If you’re serious about growing your business, you’ll need to consistently increase your leads over time. Without prioritizing effective lead generation in your marketing strategy, it will be challenging for your sales team to achieve your desired business growth.
Fortunately, there are a variety of actions you can take to increase the leads and revenue generated by your website. The following tips will help you optimize your website, making it the powerful lead generation tool you need.
Perform a Conversion Audit
Many websites have a beautiful, appealing design, but aren’t set up to maximize conversions. This makes it more challenging to leverage your website as an effective lead generation tool. The first step you should take is to perform a conversion audit to identify any areas in which your website isn’t effectively implementing lead generation elements and tactics.
A conversion audit involves performing a comprehensive assessment of the customer journey on your website. As part of this process, you’ll compile data that will help you to identify any technical or UX issues which may be negatively impacting your website’s conversion rate. Once you’ve compiled this data, you should compare your website’s journey with UX best practices and evaluate top performing websites in your industry to better understand the tactics you should implement. After completing this audit, you should have a list of specific improvements you can make to your website in order to convert more leads.
Keep in mind that the audit itself won’t help increase your conversion rate. It’s simply the starting point that will generate the action items your team must take. Once you implement the changes identified during your conversion audit, your website should deliver a more compelling customer journey that will optimize your conversion rate.
Track User Activity on Your Website
Understanding how visitors engage with your website is an important way to improve conversions. You can install a heat map tool such as Crazy Egg that will provide robust data regarding where visitors are clicking on the page (and where they’re not clicking), and how far down the page your visitors are scrolling.
This information will help you understand:
- Where users are focusing their attention, allowing you to remove any elements that may be providing a poor experience or distracting visitors from taking your desired action
- Whether your conversion elements and calls to action (CTAs) are placed properly, or if they’re too low on the page and not being seen by a large number of visitors who may not scroll down that far
- Which videos, links, CTAs and other elements on your page are driving user engagement and which ones are being ignored
This data provides a powerful tool to help you improve lead conversions and drive revenue. You can also use a heat map tool to test different locations for your important CTAs and conversion elements to see which areas on the page generate the most clicks and views. Instead of assuming your carefully crafted conversion element is placed in the best spot, you’ll have hard data telling you whether or not it is, as well as insights into locations on the page that might be more effective.
Leverage Your Google Analytics Data to Inform Your Marketing Strategy
Google Analytics provides robust data that allows you to understand how your website is performing and what improvements can be made to optimize its performance. You can use your Google Analytics data to:
- Identify pages with a high bounce rate – This is typically an indication that a page may benefit from a rewrite to make it more engaging and informative.
- See which pages and blogs are viewed most frequently – This will allow you to focus your efforts on strategically placing CTAs and conversion elements on the pages which are being viewed the most, increasing the chances you’ll generate leads on these pages. You’ll also know which of your blogs are most popular and should receive extra promotion on social media to drive even more traffic to them.
- See how long visitors are spending on each page – Time spent on page is a strong indicator of user engagement. The longer someone spends on the page, the more engaged they are with the information on there. This information can help you understand which pages on your website are most engaging, providing a framework for how to restructure other pages to improve their engagement.
- Understand your keyword performance – You can see which of your target keywords are ranking well, and which pages are ranking for these keywords. This allows you to focus your efforts on improving these pages to convert more leads with the traffic they’re generating. In addition, knowing which keywords are performing poorly can be extremely valuable when developing your long-term content strategy, as it will help you identify topics and keywords that can improve your rankings.
- See which sources of traffic are generating the most conversions – If you know that most of your traffic generated by social media doesn’t convert as well as the traffic generated by your blog, you can shift resources from your social media campaign to write additional blog content that might be more effective at generating additional leads.
When you understand your Google Analytics data, you can be more strategic and effective in the ways you refine your website marketing campaign over time to ensure your web presence is as strong as possible and drives the revenue-generating leads your business needs to grow and thrive.
Display Trust Signals
Building trust with your audience is critical to your ability to drive more leads and eventually convert these leads into new revenue-generating customers. Displaying social proof on your website is one of the most effective ways to build this trust as people learn about your company.
Individuals who trust your business are much more likely to submit their contact information in exchange for additional content that can help them as they conduct their research. But more importantly, this trust will make these individuals much more likely to schedule a consultation or make a purchase.
Showcasing the following trust signals will help you build credibility in your business and demonstrate to your audience that you’re the most qualified company to address their needs:
- Testimonials from happy customers
- Accreditations from organizations such as the Better Business Bureau
- Awards and recognitions you’ve earned
These items send a powerful message to your audience and can significantly improve your ability to generate leads or close new business.
Install Live Chat or Use Chatbots to Move Website Visitors Down the Sales Funnel
Chat is an effective way to engage visitors on your website, provide them with important information they’re seeking and drive them further down the sales funnel. Whether you use a live chat service or install a chatbot, you can significantly improve your lead generation. In fact, over 50% of businesses that use AI-powered chatbots have reported generating higher quality leads as a result.
