Is your website generating qualified business leads? Gone are the days where websites served as static online brochures. Today, websites are dynamic online marketing hubs that educate, engage and drive meaningful action. This shift has not only increased the alignment and collaboration between sales and marketing teams, but made it easier to measure marketing ROI. Ready to start generating (more) leads from your website? Let’s get started:
Be responsive
In 2016, responsive website design isn’t just a good idea – it’s a business imperative. Studies show that 27% of visitors will leave a website that isn’t mobile-optimized. Further, social media is driving 1/3 of all website traffic and U.S. adults are spending 51% of their time with digital media on smartphones.
Responsive websites automatically scale to the visitors device, helping to foster a positive user experience. No pinching, flicking or zooming required to easily read copy, complete forms and share content.
Make forms user-friendly
Data capture forms can help companies to pre-qualify their online leads. By adding fields for the visitors’ location, areas of interest/service needs, company size, etc. companies can learn the basics about their prospects before picking up the phone or crafting an email to follow-up. While this data can be helpful to the sales team, it is important to determine what form fields are mission-critical so that prospects don’t feel overwhelmed and abandon the form before submission.
If you are generating your data capture forms from a CRM or other third-party application and embedding code to generate your forms, make sure the forms are responsive as well. You don’t want people to transition from a responsive website to a non-responsive form and lose some of your prospects along the way.
Ramp up your online marketing content
One of the best ways to “get found” online is to maintain a content-rich blog on your website. When structured properly, every new blog post you add to your site can be a new, optimized page of content for Google to crawl. Blog posts are also great opportunities to educate prospective clients about your areas of expertise and showcase your thought leadership.
Among the critical components of an effective lead generation blog are compelling calls-to-action. What do you want people to do after they read your blog posts? Calls-to-action are a great opportunity to deepen engagement with the prospective clients who are visiting your website. Effective calls-to-action can run the gamut from downloading additional information, often in the form of a whitepaper, e-book or toolkit, to registering for an event. The key is to make sure the “ask” is audience-centric and that you have various options available to suit visitors who are in various phases of the sales cycle.
Embrace lead nurturing emails
To generate leads from your website, you need to keep in touch with the folks who are downloading your content marketing assets. This is where lead nurturing emails come into play.
A series of compelling and actionable emails that help move leads down the sales funnel can help to increase lead conversion and bolster marketing ROI. The trick to effective lead nurturing emails is to make the subject line compelling, the copy succinct and to align the call-to-action with the level your lead is currently at in the sales funnel. Case and point – your first lead nurturing email is most-often a content-based offer, not an offer for a sales consultation. Save that offer for a later point in your series.
Clients often ask, “How often should I send lead nurturing emails?” While the answer isn’t universal a best practice is to inform and engage without overwhelming. Looking at the sales cycle for your offline leads can help to provide insights as well.
Take a multimedia approach
The explosive growth of Instagram and online video prove we are living in an increasingly visual world. When developing your online marketing content, consider what information is best conveyed through website copy, as opposed to Infographics, custom imagery and/or video. Taking a multimedia approach will also help to provide a robust bank of assets to share on your social media marketing channels and in your email marketing.
Rebuilding your website and establishing an effective content marketing program are investments that will pay ongoing dividends.
