In the previous two articles in this series, we discussed your business’s website design and structure and how you could optimise those elements to build your business’s credibility, visitors’ trust in your business and encourage engagement.
In this, the last part of the series, we’ll look at generating B2B sales leads via website lead generation techniques, including your website’s messaging and how you can track engagement and activity on your website to inform your future online marketing decisions.
No matter how aesthetically appealing your website is, if it doesn’t clearly state what your business does and how it can benefit the reader, then people will arrive and promptly leave your website (everyone knows what bounce rate is – right?).
If you want website visitors to stay on your website and investigate your business further, it needs to include a short description of no more than 50 words that explains what you do, on your homepage. Also, make sure website visitors can access a piece (or multiple pieces) of quality content directly from your homepage, as this gives them the opportunity to engage further with your business and you the opportunity to move them further through the buyer’s journey. You want your website visitors to land on your site and think ‘these guys have exactly what I need!’.
Lastly, if your business has received any awards or has some incredibly positive customer testimonials, don’t be afraid to share these on your homepage. You want to build the website visitor’s trust in your business and including these small, yet pivotal elements, will help them to decide about your business.
In the first part of this blog series, we discussed the importance of including a variety of Calls-To-Action on your website, if you haven’t do this is it important for you to get in contact with a professional web design company. It’s important to appreciate the fact that most visitors to your website will not be ready to make a purchase or even engage with your business.
Calls-To-Action (CTAs) such as ‘contact us’ or ‘buy now’ are far too aggressive and will only put website visitors off. The modern prospect wants to understand your business and its solutions way before they talk to you. Therefore, including a variety of ‘soft’ calls-to-action that drive those visitors to useful content will help you to increase your lead generation activity.
Including CTAs such as ‘find out more’, ‘read more’, ‘download now’ and ‘try now’ – that direct a website visitor to a piece of TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) content that is gated behind a submission form – is an excellent way to get website visitors to engage with your business. It also enables you to capture their details via a submission form and doesn’t mean a salesperson is going to call them within two minutes of completion.
Of course, the more valuable the content you are offering your website visitor, the more details you can ask for in exchange. Including soft CTAs that drive website visitors to relevant content offers is a more subtle and effective way of gathering a prospect’s information.
With the marketplace being so competitive, every business is trying desperately to demonstrate their industry authority and market knowledge. Consequently, many websites become self-promotional – and offer nothing of real value to the website visitor.
Instead of over-glorifying your business, you need to show your prospective customers that you understand the problems they are facing and you have solved similar problems for other people in their industry in the past. That ‘About Us’ page you’ve got on your site – who cares? Maybe you should turn it into an ‘About You’, and show the visitor some empathy and understanding of their current pain points and needs.
Now that you have your messaging and calls-to-action in order, you need to have the tools to see how visitors are interacting with your website. Marketing automation and analytics technology enable you to identify visitors on your website (through cookie tracking) and capture their information (through submission forms).
The benefits of cookie tracking are that you can establish a website visitor’s entire history of interaction on your website – providing they have cookies enabled. Then, the point at which that visitor identifies themselves by completing a form on your website, the data captured by the website’s cookies and the visitor’s submission information, come together to form their contact record, which includes a detailed history of all their movements on your website.
Also, with the right tools, you can see:
And much, much more.
As marketers, one of our most important resources is data. In order to get actionable insights from our marketing campaigns and start to refine them, it’s vital that we monitor and assess interactions on our website(s). Once we have this information, we can start to make website/marketing decisions based on user interactions – focusing on what worked well and refining those aspects further, while overhauling things that didn’t.
Hopefully, these website lead generation techniques will provide you with a solid foundation for the construction – or reconstruction – of your website.
That concludes our three-part series on generating high-quality, B2B sales leads through your website.
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With more than two decades of experience running his own technology-focused PR and marketing firm, author and curator Bob Dearsley understands what you don't about PR and marketing. His straight-forward, witty and accessible advice will help you realise the remarkable benefits and advantages that the immediacy of the modern, connected world provides and how to leverage them for the long-term success of your business. His top tip is: “You may not be able to afford a PR agency, but you can’t afford to miss out on my advice!” Bob Dearsley is also the author of 'No More PR Bollox'.
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