We’ve seen it before. A company has a really great-looking website with all of the relevant information. But it’s not doing anything. It’s just sitting there, hanging out in cyberspace.
If your website isn’t carefully optimized with all of the right lead-generating components, it’s probably just going to sit there. That’s right, collecting dust out in cyberspace.
Here, it might be helpful to think of your website as a tool, rather than an advertisement. This means that it’s crucial that your website is built to attract your buyer personas and function as an efficient, lead-generating machine.
Components of a Lead-Generating Website:
1. Marketing messages crafted around your buyer persona.
First, you have to understand your buyer persona. Oftentimes, a company will have more than one, because it’s likely that a business has a diverse client base. When you know who your ideal buyers are you can craft your marketing messages to speak to each of them, a strategy that will increase your leads and result in more engaged customers.
2. A design that is built around your sales funnel.
Effective lead-generation is a proven way to shorten your sales funnel, and a shortened sales funnel equals higher profitability. So, you want your site to lead visitors through the sales process. This involves landing pages with effective calls-to-action and easy-to-find contact information. The main consideration in your design should be to make the buyer process easy for your visitors.
3. Persuasive copywriting.
Visitors come to your site asking, “What’s in it for me?” So, your copywriting should be written about your customer. Meaning, your text should answer some of these questions:
- How do you solve their problem?
- Why should they use your product/service?
- How do you enhance their daily life?
A good place to start is to re-examine your buyer personas.
4. Effective content.
One of the main goals of your content should be to make your website “findable” to search engines. Yep, it’s called SEO. So, on the one hand your content must be persuasively written to people, and, on the other, it must be optimized for search engines. Identify which keywords people are using when they search for your product or service. Then, place those keywords into your site’s content, like titles and headings, inbound links, web page content, and blogs.
5. Calls-to-action.
A CTA is a button on a website that encourages a visitor to do something, like click to download an eBook. As part of the larger inbound marketing strategy, a visitor clicks on the CTA to trade contact information in exchange for whatever the CTA has offered. So, these buttons serve as starting points in the process of converting visitors into leads.
6. Mobile-optimization.
More and more people are using the Internet on a device that is not a laptop or desktop computer, and your site needs to reflect that. When designing a mobile site it’s important to consider the following concepts:
- Do not use Flash technology.
- Prioritize your content based on the customer.
- Use whitespace effectively.
- Keep your branding consistent.
Another benefit to developing a mobile-optimized site is that it will increase your site’s overall SEO.
7. Updated usability.
Ask yourself: What do my visitors see in their first 10 seconds on my site? Those first 10 seconds usually determine if a visitor will hang out awhile, so making your site user-friendly is crucial.
8. Customer testimonials.
Potential buyers want to know what your customers think. Testimonials will build your credibility with site visitors.
9. Analytics.
You’ll need to implement an analytics feature into your site so that you can see what is working, what’s not working, and then shift the components of your website to fix problems and ward off potential issues.
Your analytics should examine at least these stats:
- Overall site traffic
- Lead conversion rate
- Customer conversion rate
- Landing page and CTA performance
How does your site stack up?
By Drew Himel