How to Get More Leads From Your Website?

Once upon a time, generating leads boiled down to cold calling people off the yellow pages. Besides this method’s monotony and non-elegance, calling up potential customers was mostly ineffective and counterproductive.

Now, we do things a little bit differently. Of course, there are still companies that invest resources into cold calls in order to generate leads and expand their customer base. However, the majority of businesses in the previous decade used websites to generate leads. 

Given that there are many different ways to capture leads on your business website, in this article, we’re going to show you some of the most effective ones. Let’s start from the basics:

• According to B2B Marketing Community, 61% of marketers identify generating high-quality leads as their biggest challenge. 

Takeaway: it’s great to start with an estimate of how much you’re struggling with leads, but you also need to follow up with real action. Ask targeted questions on why capturing leads on your website is running into issues and what you can do about it. Also, compare how your website is performing compared to your other lead generation channels. What works where?

• According to Marketo’s research, a whopping 98% of your website visitors will leave no personal data whatsoever. 

Takeaway: use tools and services to identify all your visitors and generate leads. If your website is getting massive traffic, you might be missing out on huge opportunities if your conversion rate is really low.

• According to DM News, the most commonly used strategies for generating leads are email, event marketing and content marketing. 

Takeaway: all of these marketing channels can be powerful and effective if used well. However, to successfully generate quality leads, you need to have a holistic digital marketing strategy. Your website can be the primary lead generator which you can later supplement with other channels. Email is generally considered to be the glue between all of these strategies. 

So, now that we have seen some of the basic statistics behind lead generation, let’s look at specific examples of how you can increase your success.  These are some of the most commonly used methods you can utilize to maximize the number of leads you get from your website:

1) Content Marketing

According to research, blogging is the most commonly used strategy in content marketing. SEO Tribunal’s study has shown that 66% of businesses that regularly publish blogs generate more leads than those that don’t.

Blogging is also one of the cheapest and most effective ways to present your business to customers. Throughout your articles, you should address all different buyer personas, but also keep in mind the different stages of the customer journey they might be in. Remember, website content is usually the first contact a customer will have with your business. That’s why it’s important to offer high-quality content and offer content upgrades that will answer readers’ burning questions.

To make sure your website content is top-notch, you can partner up with writing experts who are experienced in content marketing. You can hire professional content marketers at Studicus (a writing service website) or GrabMyEssay (a platform where you can hire writers in any field). If you’re not an experienced writer, it’s always better to hire content marketers to do it for you, because that will not only save you time, but also has a great ROI in the long-term. 

Content = Trust

Potential customers need a certain amount of time to form trust towards a business, regardless of the customer journey stage, they are in. According to Forrester, 82% of customers view at least 5 pieces of content from a brand before purchasing. 

Make sure you craft high-quality content that will cover all these stages:

1) Awareness (when customers become aware of a problem)

2) Consideration (when customers start considering an array of options)

3) Decision (when customers make their final decision on whether or not they will purchase)

Content marketing really is the future of marketing communication. A vast majority of businesses (90%) use content as a key part of their lead generation marketing. Blogging in particular can be used by any business, even with a very low budget. To get it right and generate as many leads as possible, test out different content marketing strategies to provide your audience with exactly what they are looking for. According to Marketo, 93% of businesses say that content marketing generates more leads than any other marketing channel. 

2) User Experience Optimization

New technologies are rapidly advancing. Without adapting to those technologies, your lead generation strategy is doomed to become obsolete.  To make sure your business stays ahead of the curve, research big data management solutions and implement programmatic marketing to send out a personalized newsletter. Personalization and optimization of the individual user experience always increase the number of generated leads. Adobe says that marketers consider customer experience, personalization and big data to be the biggest game-changers in the next 5 years. 

When it comes to an email newsletter, using personalization as a UX optimization tool generates a 26% increase in opening rate, Campaign Monitor says. Email marketing tools like MailChimp have recognized this need some time ago and presented businesses with simple solutions for personalization and automation of email marketing campaigns. 

Another statistic showing how important user experience it comes from research by CMO. According to their surveys, over 90% of businesses will change their business partner after a single negative user experience. 

3) Landing Pages

A landing page is the first point of contact between a potential customer and your brand. Every landing page consists of content. If you want to achieve maximum efficiency, i.e. conversion rate, you need to adapt the content you’re presenting to the goals of each landing page. According to MarketingSherpa, 68% of B2B businesses use landing pages to generate new leads. 

