not something that can be built and forgotten. It's a real waste to do that.
Your website and marketing strategy go hand in hand, and we think it's really important to get the most from both. if you are struggling to understand how to do it yourself, talk to us and we'd be more than happy to help!
