How to Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine
As a business owner with a limited marketing budget, you need to implement strategies that will result in higher return on investment (ROI). You can do this by identifying the goals you wish to achieve with your website and the challenges you are likely to come across while working towards your goals.
Goals and Challenges
Identify and set realistic marketing and sales goals. It is only through setting goals that you can define the path to take. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself when setting your goals:
- What are your company’s lead generation goals?
- Which target market do you need to focus on and why?
- What solution or benefits are you offering your market?
- Which lead generation methods will be effective for your company?
- Can you execute inbound marketing activities on your own or will you have to hire a marketing agency?
- What is your budget for the lead generation exercise?
Knowing your target audience and how to reach them will make it easy for you to decide which inbound marketing strategies to use, be it social media, email marketing, blogging or a combination of strategies.
Another challenge you may face when creating your marketing goals is cost. You may not have enough money to hire a marketing firm. In this case, you may have to do everything in-house.
You must always keep track of your competitors and ensure that you are one step ahead of them. You can use your competitor’s marketing plans and tweak them to your own advantage.
How to Generate More Leads With Your Website
The number one reason for any business to exist, whether physically or digitally, is to generate as many qualified leads as possible to increase sales. Generating leads on your website is all about offering a solution to the right target market. You therefore need to research the needs of your market, where they look for your solution online and know what keywords they use to search for it.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There are two type of SEO; on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization includes all the activities you do to your website to make it rank well on search engine results. Off-page optimization refers to natural and paid methods that can affect your website’s visibility on search engines.
Good and natural SEO which will make your site rank highly and generate leads include:
- Keywords: Pick the right keywords, using them in titles and heading tags and using them naturally. You can also use latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords to boost the relevance of your website in your industry.
- Content: Write compelling and high quality content. Update the content regularly.
- Tags: Update your page titles, alt tags and other descriptions to be relevant.
- Backlinks: Build backlinks naturally and from related websites.
2. Blogging
Write content on topics that are relevant to your industry and target customers. The content should resonate well with your audience. You should also optimize your blog content with your target keywords. Blogging is a great way to generate leads for a long time. According to Hubspot, companies that blog 15 times or more per month get 5 times more traffic than those that don’t.
3. Have a Professional Website Design
Your website design should be professional and represent your brand and personality. The new design should be implemented with a conversion strategy. In case you have hired a marketing firm, let them know what goals you hope to achieve with your website, where more attention is needed and what action you need leads to take once they land on the homepage.
4. Have a Compelling Offer
The offers you provide should be targeted at the needs of the leads at the different levels in the sales funnel. To see more about the sales funnel, check out this blog post (link)
5. Call to Action (CTA)
A call to action is the final stage of your marketing cycle. Let your leads know that if they do not act now, they will miss a great opportunity that may never come again. Great CTAs should have a promise and a definite action. Tell the prospect what to do to get what you are promising, be it a free eBook, video series, access to a webinar, etc.
6.Landing Pages
Landing pages are dedicated pages on your website with email capture forms where you direct traffic to get their contact information. The landing pages give prospects specific information about what you are offering. The visitors to the landing pages should be prompted to provide their contact information (usually the email address) to get something in return.