Your website is often the first experience a potential client has with your business. You have an opportunity to make an excellent first impression if you create a site geared toward offering solutions to your target audience’s pain points.
Once you get those who are a good match for what you offer to navigate to your page, your goal is to generate a lead. How do you get them to share their information and consider your product over all the other ones out there?
How Do I Turn My Website Into a Lead Generation Machine?
Internet Live Stats estimates there are more than 1.5 billion websites in the world, but not all are active all the time. Almost every industry has at least some competitors vying for attention from the same pool of potential customers.
Once people land on your page, you want to keep them there. Fortunately, there are several simple things you can do to ensure you generate more leads from those who do arrive on your page.
1. Know Your Target Audience
In order to generate leads, you have to know your target audience. It doesn’t do you much good to collect data on people who aren’t truly interested in what you have to offer. Start by figuring out the demographics and psychographics of your current customers.
Create a buyer person to represent your average shopper. With detailed information about your customer type in hand, you can easily customize your landing pages to meet their needs.
Source: https://www.art.com
Art.com understands their typical buyer is on a budget, so they start their landing page off with a huge headline about budget $49 abstracts. Although the site caters to many different buyer personas, they seem to have one main buyer they target their messages to, which works very well for a general home page.
2. Plan Your Sales Funnel Strategy
Take the time to map out the buyer’s journey on your website. If you want to generate more leads, you can’t leave anything to chance. Think through each touchpoint and if there’s any chance you might lose one of your users at any point.
You can generate more leads when you grab the attention of your site visitors and keep it until they share their data with you.
3. Offer Useful Tools
What pain points are your buyers experiencing that drives them to your site in the first place? If you can offer a tool that gives them a partial answer or helps them in some way, then you increase the chances they’ll share their email and contact info in exchange for using the feature.
Examples include calculators, idea generators and interactive maps.
Source: https://www.keckgroup.com/services/government-furniture
The Keck Group talks about ways to save money on high-quality furnishings for governments. They talk about how they get worn over time but can be refinished on a budget. They then offer a quote form so the user can share details and get a response on how much it might cost to repair the item.
4. Ask for Referrals
When your current customers check out, login or land on your site, ask them to tell others about what you offer. Make sharing on social media a one-click process. Start a rewards program and give them a perk for sending new customers your way.
Word-of-mouth leads are often much more likely to buy from you. They’ve already learned about your business from the person referring them. They know they want a similar product or service. Closing the sale may be much easier.
5. Use Pop-Ups
Whether you fall into the group of people who loathe pop-ups, or you appreciate their usefulness to get the message across, adding them to your site can help generate leads in a number of ways.
Use a pop-up to predict exit intent and throw out one final offer. Add one when people first land on your page to encourage them to share their email or sign up for a newsletter. Look for ways to offer something for lead generation, like a free guide, video series or other tool.
Source: https://heymaeve.com
Hey Maeve adds a pop-up on the left as you start to scroll down the page. They offer 10% off your first order just for sharing your email address. They also ask a question with a simple checkbox to learn a bit more about which audience segment you fit in.
6. Add Trust Factors
When people land on your website, they have no reason to trust you. Adding trust factors shows them they can share their information and reach out without fear of being spammed or scammed.
Some of the trust factors that are most effective include customer testimonials and reviews. Reach out to your top clients and ask them if they’d be willing to write a few words about why they buy from you. If you can feature a variety of testimonials and each focuses on a key point you want potential leads to know, you’ll have made a huge stride toward outpacing the competition.
Consider Your User
Lead generation tactics can vary widely from one company to the next. The key is to figure out your buyers’ pain points and offer a solution or potential solution so they see you know how to fix the problem.
Think about your typical customer. What would entice them to want to share their information and take the next step in the buyer’s journey? If you can put yourself in their shoes, it’s much more likely they’ll go from a browser to a lead and eventually a customer.
Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.
