In 2016, 89% of B2B marketers said lead generation was their topmost marketing goal (Content Marketing Institute). If it’s a priority to this large percentage of marketers, then it must be important for businesses.
To many, lead generation is simply having a call to action on their website. In other words, once they can scrabble some “sign up to our newsletter here” somewhere on their website, that is all there is to lead generation.
However, generating leads for your business through your website goes beyond just CTAs. Yes, CTAs play an important role in lead generation process, nevertheless, it’s not “the beginning and the end” of the process. Your entire website design has to be involved.
In this blog post, you will learn the crucial role of lead generation to your business and how you can optimize your website design for this purpose.
Why Lead Generation Matters?
According to Marketing Donut, 63% of consumers looking for information about your business will not convert until after 3 months. This is especially true for B2B businesses. So, what happens between the first contact with your business and the 3 months space?
A lead is simply a potential customer who is now reachable. That’s the simplest way to put it.
Imagine you run a business that provides content marketing services to B2Bs in Canada. Your potential customers are pretty much all the B2Bs in Canada. However, your leads are those who have or showed an interest in your content marketing service.
Lead generation is important because it makes conversion easier. Like the example above, while you’d still continue to put out promotional contents because you want more leads, you can focus more effort on your leads because you know for a fact that they are interested in your service.
Also, lead generation helps you save cost. Especially when the number of leads is high. Rather than investing in advertisement hoping it reaches and converts a customer, you can put in smaller resources and effort to convert the leads you already have.
We can go and on about the importance of lead generation. However, let’s look at some lead generation strategies for your website design.
How to Optimize your Web design for lead generation
This is databox homepage, a good example of lead generation in action. The site homepage is the first point of contact for the majority of the site visitors and it’s rightly used to generate leads for the business. This is an important lead generation strategy. Take advantage of any of your pages that get the most traffic and focus your lead generation effort on them for obvious reasons.
Having said that, there are some other lessons on lead generation using website design from databox homepage. We will discuss it alongside other strategies which include:
If you’re in a hurry:
The Details…
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SEO
It all begins with a search. As a matter of fact, 93% of all online activities start with a search. You might want to argue that SEO is not exactly part of website design. Well, that may be true to a small extent. Understanding that your buyers’ journey from being clueless about your business to when he clicks on “buy now” on your website begins on a search engine makes you question the authenticity of that claim.
Your potential customers to find you on search engine when they search about things related to you, your product or service. This is your first strategy for getting the right leads for your business.
Any individual searching about something online either wants the product immediately or wants to use it later in the future (3 months later?). The point is they have an interest and you should leverage on that by positioning yourself on search engine through various SEO techniques.
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User-friendly Interphase
The next thing to do after working on your SEO is making your website design user-friendly.
Many companies, in an attempt to be unique, end up creating a website that confuses their visitors. The visitors come to the website with prior knowledge of how a website works only to be faced with a completely different feel.
It’s okay to be unique, but keep your customers in mind while at it. There are several other options out there so customers would “bounce” an unfriendly site.
Here are some things to pay attention to for your website design to be user-friendly:
- Fast load speed
- Proper use of white space
- Strategically placed buttons
- High quality and optimized images
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Simple Conversion Path
While the process begins on a search engine, it goes far beyond search engines. As expected, different businesses will have unique conversion paths. Ensure your path is simple and seamless.
One of the things that set website visitors off is having too many text fields in your forms. Imagine you are trying to sign up to a website’s newsletter and you are required to enter your name, email address, phone number, date of birth, address, next of kin information and so on – just to sign up for a newsletter. If you are like most website visitors out there, then you are not signing up to that newsletter!
The fewer the text fields, the higher your conversion rate. Just get the basic information such as name and email address, the additional details can be gotten over the next couple of interactions with them.
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Add testimonials with real images
According to Simon Sinek in his book “Start With Why”, a testimonial is a manipulative marketing tool. Other manipulative marketing tools, he said, are discounts, promo offers, slashed prices among others.
He believes these tools are effective in getting customers to do a first-time purchase, but won’t get you loyal customers. The point here is they are effective in getting customers to carry out that action. And in this case, the action is becoming a lead. After they become leads, you now have the responsibility of converting them to customers and ultimately to loyalists.
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Include a Call to Action on every page
Yes, it’s true that most website users are turned off by a site that’s too “selly”. They don’t want you trying too much to get them to buy. The same customers would visit your website but be clueless about what to do next.
To avoid losing potential customers, endeavour to include a call to action on every page of your website. The copy or offer for each call to action can be different for variety sake. Just make sure it’s there in one way or another so you can capture your leads on every page of your website.
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Use a Lead Hook
Lead hooks are a very vital element in the effectiveness of your Call to Action (CTA). Consider this; as a prospective customer, millions of websites are vying for your attention. Think about all the times you’ve actually signed up to receive emails or offers from a brand…why did you sign up? Because they were offering something you’re interested in! So it’s not enough to add CTAs on every page on your website, you have to introduce VALUABLE lead hooks that a prospective customer would find irresistible.
Some examples of lead hooks include time bound discounts, ebooks, software or tools, gift cards and a host of other similar offers.
Conclusion
Leads are important to your business and should be a priority in your website design. However, what’s even more important is getting your leads to convert. And the most important would be getting them to be loyal customers.