If you’re a business owner with a website, you already know the importance of having a strong web presence. Still, 28% of small businesses don’t have one! This minority of entrepreneurs are missing out on large potential audiences of customers they can reach simply by having a website.
Having a website allows businesses to generate “leads” or prospective clients. The leads you get from your website can then turn into customers and clients, increasing your profit and allowing your business to grow organically. However, just having a website isn’t enough. You have to know how to find and nurture these leads.
Building a profitable online presence starts with optimizing your website for lead generation. In this article we’ll discuss:
- Considerations for designing a lead acquisition strategy that aligns with your business goals and available resources.
- Various paid and SEO tactics you can use to help drive leads using your website.
- How to optimize your lead generation campaign and measure its success with concrete metrics.
How to start driving leads
Define your goal
A common goal of every business owner is always to increase sales. But what’s important is having a specific plan on how you get your business there; the intention is not enough to generate sales. You have to have a well-thought-out process that takes leads through your sales cycle, ideally ending with them becoming clients.
When assessing your sales goals with your team, ask these questions:
What type of lead do you want?
Figure out who your target audience is and be as specific as possible. While businesses tend to want to have as wide of an appeal as possible, it helps to get as specific and niche as you can. This helps your business and your sales team be more focused when trying to acquire new leads. It also helps define your strategies to increase your site traffic, and by default, sales leads.
What is a lead worth to your business?
Businesses only find lead acquisition important if they get an ROI. Before you start creating a grand, elaborate lead generation plan, assess your budget to see how much money you can invest in this process. Keep in mind that in addition to building out a process and acquiring software, you’ll also have to account for the time it will take to develop these plans. Know what your business can afford to spend in time and money before you start a project you can’t finish.
How will you communicate with and engage with your leads?
The strongest leads in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to engage with them. Create a step-by-step strategy that allows you and your team to move your leads throughout your sales cycle. This way there won’t be any lost time or missteps throughout the process, and you can properly convey your pitch to your lead immediately.
Create the space on your website to gather leads
The easiest way to accumulate leads on your website is by having an option for people to input their contact information directly. This can live on your site in several different ways:
- Contact form – This is a separate page of your site that allows the user to input their name, email address, and any other additional information that you request. It gets sent directly to you in order for you and your sales team to reach out to them.
- Chatbot – A chatbot is a pop-up box on your site that allows users to have a conversation with an AI program. The chatbot can be used for customer service, site navigation, or to answer questions about your company for sales purposes. Depending on the size of your company, you can also have a human manage your chat box inquiries.
- Pop-up box – Before users exit out of your site, you can design your page so that a pop-up box shows up and asks if they would like to receive more information about your company or products. Typically, it will ask them to input their email and directly send them more information.
Related article: Everything You Need to Know About AI Copywriting
Consider SEO
Once you have the lead capture on your site, think about investing time and money into improving your organic search rankings to get more clicks from potential customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great strategy companies can use to increase their search engine ranking and get more eyes on their site.
Conduct an SEO audit of your website to see what your current content strategy is and where you need to make improvements. From there, determine if you should coordinate your SEO efforts in-house or through an agency. While there are many things that small businesses can do in house, if your company doesn’t already have someone who is well-versed in SEO, it’s more advantageous to go outside your company, if you can afford it.
By optimizing your website and content for SEO best practices, you’ll have a better opportunity at attracting your ideal leads. With more eyes on your site, this can lead to better quality leads that connect with you directly.
How to get more leads
Produce more content
Content gets more eyes on your page, further generating interest in your business. While well-written blog posts are the best types of content to increase your SEO rankings, videos, pictures, email newsletters, and other types of content are all beneficial to attracting, engaging with, and converting more leads. Many forms of content increase your brand awareness and establish your organization as an expert in the field, creating more interest and trust.
Social media
Every business can use social media to increase their brand and attract customers. As a free tool that lets you engage directly with your customers and promote your business, social media can help you get more leads to your website. Much like with SEO strategies, seeing an improvement with social media takes time. However, if you consistently put in the time and effort, it can pay off for your customers.
Online courses and webinars
You didn’t get into your business by accident. As an expert in your field, you should share your experiences and insights with others. Create online courses that allow you to educate others on your industry that can be used for their professional or personal development. Similarly, you can create online events, such as webinars, to connect different business leaders together for an engaging conversation. Hosting courses and events allows you both to extend your reach and create a conversation with new and existing customers.
