A website that generates leads. Easy enough, right? Not necessarily. How does a website that is generating leads compare to a website that is NOT generating leads? That is the more important question. Knowing what the goals of a lead-generating website are, and how to build one, is vital to achieving business growth in today’s corporate world.
First, let’s more precisely define what is a lead-generating website. A lead-generating website is built with the right design, content, offers, and calls-to-action to clearly guide visitors to take the desired action based on where they are in their buying journey. The action desired can be anything from signing up for a newsletter, requesting a consultation, making a purchase, or downloading a free e-book.
All of that sounds easy enough, but it has to be done in the right way and constantly adjusted to maximize leads that are high-quality from the right buyer personas.
To achieve a successful lead generation website, start with an intuitive website design. With your buyer personas in mind, consider how they categorize your product or service. Building your site so they can find what they are looking for easily and quickly can ensure your viewers remain on your page. A website has to load fast and look and function well no matter what device is used. With the right usage of fonts, whitespace, colors, images, and video you will communicate your value proposition easily, building trust with your site visitors. (To accomplish this feat, a UX designer or a lead generation-focused marketing agency can help you keep up with the latest web design trends.)
Design the right content offers to engage your clients by providing them with useful information or tools, in exchange for their contact information. If you’re selling mortgages, a mortgage calculator could be of use to your client. If you’re an interior designer, maybe a longer design guide is appropriate. Or if you’re in the business of growing businesses, a case study on past successes would be beneficial. Whatever your offer is, make sure it is for the right buyer persona and will be of value enough to encourage them to provide their contact information.
Call-to-actions should be on every page. In fact, there should be two on every page. With a primary CTA above the fold, you give a quick option to someone who already knows what action they want to take. This main offer should be the action you want them to make the most. And with a more narrowly focused offer further down the page, you may convert someone earlier in the buyer journey, so you can nurture them as a lead.
Choose your CTAs strategically based on the buyer persona who is likely to be engaging with the content on that page. Also, follow our guide to create knock-out CTAs and convince visitors to convert.
Create a simple landing page for every offer, making it perfectly clear why the person is opting in. Landing pages are simply a place for your form to exist, where nothing else is distracting the prospect, but they’ll know what they are getting. This page is vital to obtaining the lead after they have clicked the CTA.
A form can make or break the number of leads your site generates. Too long, fewer submissions. Too short, too many unqualified submissions.
When creating your forms, ask yourself what the bare minimum information you need to continue to nurture this lead is. Then ask yourself, what is the bare minimum you need to qualify this lead.
Choosing a slightly longer form and getting fewer, more-qualified leads might be the right choice for you. Additionally, we recommend your forms be different depending on what stage in the buyer's journey you are targeting with that offer. A person in the awareness stage should be required to provide less information, while a person in the decision stage really needs to be qualified.
In addition to the main pages of your website, a successful website that generates leads also features a blog. Blogs are the best way to continuously add content to your website for casting the widest net possible in an effort to catch your buyer personas when they are searching online. Not only should your blog provide useful content that your buyer persona is in search of, but it should also be generating leads with two essential elements.
Read How to Write for a B2B Blog for the top tips in creating a blog that gets the job done.
A great lead-generating website should have a marketing automation system for collecting the data from the forms submitted in a single location, so you can nurture those leads. It also has to be able to track traffic, so you always know what initiatives drove that user to your website. With a variety of inbound promotion tools such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and listings on a hundred different websites, informing future marketing campaigns relies heavily on knowing where exactly what sources sent the converting visitors.
The best lead-generating websites certainly include more components than what we have outlined here. That being said, the fundamental requirements of a lead-generating website have been outlined above, so you can get started on the right track. After you’ve built a website with the goal of converting visitors into leads, you can begin the continuous process of testing and tweaking to further increase your lead generation numbers.
This blog was originally published on April 22, 2018 and updated on March 22, 2021 for accuracy.