Using live chat and/or chatbots on your website can deliver a variety of benefits:
- Creates a better user experience and easier way for individuals to provide their information compared with contact forms
- Allows you to respond to leads faster by automating the process (businesses that respond to leads in less than five minutes are 100 times more likely to make a sale)
- Makes it easier to identify qualified leads, ensuring your sales team reaches out to the best potential leads first
Optimize Your Landing Pages
Having well optimized landing pages is a critical element to the success of your lead generation campaign. These pages tend to convert at a higher rate than other offers and ads associated with your marketing campaign. While the average conversion rate of a landing page is 2.35%, the top 10% of highest performing landing pages covert at a rate of 11.45% or higher. Therefore, if your landing pages aren’t converting at close to 10%, there is likely a lot you can do to improve their performance.
Taking the time to optimize your landing pages can significantly improve your lead generation efforts. The following actions can help you get the most out of your landing pages:
- A/B test a variety of adjustments to your headline – This is the first item someone reads when they arrive on your landing page, and it’s one of the biggest factors impacting whether they continue viewing the rest of the page.
- Add a video to the page – Most people would rather watch a video than read content, and adding a video can make it much easier for people to understand your product or service. In addition, 76% of sales teams indicate videos significantly improve their ability to close deals with new customers.
- Remove any distractions from the page – Keep your landing page layout simple. Remove the navigation menu and any links to other pages on your website. Your landing page visitors should have only one option: to take your desired action.
- Revise the content on the page – Make sure your landing page content is short, eye catching and engaging. It should clearly explain what your product/service is and how the reader will benefit within a few seconds of visiting the page. Always focus on the benefits you provide instead of the features of your product/service.
- Clearly set expectations for your CTA – Make sure it’s clear to the reader what happens after they click on your CTA button or fill out the contact form.
Often, making a small change to your landing page can result in a significant increase in lead conversions. However, it’s important to test the changes you make to understand how they’re impacting your results. Extensive A/B testing is critical to ensuring your landing page adjustments are driving the additional leads you’re looking to achieve. When you know exactly which differences on your page make the biggest impact on your conversions, you can make sure all of your landing pages are optimized for greater success.
Offer Quality Gated Content
While some of your website visitors may be ready to make a decision right away, most people will still be earlier on in their research process. In order to turn these people into leads that will eventually become customers, you’ll need to move them along your sales funnel. Providing gated content is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this.
Gated content refers to a special piece of content you offer your website visitors in exchange for their contact information. Depending on the specific needs of your audience, this gated content can be delivered in a variety of formats, including:
- eBooks
- White papers
- Case studies
- Toolkits
- PDF downloads
- Checklists
- Cheat sheets
- Video series
- Webinars
Regardless of the format you choose for your gated content, it’s important to make sure it is high quality and delivers a great deal of value to the reader. Otherwise, these leads will be less interested in consuming additional content you send them down the road, and you risk having a large percentage of your leads unsubscribe from subsequent email nurturing campaigns.
The best way to deliver the value your readers need is to provide information that addresses their pain points and helps them solve their problems. By providing expertise that helps your reader in a meaningful way, you’ll start building trust and forming a relationship that can result in a lead becoming a customer.
The other key component to delivering value with your gated content is to focus on a quality presentation of the information. It should be visually appealing and contain videos, images, infographics and other types of multimedia content that provides a great user experience and enhances their understanding of the information.
Use Automation Tools to Nurture Your Leads
The items discussed above all relate to ways you can improve your lead generation. But in order to turn these leads into revenue, you must also be able to convert them into customers. On average, only 2% of sales are made during the first contact with a lead. Therefore, if you fail to follow up with your leads, you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential sales. For this reason, a strong lead nurture strategy is essential to achieving your desired revenue growth.
Email nurture campaigns are one of the most effective ways to drive your leads down your sales funnel. There are a variety of email automation platforms which will integrate with your contact forms to ensure every email you capture is automatically added to your list. In addition, you’ll be able to use these platforms to create a series of automated emails that are sent out to your leads on a regular basis.
These emails will continue building a relationship with your leads by keeping your business on top of their mind while providing them with additional educational content that can help them address their pain points. Once you’ve built this relationship, you can shift gears and send your leads emails that are more focused on the product/service you offer, and how it can help them achieve their goals.
Using automated lead nurture tools will ensure you follow up with all leads in a timely manner. They also make it easier for your marketing and sales teams to keep leads engaged, increasing the likelihood that they’ll move through every stage of your funnel and eventually become a customer.
Webolutions Can Help You Increase Website Leads and Grow Your Revenue
Optimizing your website to maximize the ROI on your lead generation efforts is a complex process that involves a variety of steps. It often can be very challenging to hit your website lead goals and achieve your desired revenue growth without the help of experts who have extensive experience performing the important tasks discussed above. At Webolutions, we have you covered.
Webolutions offers comprehensive strategic marketing services tailored to the unique needs of your business. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach allows you to grow your business smarter, faster and easier. As part of this approach, we take your team on a collaborative, expert led journey to identify what is special about your company. We also conduct extensive market research to identify what your competitors are doing and saying. Our team uses all of this information to establish your industry leading marketing positioning which will differentiate you from your competitors.
Based on your market positioning, our team will develop your key brand communication elements which will be leveraged throughout every phase of your marketing strategy. Your brand story will form the basis of your website messaging, helping you build trust with your audience and increase their engagement with your business.
At Webolutions, we utilize a data driven approach which enables us to determine which adjustments have the biggest impact on your lead generation and revenue growth. As we continue making these refinements over time, you’ll be able to experience the consistent growth necessary to achieve your goals.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. During this conversation, our expert lead generation consultants will discuss strategies that will help you capture more qualified leads and increase your sales.