Engage with other industry leaders
There are more ways you can leverage your connections, aside from hosting them in a webinar. Interview other thought leaders in your industry and share your conversations throughout your content or guest posts. This could be in the form of using them as a quote in one of your blogs or releasing a longform interview podcast. Talking to other industry leaders gives your audience a new perspective on your business, as well as brings in their base as well.
Paid advertisements
From all the above methods, it will take time and consistency to see results. If you want to speed up your client acquisition process, consider advertising. Digital strategies such as page search, social media advertising, and display advertising can all help attract new leads to your website. Before committing to one of these advertising strategies, think about what your overall goal is. Do you want to increase traffic or sales conversions? Be sure to commit a fair amount of money over time to your paid ad. The longer it runs, the better results you’ll get.
Related article: PPC Management: What You Need to Know About Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Be patient
Getting quality leads takes time, so it’s important to have the longest view in the room when assessing your strategy. No business is an overnight success. When making changes to your client acquisition strategy, know that it will take months — even years — to see the results prove successful. Like a tree, it takes time for the seeds you plant to grow.
How to get better quality leads
Increasing the traffic on your website doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be able to convert those views into tangible sales leads. And even if you do, you might not be generating high-quality leads. In order to make sure that you’re getting the quality leads, here’s how you can optimize your website for SEO and the lead process.
Optimizing for SEO
Much like starting the process of gathering leads, optimizing leads for SEO starts with defining goals. Here are the steps to do so:
Define objectives
Your SEO strategy needs to be defined by what specific objectives you have. It’s difficult to create a plan when your objectives are broad, such as “increase traffic” or “increase sales.” Look at those specific metrics for your site in cross analyze them with your current sales trends. Using that data, you can create a specific SEO plan that helps you meet tangible objectives.
Perform research for keywords and topics
Keywords are the words and phrases that are the most commonly used amongst your target audience. You want to perform keyword research to know what it is that your target audience is searching for and what words and phrases you can use to increase your site ranking and get them on your webpage. Use your research findings to help inform the blogs and content that you look to publish.
Plan and develop content
When businesses start to have a content strategy, they often do too much too soon, see little to no results, and then get burnt out by their efforts and give up. Remember, it takes time to see the results of your content. Because of that lengthy process, you don’t need to rush into publishing a mass amount of content. Create a content calendar that outlines what pieces you want to publish on your site and promote throughout the week, month, or quarter. This way you’ll have a well-thought-out content strategy that you can devote time to develop properly.
Promote content
As you continue to publish more content, promote it through a variety of different mediums to reach as wide of an audience as you can. Posting on different social media platforms, sharing content in a newsletter, and even just sending it to your business connections, are great ways to get eyes on your content and start a conversation.
Analyze performance
Every quarter, create a report of your analytics and review them. This report should include your page views, click through rate, social media engagement, and any other measurement that you have access to. Notice where you’ve been successful and create a plan to emulate that success in your future content strategy.
Optimizing the process
Each step of the lead-gathering process should be seamless and efficient for your prospective customers. For them, the process should start with then visiting your site and ending with them submitting their information and becoming a lead. There are a few simple ways that you can optimize your content and the lead process in order to see an increase in high quality lead generation.
CTA
At the end of every blog, write a call to action that states how your company can help solve a problem or improve an issue that was talked about in the article. Right and enticing message that persuades your reader to learn more about your company. Your CTAs should stand out on your blog, at the minimum being bolded, though it never hurts to create eye-catching images to get their attention.
Landing pages
The more landing pages you have on your website, the greater your ability to generate leads is. Talk with your SEO specialist about what types of landing pages would be beneficial for you to have on your site and then start writing and producing them.
Thank you pages
Similar to landing pages, publish thank you pages on your site that are seen after a user submits their information. These should thank the user for their interest and include new links for them to explore in order to keep them on the page and learn more about your company. You can even give them the option to share your page on social media through different buttons.
Measure the quality of your lead
Once you have leads, how do you even know if they’re good? There are two ways to define the quality of a lead: closing potential is how easy the process will be to convert the lead into a customer in revenue potential is an assessment of how much money the prospect could generate over their time as a client.
From there you can use a number of factors to determine the quality of your lead. Many like to use the BANT formula, which measures leads against your objective qualifications of budget, authority, need, and timetable. leaders also like to measure the quality of the lead based on how much revenue it could bring in and how much interest they have.
The first step in attracting quality leads to your website is having content that they want. A well thought out content strategy, featuring well researched and SEO friendly content will help your business start to attract the lead you want. Take a look at our content marketing packages to see how we can help grow organic traffic to your site and attract quality leads.
