Every business needs to be able to generate a constant stream of visitors to their website. But visitors on their own aren’t enough. To convert visitors into leads - and then into sales - you need data.

Your potential customers expect you to have more up your sleeve than a simple brochure website. They want to be able to educate themselves about your product or service. They want interactivity. They also want a customer experience that is consistent across your website, email marketing, and social media platforms.

When considering their lead generations strategies, B2B marketers need to understand how to create a customer-focused lead generation website. Using content strategy and marketing automation, your website creates points of interaction throughout the customer journey that enable lead capture, nurturing, and scoring.

If you currently looking at a website that doesn't perform, don't worry. We're going to look at the steps you can take to improve your conversion rates and turn your site into a full-on lead-generating machine.

Focus on Your Customer

Creating a lead generation site doesn’t have to be difficult and you don’t have to do it overnight. If a full website redesign isn't on the cards at the moment, you can start with some small steps to improve your results. You can then work up to more advanced changes over time.

Before you start, however, go back to basics and look at three things:

1) Know Your Ideal Customer

While it is your website, you’re building it for your audience. If you want to create a website that connects with your ideal customer and nurtures interest in your products, you need to know your target audience inside and out.

If you haven’t already done it, research your target market and create buyer personas. Creating your lead generation website before you’ve done this step is putting the cart before the horse. If you have already defined your audience, review and refresh your knowledge. Reach out to business development, sales, and customer service to create a cross-departmental working group. They're in direct contact with your customers so their input is vital.

When people search for companies like yours they are looking for an answer to a question. Take time to really understand the question that your site is answering. Then build the experience around delivering the best possible answer in the best possible way.

2) Define 'Lead'

Improving your website and angling it to capture more leads works better if you know what your end goal is. While it’s good to know your income and profit goals, and any other results you want to achieve, the first question to ask is 'What do you mean by a lead?'

Some people on your team might consider a lead to be someone who interacts a lot on social media or someone who browses the website frequently. Others might only consider someone a lead if they sign up for a lead magnet or even request a demo.

Does the marketing team's idea of lead tally up with what the sales team would consider a lead? At what point does a 'marketing qualified lead' become a 'sales qualified lead'?

If you have clear and agreed definitions, you’ll have an easier time planning and executing the changes you need to make.

3) Design Your Customer Journey

Once you have your buyer personas and your definition of a lead, you need to understand your customer journey.

What roles does your website play in your buyer's journey? What jobs do they need to do and how does your website help them achieve those aims?

Your website will need to offer touchpoints at each stage of the journey. Create at least one conversion point for every stage of your funnel initially. You can add more later, but at least one for the top of the funnel, middle of your funnel, and bottom of your funnel is vital.

Converting your Brochure Website to a Lead Gen Website

Optimise Your Site

Hopefully, you already have a well-branded site that’s clear, uncluttered, and easy to navigate. If not, there’s some work to do here, before you can move on.

Your website should also offer a brand experience that is consistent with your other platforms to create a sense of familiarity and trust. It should be possible to look at any social media post or page and your website and immediately know that it’s the same company.

Ensure that your site is fast loading and easy to use. Clear navigation is important for both your SEO performance and for a good customer experience. Steve Jobs had a famous three-click design rule, and it's a great standard to design by. If your customers have to dig around on your website to find the information they need, they're going to go elsewhere.

Fixed navigation makes it easy to go back to the home page and to find other pages on your site. You should also include your most important call to action in the top right-hand corner of your navigation menu. Your visitors enter your website a different points, not necessarily the home page. They might find an older blog post of yours through search, or land on a product page from an advert. If there’s a call to action at the top of every page, they’ve always got that extra step to take towards you, no matter where they land.

Create Conversion Points

In addition to providing a conversion point in your navigation, add a conversion point to every single page of your website. However, you need to balance the need to provide your potential customers with plenty of opportunities to enter your sales funnel. Too many calls to action on a single page creates confusion and reduces your ability to convert.

Instead, use your understanding of the customer journey and be deliberate about where each conversion point should go. Use this information to decide what role each page of your site plays and design your calls to action accordingly.

For example, blog posts are more likely to be top-of-the-funnel points of entry. These are ideal places to ask someone to fill out a lead capture form to download a related lead magnet, or sign up to your mailing list to stay up to date via a newsletter or blog digest.

Sales pages, on the other hand, are the prime real estate for bottom-of-funnel calls to action designed for people who are in the market to buy. These might be people who have responded to an advert targeted to transactional keywords, or a lead you have been nurturing who clicked through from a targeted email.

Either way, the content of the page indicates they are more likely to respond to the offer of a demo or even to buy on the spot. You can also provide a chance to get more information for middle-of-the-funnel visitors on your sales page.

Craft Your Calls to Action

As we've seen, conversion points need to match where the customer is in their buying journey. It's also important that you pay attention to your calls to action. Make sure that this micro-messaging throughout your site is optimised to both sell your offer and tells your visitor what to expect.

For example, a CTA, such as Contact Us, is vague. It doesn’t tell the customer why they should contact you or what they’ll get if they do. A call to action such as Book a Demo or Add to Cart shows your customer exactly what they’ll get if they go ahead.

Add Interactive Elements

Use interactive elements, such as cost calculators and appointment booking forms. These sort of forms can do more than just ask for your visitor’s name and address. You can add multiple-choice options, branching logic, rating scales, and more. They can help your visitor to educate themselves about their problem, your product, and guide them to the right department. You can also connect your form to your analytics and CRM so you get a good picture of who is visiting your website and why.

However, make it easy on your audience. If you want to know everything about your visitor in one shot, you're going to put them off. Judge how much information is appropriate for each stage of the process. Perhaps you need more than just a name and email address for access to a valuable tool or report. But maybe you don't need them to fill out a long questionnaire about themselves, their company, and employees in order to book a demo.

