Make your website your workhorse! Website lead generation strategies for your business
Creating a beautiful new website is high on most entrepreneurs’ agenda when launching their business. There’s more to be considered than gorgeous branding and professional images.
As North Brisbane’s leading website designers, we often remind our clients of the importance of a well-considered website lead generation strategy. This helps to ensure their website not only looks great but is also working hard. Their website needs to engage its audience and helping to convert them into paying customers.
Ensuring you put some thought into how to use your website for lead generation can help accelerate your business success and help you reach your goals.
This article discusses how you can use your website to generate quality leads for your business.
Website lead generation strategies for your business
The best website lead generation strategies are those that not only drive traffic to your website but help to convert them to paying customers. Here are some great tips and ideas to consider to help make your website your workhorse.
SEO – The ultimate website lead generation strategy
Generating leads through search engine optimization (SEO) is a highly effective strategy that will help boost your site’s rankings in search engines without paying for ads.
The aim of the game is to help your website be ‘seen’ by Google and other search engines. This allows your site to rank higher on the first pages for specific keywords relevant to your business and industry.
Once you succeed in reaching a higher ranking, you’ll likely attract more traffic to your website and, therefore, more sales.
It’s important to ensure the best practice techniques are followed when it comes to long-lasting SEO results.
So, unless you know what you’re doing, it’s better to reach out to a local SEO expert to set this up properly for you.
UX Design – What is it and how does it help?
Once a potential customer clicks onto your website, you’ll want them to stay there for a while. By engaging in your website for longer, they get to know your business before making a decision about your service or product.
This is where UX, otherwise known as ‘user experience’ comes in.
Ensuring your website is user-friendly and provides your visitors with a great experience is important in your lead generation strategy.
But we also need to take it one step further. You need to consider whether your website is laid out in a way that encourages your audience to take that all-important next step toward buying your product or service.
Here are some things to consider when it comes to UX design:
- Are your contact forms added to the pages that get the most traffic?
- Are your calls to action clear and enticing (more on this later…)
- Does the layout of your website make sense?
- And is it easy for your customers to find key information?
Having a killer website design is important to improve your lead generation. So, don’t forget to really put some thought into the design and layout of your website
Publish original and quality content on your website
Updating your website regularly with fresh, up-to-date and relevant content is a great way to generate new leads and improve your SEO.
By writing articles or blogs that share your knowledge and expertise you provide valuable insights for your audience and allow readers to engage with your business and your product or service.
What’s more, Google loves to see new content on your website. So, producing quality and original content will likely help your SEO ranking.
Of course, there are specific ways to ensure you make the most of new content opportunities, so it could be a good idea to check in with an expert on this one.
What’s your ‘Call to Action’?
This could be the most important strategy of all the website lead generating tools. It’s great to get a potential customer to your website, but unless they take that all-important next step towards making a purchase, you may have lost a great opportunity.
A ‘call to action’ (or ‘CTA’) is a prompt on your website that asks the user to take a specific action. Your call to action may be a special offer with a ‘buy now’ button or may just be an invitation to ‘learn more’.
Whichever CTA is appropriate for your business, it’s important that the action is obvious and stands out from all the other information on the page. Make it very clear what steps your visitor to take when engaging on your business website.
Opt for opt ins
‘Opting in’ is a fancy marketing term that simply means offering a customer a reason to sign up to your lead generating customer database.
Data privacy laws mean that customers have the right to opt out of receiving marketing materials from your business, so it’s a great strategy to give them a reason to ‘opt in’.
A great idea is to offer customers a value-packed ‘lead magnet’ – basically a freebie in exchange for their email address.
Few people are willing to just hand over their email address these days. Not only does offering a valuable opt in gift provide a reason for people to give you their details but it also helps to ensure you’re attracting the ‘right’ kind of people to your mailing list.
Some examples of lead generating opt ins include:
- Checklists
- Video training
- E-book
- Mini course.
Whatever you choose, make sure it’s short and sweet and packed with value.
Providing regular, helpful content via your email newsletters helps to convert those warm leads to hot ones. You can even use the content you’re generating for your blog!
Remember to measure the success from your lead generation strategies
As with anything we do in business, it’s important to track which of our website’s lead generation strategies can be improved and which are working hard for your business.
The best tool for this is Google Analytics which tracks how many people are visiting your website, how much time they’re spending there and where they’re finding you online.
It’s also a great idea to track every month how many people are signing up to your email list and how many are filling in your forms (or emailing you) for more information.
Of course, tracking how many website visitors convert to paying customers is the ultimate test. By following the website lead generation strategies and tips above, you will build your leads, build stronger relationships and engagement with potential customers, and ultimately increase your sales.
Kirsten Sealey is the Founder and Chief Ideas Generator at The Ideas Dept., a Brisbane-based website design and SEO agency. Her aim is to help female entrepreneurs and local businesses make their websites their workhorses to engage and connect with their ideal customers and grow their business.