These days, everyone has a website. In fact, more people have websites than brick-and-mortar stores. It can be easy to get caught up in going digital and forget that a website works the same way that a brick-and-mortar store does: it’s the first experience that prospects will have with your business, so you really want to take the time make sure it’s a good one! Bill Reed, Senior Digital and Interactive Strategist at Pardot, and Rachel Peters the UX Lead from Launch Interactive hosted a webinar on Optimizing Your Website for Lead Generation which gave these and other great tips on how to attract and qualify leads with your website.
Drawing Prospects In
We’ve all heard the old adage “If you build it they will come,” and while it might be true of baseball diamonds, it’s not the case for a website. Simply building your site is no guarantee that prospects will come and engage with it, and it won’t be a good source for lead generation if there are no visitors.
There are three keys to creating a website that will help you drive lead generation:
- Understand your audience
- Develop great content
- Create around your ideal buyer
Understand Your Audience
You’ll lose out on potential leads if you don’t focus on what your prospects are actually interested in, so understanding your audience starts with talking to your current clients. Find out what they liked about you as opposed to other businesses, and what made them choose to make a purchase from your business. The next step is to talk to your sales team. They communicate with your prospects every day, and they’ll have good insight into common questions and issues that prospects have and what they’re looking to get from a product or solution. Lastly, look at what your competition is doing. This may sound counterproductive, but there’s a reason prospects choose your competition too, and knowing what’s spurred their decision to buy from a competitor can help you identify any areas where you could offer more to your target audience.
Develop Great Content
Your website runs on great content. At a high level, the aim of content marketing is to give prospects access to the information that they’re looking for, so don’t create content just to create it. Aim to be helpful, a resource for your prospects – whether they buy from your business or not. That’s what will really resonate with your target audience.
Create Around Your Ideal Buyer
When you’re building your site, you’ll want to think about who it’s going to target. Developing buyer personas that identify the unique characteristics of your target audience will help you learn to narrow the focus of your website to help the prospects you want find you faster and more easily.
We can’t go much further without talking about SEO. Good SEO follows three key steps:
- Structure: Think through the path you want your users to follow and build your site so that it makes following that path intuitive.
- Mark-Up: Don’t ignore technical tags on your pages. Make them relevant.
- Develop Content: Create pages that directly answer common questions your prospects have.
Give Your Users What They Want
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than non-customer centric companies, so when it comes to lead generation, it’s important to remember that your leads, your customers – are people, and keep the focus on them. People make snap judgements – the first thing they want to know is what your company does. If someone can’t figure out what you do in a few seconds then they won’t stick around, so including simple, clear statements about what you do on your homepage will encourage prospects to engage for longer.
Set and Measure a Goal for Your Website
What do you want your website to accomplish? You don’t want to build a site without having a good idea in mind of what you want it to do. Once you have a goal set, you can use metrics to measure how successful you are.
Analytics will really help you develop your site by enabling you to turn your chosen KPIs to form into actionable insights. With analytics, you can base your decision-making on data. Find ways to connect your KPIs to your analytics platform to really identify ways to improve your site and capture more leads.
For more tips and tricks on what you can do to create a better user experience and attract more prospects, watch the full webinar presentation Optimizing Your Website for Lead Generation.