Yes, you want to collect good data that allows you to get to know your customers, but you need to balance that with usability. You're asking for their information as well as their permission to stay in touch, so assume you're going to have more than one chance to develop the relationship and get the information you need.

Refining your Lead Generation Website for Better Results

If you’ve already got the basics above in place, how can you refine your lead generation website and bring in even more qualified leads?

Create SEO-focused Content for High-quality Traffic

Your site needs to act as a beacon, attracting exactly the right people by providing the information they need to answer their questions.

As such, your website content needs walk a tightrope. It has to be optimised for search, educational and information for your customers, and designed to promote your expertise. It needs to filter out people who are the wrong fit, connect with the right people, and help them understand that you have the solutions they need.

Again, start with the needs of your customer at every stage of the buying journey.

Blog posts demonstrate your expertise. They also encourage new visitors to stay on your site and learn more about you.

Lead magnets should offer demonstrable value so that your middle-of-the-funnel visitors will be convinced to give you their details.

You also need top-notch content on your sales and landing pages too, to convince people to take that final step and either get in touch or buy.

Create evergreen valuable content that makes people want to sign up for your newsletter or download your lead magnet. Look at the latest trends and news stories to see if you can tie your content into anything that’s newsworthy.

Don’t just stick to written content, though. Video can be extremely powerful for persuading visitors if done well. Wyzowl found that 84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. They also found that 94% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.

Ensure that your content is fully optimised for SEO, with the right keywords and key phrases. Include your focus keyword or phrase in at least the title, headings, meta description, and first paragraph. In addition, make sure that your copy is littered with related keywords that help Google (and other search engines) see that your content is comprehensive and authoritative.

With optimised content that’s designed for your target audience, you will not only drive more traffic but more qualified traffic.

Build Dedicated Landing Pages for Unique Content Offers

When visitors get to the home page of your site or your blog, they'll have options for what to do next. They can look at other pages, read more blogs, and browse your store if you have one. On most pages of your website, there are other links and places to go.

With a dedicated landing page, however, you focus their attention on a single offer. There are no other distractions. They only have one option: to give you their contact details or to walk away.

That tight focus makes it more likely that they will to be persuaded and convert. To increase your chances even further, focus on the quality of your creative and copy throughout the experience. Investing in professional copywriters and designers here can make all the difference. Make sure that everything, from the marketing campaign that brings them in to the micro-messaging on forms and buttons, flows to an irresistible conversion point.

Offer Content Upgrades

You can make your blog posts even more valuable by adding a content upgrade with a sign-up form to every single piece over time. The idea is to provide something that relates to the content your visitor has just read in exchange for the reader's contact information.

Content upgrades don’t have to be long and complicated. This isn't the place for an in-depth piece of research or a webinar. Sometimes a simple checklist in the right place will do the job. If you’ve written a post about content marketing, for example, you might provide a simple content upgrade that shows your visitor how to generate content ideas.

Obviously, the more of these you have, the more chances you have of getting a visitor’s details.

Add Live Chat

Live chat is an excellent way to get your visitor’s attention. You can answer any questions they may have on the spot. You can also automatically direct them to more information on your site or offer to send them more details.

Live chat can be used to overcome buying objections and, of course, validate your visitor as a qualified lead.

Live chat is interactive, it’s informative and genuinely helpful. This is exactly what your website needs to be to attract and keep your audience.

Make Sure You're Tracking Your Visitors

There’s no point in doing all this work if you’re not tracking your results and capture your users' data.

Track your visitors’ movements around your website. Are they following the conversion path you've laid out?
Keep an eye on which pieces of content are getting the most reads.
Look at your conversions and see which CTAs, lead magnets, and forms have the most sign-ups.
Keep an eye on your bounce rate and where you might be losing visitors.
Track how many quality leads you are generating.

Test, Test, and Test Again

Even the size and colour of your buy buttons can make a difference, so test everything. Enter into it in the spirit of experimentation. Try different headlines and different CTAs. Compare lead magnets, and look at your most popular content.

Find out what’s not working, so you can adapt.

If you’re not testing, you can’t focus your efforts on the things that really bring you results.

What is the Gold Standard for a Lead Generation Website?

We've looked at a lot of things you can do to optimise your website for lead generation. However, you can maximise your results by investing in an integrated marketing automation platform.

Here are some of the features you can expect in an all-in-one marketing platform:

Automate your email marketing and social posting
Create high-converting landing pages.
Incorporate chatbots.
Keep track of your customer data, including their interactions with you.
Manage your pipeline.
Life-of-the-lead tracking, and a host of other features.

Marketing automation allows you to track your customer interactions across all channels and integrate your data for a 360 degree view of your leads. Using this technology, you can build personalised landing pages and emails with higher conversion rates using dynamic content. A good platform will also give you progressive profiling for lead capture forms, email workflows triggered by behaviours, and automated lead scoring to prioritise your resources.

This saves you time and effort and gives you better analytics and reports. Your website will be fully optimised for lead generation.

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At 1827 Marketing, we consider that all interactions are part of the customer experience. While website changes might be motivated by a business need, they are best approached by putting the customer first. This can be achieved by understanding your ideal customer and the customer journey. It is also important to understand the questions your buyers need to answer along the way.

With quality content to educate your customers and a clear conversion path, you can have a website that draws the visitor through the buying journey and produces quality leads.

We are also Gold partners of SharpSpring and work with them to provide our clients with quality marketing automation solutions that bring excellent results. With the right platform, you can really take your lead generation to the next level.

If you’d like to find out how the right platform, combined with excellent strategy, can take your lead generation to the next level, get in touch for an exploratory call or a demo.

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Building a Lead Generation Website that Consistently Brings in Quality Leads