7 SECRETS TO TRANSFORM YOUR WEBSITE INTO A LEAD GENERATION MACHINE

If you want to generate more leads from your marketing and sales efforts, your website is the perfect place to start. A website is a brand’s most valuable sales and marketing asset, yet so few marketers truly leverage its lead generation potential.

Many marketers find themselves overwhelmed and unsure where to start. The good news is that transforming your website into a lead generation powerhouse usually doesn’t require a total overhaul or rebuild, which can drain substantial time and resources. Rather, most websites really only need a series of strategic tweaks in order to successfully transition from a stale online brochure to a repeatable and scalable lead generation machine.

Here are seven secrets to get started transforming your website into a lead generation machine.

 1. Add a CTA Button to Your Home Page

 For almost all business websites, the top-trafficked page is the website home page. This is valuable digital marketing real estate. To increase its lead generation potential, try simply adding a call-to-action (CTA) button or banner that informs website visitors what to do next.

You might tell them to visit your blog, download an offer, visit a product page to learn more, or even to schedule a call with your sales team. Create a CTA around whatever next step that you want a visitor to take. Don’t assume that your website visitors will naturally make their way around your website. Instead, just provide simple, helpful direction.

2. Add Conversion Points for Leads at All Stages

In an ideal world, all leads would be sales-qualified and ready to buy now. But, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of your target audience will not be ready to talk to sales when they reach your website. So, give your audience something that they are ready for. Start by identifying what their buyer journey looks like - what types of questions do they seek to answer, what kinds of problems do they look to solve - before they want to talk to a salesperson?

By mapping out the questions your prospects ask and the problems that they face, you will identify opportunities for content that your organization can create in order to answer those questions or solve those problems. Create these assets in different formats to accommodate content consumption preferences - experiment with checklists, whitepapers, webinars, infographics, ebooks and more.

Once you’ve created your new content that aligns with your prospects’ buyer’s journeys, create CTA buttons to promote it, and place those CTAs contextually throughout your website.

3. Add a “Gate” to Existing Content Assets

Many companies already have great content developed and available on their websites. To maximize the lead generation potential of these assets, try putting each piece of content behind a “gate” - that is, a landing page with a form. Use the landing page to promote your content and describe the value the visitor will receive by downloading the piece.

Remember to follow landing page best practices when building your assets - use minimal contact fields, like first name, last name and email address, to maximize your conversion rate, and remove the visitor’s navigation until they submit the form to keep them focused.

4. Add Validation

Adding website elements that establish your brand’s credibility is a great way to improve the lead generation performance of your website. By including examples of companies you’ve worked with and compelling testimonials of your products and services, visitors will feel informed and validated in their decision-making process.

Written testimonials from happy clients are a good addition to any website. Video testimonials from happy clients are even better. Be sure to include your advocate’s name, title and headshot when you can. If privacy rules prohibit you from naming specific individuals or companies, you can use a generic format.

5. Add Marketing Automation

Your website is the most important tool in your marketing arsenal. Your next most important tool for lead generation is marketing automation. One of the primary goals of your business’s website should be to get a conversation started. Your website should not be expected to communicate every single detail around your brand and your products and services.

With the power of marketing automation behind your website, you can automate responses, segment leads, score prospects, prioritize opportunities, identify new prospects and more.

6. Add A/B Testing

One of the greatest advantages to being a marketer today is our ability to work like scientists, continuously developing, testing and refining hypotheses, with our experiments all informed by analytics updated in real-time. A/B testing is a great way and easy way to continuously improve the lead generation potential of your website.

A/B testing, sometimes known as split testing, means comparing two versions of a website page in order to see which version performs better. To set up an A/B test, you change one element of a website page, and begin showing both versions to your website visitors over the same time period. The version that has a better conversion rate wins.

Resist the temptation to change more than one on-page element at a time! Running an A/B test with multiple variables will muddy the results.

7. Add Personalized Content

Using marketing automation or other technology, it is relatively easy today for marketers to structure a website in a way so that it shows specific, personalized content to certain sets of visitors. For example, you may want to show a different message to first-time website visitors than you do to return visitors. Or, you may want to promote a certain content offer to those in the banking industry, while contacts from the manufacturing industry should see something else.

You can also designate content to be shown depending on things like the source of the person’s website visit or what type of device the person is using to access your site. For example, you might want to elevate your social media sharing buttons for visitors who enter your site via Facebook or Twitter. Or, you may want to remove excess copy when visitors access your website via a smartphone instead of on a desktop. The possibilities are endless and should be catered to align with your overall marketing strategy and goals.

Interested in learning more about digital lead generation strategies for modern marketing teams? Register now for our live educational webinar, Attract, Convert and Close More Customers with Marketing Automation, coming up on Wednesday, June 6, 2018, at 2:00 pm EDT. Click the button below to register now.