At the heart of your marketing tools is your ability to create a lead generating website. Lead generation — the process of converting prospects into interested leads — is so vital, yet so many businesses have no idea how to tackle it.
You want to design a site that interests potential buyers and convinces them to convert. With a little attention to web design and these tips, you’ll be drawing in the leads.
Define Your Target Audience
You can’t create a lead-generating website if you’re not even sure who you’re targeting or what kind of leads you want to create. The first step is to figure that out.
Identify your target audience based on demographics like age or gender and then get into their head. What do this group of people want? What are their interests? What kind of leads will appeal to them?
Implement Conversion Opportunities
Now you have a target market. You’ve put thought and research into what makes them convert. Now you need to give them the chance to.
Not sure exactly what constitutes a lead conversion? Here are a few examples:
- Signing up for your newsletter.
- Initiating a live chat or sending an email.
- Filling out a contact form.
- Commenting on a blog post.
- Engaging on social media.
- Visiting a landing page (through a referral link or otherwise).
- Downloading an ebook, report, or other file from your website.
Below we’ve listed out a number of tools you can use to send them through your conversion funnel or path.
1. Create Call-to-Action Buttons
The key part of any lead is a Call-to-Action (CTA). CTAs are links using action phrases like “Fill out our form”, “Download our whitepaper”, or “Check it out”. They often take the form of buttons or clickable images.
Use your site’s design to your advantage. Create a CTA with contrasting, eye-grabbing colors distinct from the rest of the page, and strategically use whitespace to highlight it. That’s the beginning of a strong lead generation website design.
2. Design Landing Pages
Landing pages allow you to obtain a visitor’s information through the use of a conversion form. Need design inspiration? Keep in mind that the best lead generation websites have landing pages designed to target your specific audience, offer them something beneficial, create leads and capture information about who they are and why they converted.
In order to create efficient landing pages that encourage website conversion optimization, there are some aspects that should always be included:
- A headline is the first thing visitors see when they view your page, so make sure it sums up your offer as clearly as possible.
- Copy, or text, should also be included on the page, along with keywords for search engine optimization.
- Make sure you include a conversion form, which allows visitors to submit their information to receive the offer and requires the most vital information for yourself. We’ll talk more about this below.
- Finally, utilizing relevant images makes the page more appealing, aesthetics can make or break an offer.
3. Construct Contact Forms
Visitors on your website are already interested in your industry or offerings. Therefore it is crucial that you implement contact forms to collect their information and add them to your email list. Additionally, the easier you make it to find and use the form, the more likely it is for visitors to contact you.
Aside from making it easier for your visitors, contact forms make learning about them painless for you. An efficient contact form will ask leading questions to target visitors based on their answers.
The location of forms are completely up to you, but there are a few options that work better than others. Use pop up forms that float over your site to capture attention of users who spend a good amount of time on a page or appear to be ready to leave. Forms near informative content also have stronger chances of converting visitors. Subscription forms for mailing lists should be easy to locate and displayed prominently throughout the site. If you’re still unsure of where to add forms, experiment. Each website is different and will attract different crowds.
Keep in mind studies have shown that adding extra fields increase form abandonment rates. Be smart about what’s included and consider the necessity of each field.
4. Build Out Follow Up Workflows
Before you can establish any workflows, you need to understand what they are. Workflows are systems that automate a company’s operations to lower the amount of manual data processing and labor.
For example, if a site visitor fills out a contact form and spends time on a specific page, an email can be automatically sent the next day offering more information and additional ways to engage with your company.
It is important that you establish follow up workflows for various forms and events as they minimize room for errors while increasing your overall efficiency. Creating a set process for what to do when a new lead is converted is a crucial aspect of every business in today’s online world.
Further, workflows create maps for employees to improve communication, increase accountability and provide better customer service. Which can, in turn, generate more leads.
Workflows create maps for employees to improve communication, increase accountability and provide better customer service. Click To TweetOptimize & Audit Website
When you’re using your website to create conversions or leads, every page should contribute to that goal. You should always be pushing people towards your form, landing page, or whatever you want them to interact with.
This is accomplished through careful web design. If you’re relying on users interacting with a form or phone number, include it, or at the very least a prominent link leading to it, on every page. This can be as simple as a “Contact Us” link in your footer — just make sure users can clearly find it and easily get to it, no matter where they are.
Also keep in mind site hierarchy and link chains. By strategically linking to internal pages, you can ensure that people end up exactly where you want them — your pricing page, a certain blog post, or a form.
Ensure that your site is mobile-friendly, but be wary with how you apply responsiveness. If your footer with important contact links or the banner advertising your ebook disappears on mobile devices, that’s obviously bad. Ensure that your lead generators appear on every screen size.
Authenticity and Inbound Content Audit
A big part of generating leads is convincing people that you’re authentic. You can make yourself look more genuine with unique, custom-made web design (avoid using the default WordPress themes), designing a logo for your business, uploading photos of you and your team, and including testimonials.
When users trust you, they’re more likely to engage. Use Google Analytics to review frequently visited pages and find information such as how long visitors stayed on your website, click through rates and the number of pages they accessed before leaving. This will highlight key page locations that may require more work than others. Continuing to revisit website performance will increase organizational and business growth and boost your overall website conversion rate.
Position Tracking and Organic Search Traffic
Having your website rank well in search engines does not happen overnight — it takes time. Google uses numerous data points to rank content in search results, but there are a few website optimization strategies that can create the best lead generation landing pages and elevate your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).
The first thing you should do is track your keywords. You can use Google Search Console to track what search queries your website pages are showing up for in search results too. This will provide you with the average position your content is showing in search result pages.
You can take this a step further and join a keyword tracking tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to monitor keyword rankings and create landing pages that convert. Continuing to review keyword performance and organic search traffic will provide insights into how to reach conversion rate optimization and make a lead generating website.
Nurture Your Leads to Create Conversions
A lead is only the first step towards making a curious user into a customer — if you don’t nurture your leads, nothing will come of all your efforts.
Once someone fills out a form or messages you on live chat, they’re already somewhat interested. At this point, they just need a little convincing you’re the provider they need. Get back to them promptly and prove that your business has what they want.
Don’t spam their inbox every day, but follow up if they go silent. Be engaging, but not annoying. Send a personalized email as soon as possible, while still giving them room to breathe.
Marketing campaigns use email automation workflows everywhere. They have proven their worth time and time again. Nurture the leads your website generates and you’ll be creating conversions in no time.
Lastly, make sure you have something to give back. People will be much more interested if you’re offering them resources like ebooks, whitepapers, and informative blog posts. Use these tools as leverage when you’re reaching out.
Create Better Leads
The key takeaway here is to always offer a clear way to interact with your audience — always be engaging and within reach. Once you have someone’s contact information and a conversation started, you’re already halfway to a conversion.
Add a form to your website, whether it’s for simply contacting you with a question or signing up to your newsletter. Implement live chat so you can speak to users quickly and directly. Encourage visitors to reach out on social media. Follow up engagements with an email or other fitting form of communication to show extended interest in them.
A final thought: Don’t forget about A/B testing. Always test your site, landing pages, and calls to action to help learn what’s really driving conversions. An A/B test can be as simple as modified wording on a CTA or a differently colored button. Things aren’t always set-and-forget, you will want to test things multiple times over the course of your campaigns.
Optimizing your site’s functionality and discoverability are the major steps to creating a lead generating website. From SEO to marketing automation and nurturing operations, you will give yourself the tools needed to bring in the quality leads your company needs to sustain and grow.