Improvements at the top of the sales funnel are usually the best drivers of company growth. And if you own a lead generation site, odds are you’re relying on it for a lot of your leads at the top of the funnel.
We’re going to look at a couple of ways you can capture more leads with your website, following Elliot Schmukler’s three drivers of growth: increasing exposure, decreasing friction, and increasing benefits.
1. Increasing exposure
The more people who see your stuff, the more people who are going to turn into leads, and the more of those leads are going to turn into sales. That’s the idea behind increasing your website exposure. And the metric we usually use to measure this is web traffic.
So the real question is: how do you increase your web traffic?
Advertise
It’s not very flashy, but it gets the job done. Paid search (PPC) advertising for your critical keywords is one option. Another option is display ads, which includes things like banner ads on websites. If your product exists in a niche, it might be worth contacting some of the major publications within that niche.
Usually, they have websites, and usually those sites have ads. It just might not necessarily be sold through someone like Google.
Improve your SEO
The native version of paid search advertising. There are
lots of things you can do to improve your position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) that won’t necessarily cost you a dime. Your first step is probably running your site through something like
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, to see where your SEO might be going wrong.
You can also focus on improving your SEO by:
- Focusing more on certain keywords
- Producing more relevant content
- Fully using meta tags
- Working to improve your backlinks
While SEO is generally slower and more time consuming than paid search advertising, it has the added benefit that you’re going to get better leads with higher conversions. It might be worth trying both and seeing which one works better.
Guest write/produce/blog
Get your own stuff out there on other websites. It’ll expose you to a new audience, which is great. It will also provide you with some top quality backlinks, which is great for your SEO as well. Finally, it opens to doors to getting other writers/bloggers to guest post for you. They’ll in turn then promote that fact, driving yet more traffic to your site.
Social media
And finally, the exposure super-drug, social media. The least expensive way to get people to go to your site is to engage with them on social media. Here are a few tips:
- Post on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a publishing function and is a key platform for professional content. You should be producing regularly for it
- Answer questions on Quora
- Link all your blog posts to your social media accounts
- Engage with other people in your industry via social media
- Engage with your customers and leads via social media
- Advertise on social media
2. Decrease friction
In the first part, we covered getting people to your site. Now we’re going to look at one of the two ways you can turn a visitor into a lead – by making it easier for them.
Making your site easier for your visitors is partially
about your user experience design and partially about your copywriting.
UX Design
The objective of any lead generation site is to generate leads. So, all of your UX decisions should focus on the process of becoming a lead, and then making that process easier.
One way to do this is to
evaluate roadblocks that your visitors might encounter.
For example, is it clear what you want them to do?
If your CTA is too small, they might not see it. Once they click your CTA, do they know what’s going to happen next? Are the able to find all the information that they might want? Is your font legible?
Each of these micro-interactions is going to make your visitors’ lives easier and thus, more likely to progress to becoming a lead.
Copywriting
Once you’ve made it easy for your visitors to convert physically,
you need to address your copywriting. Copywriting is
packed with opportunities to increase conversions. And a little bit of A/B testing will help you tweak and tailor your pages endlessly.
But before you start that, you need to get the broad stroke copywriting in place. So first, make sure it’s really clear. Clear communication is going to both reassure your visitor and it’s going to make it easy to understand your product. Confused people don’t do anything. So make your copywriting simple.
Another thing you can do is focus on headlines and headings. These are what are going to get read most often and are really the start on the visitor/lead conversion. Spend a little extra time getting them into tip top shape.
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3. Increasing benefits
The second way that you can get more visitors to sign on as leads is to give them more stuff. When you give people more stuff, they stick around. That much is clear. And yet in internet marketing, increasing the benefits is always the last thing to be talked about. But it works.
Think about infomercials for a second. Yes, they’re cheesy and formulaic. But the thing is,
they wouldn’t be formulaic unless that formula actually worked.
For infomercials at least, increasing benefits is a staple. The classic
‘but wait there’s more!’ does exactly that.
So how do you use it on your website?
One option (if it’s applicable) is offer website or even webpage-specific discounts. Retailers with both actual store and ecommerce stores tend to do this because their margins are higher online than in-store. For example, Club Monaco might offer 20% off if you buy online.
Another option for lead generation sites is to improve the quality of your content. Instead of just offering blog posts and email newsletters, do a webinar. Other high-value content includes:
- Whiteboard videos – spending 20 minutes talking through a complicated problem
- Whitepapers
- Long-form guides
- Ebooks
Since you’re offering more value, you increase the benefit of someone actually converting from a visitor to a lead.
Conclusion
Getting more leads can be boiled down to three things: more exposure, less friction, and more benefits. Fortunately, these objectives are not hard to achieve. But they can be time consuming.
Exposure via search engine rankings or social media takes time to have an effect. UX design and copywriting both require constant tweaking and testing. The time it takes to produce high quality special content like videos can feel like a lifetime. But that’s how it’s done.
There’s no magic trick into fooling people to coming to your site and converting into leads. There’s only a lot of constant hard work. Are you up for it?