Each of your landing pages should include a direct and straightforward CTA. If your lead doesn’t carry out the action on your landing page, contact them. With cutting-edge tools, it’s possible to know who visited your website, even when they don’t leave any data.

Marketers use search engine optimization (SEO) to get those landing pages ranking on Google. When your landing pages start receiving organic traffic, it’s likely that the conversion rates will also go up, because you attracted users who are already highly interested in what you have to say.  

Tools and Services to Increase Website Lead Generation

Now, before you start optimizing your lead generation strategy, you need to know where you stand. If you have a lot of data on user behavior already, it’s likely that you will get results more quickly. To achieve the maximum conversion rate for your website, you need to analyze traffic and user behavior on your website and each page. Here are some of the best tools that you can use to do that:

Google Analytics

This is the fundamental tool for when you want to analyze your website and its performance. With Google Analytics, you can carry out deep and segmented analyses of user traffic, user behavior and web page results. Google uses all possible inputs from users in order to provide detailed analyses of landing pages and how users behave on those pages, current conversion rates, traffic analyses, etc. 

To carry out a successful website analysis with Google Analytics, you will need to set it up correctly. If analyzing and pulling data from the tool is too time-consuming for your time, you can hire agencies to do it for you – unlike some other tools that we will mention, Google Analytics work is very easy to outsource. 

Image source: Neil Patel

Hotjar

Hotjar is another useful tool that can tell you a lot about what’s (not) helping your lead generation efforts. The Hotjar tool uses heat maps and click maps to show you the “hottest sections” of your website. Using this software, you can identify clicks on content or website elements that are unclickable. You can also discover which elements attract the most attention and how far down users scroll on a certain page.

Image source: HotJar

SmartLook

SmartLook is a powerful tool that records user behavior on your website and discovers the path users take from one page to the next, as well as everything they are doing while they are on the page. This helps us to identify key clicks and why some users leave without converting into leads. It gives us a deeper insight into possible mistakes on the website. 

Image source: SmartLook

Contact Form Tracking Tools

If you’re like most businesses, a contact form will be your biggest lead magnet. So naturally, that is where you will have to direct your attention to find out what’s happening to your conversion rates. Tools that track contact form stats will enable you to analyze and get details about how users fill out contact forms on your website. 

For example, you can find out:

• how many users reached a contact form page

• what percentage of users started filling out the form

• how many users tried sending out the form unsuccessfully

• how many users quit the process; and when

• which fields remained empty

• how much time was necessary to input each of the fields, etc. 

User surveys

User surveys or polls are used for qualitative analyses that collect direct feedback from users related to your most important marketing questions. There are particular questions that are universal and that you can ask users regardless of your goals, while others are related to a specific problem. You can use some of the following questions in your user surveys:

• Did you find what you were looking for?

• If we could do something for you, what would it be?

• How likely are you to recommend us to your friend or colleague?

• Did you find this content useful?

• Which other products or services would you like us to offer?

• How would you describe our website?

• Why did you decide to visit our website/business?

Usability testing

Usability testing is a technique that’s used to evaluate user interaction with a website’s design and functionality. It’s tested directly with the help of users. For many businesses, usability testing is an indispensable part of the optimization of their lead generation strategy. 

Usability tests are specific in the sense that they are carried out systematically, in controlled environments, where researchers document the way a user uses a website or a particular product. In any case, this mode of testing is amazing for increasing leads on your website. Users who test websites tend to find mistakes or inconsistencies which developers can’t notice because they’re “too close” to it. 

A/B Testing with Google Optimize

Optimize is directly integrated with Google Analytics, which makes it a very powerful tool for A/B testing and multivariate testing. There is a paid and free version of Optimize, but for basic testing, you can use the free mode for up to 5 simultaneous tests. 

Conclusion

A well-developed lead generation strategy is crucial for achieving both marketing and sales goals. When it’s implemented correctly and successfully, new leads will flow into your sales funnel, after which you’ll easily convert them into customers with follow-up actions. 

Instead of speculating or using intuition to determine how you want to attract and capture new leads, use actual data. Luckily, today’s tracking and analytics tools are very advanced and can provide you with enough information so you can know exactly what you should do. Look at your initial website or landing page as a testing playground. Using all the data you get from those first interactions, you’ll be able to tweak and set up a real lead magnet. 

Author Bio

Marques Coleman is a professional content writer and digital marketer working with SupremeDissertations, an essay writing website. He works with students around the world and organizes seminars, conferences and workshops dedicated to academic writing. Next to his professional interests, Marques is also interested in psychology and self-improvement.