Are you struggling to generate high-quality leads? Don’t worry, there are enough effective strategies to make your business grow by properly using your own website.
Leads at the Start of Growth
Generating leads is amongst the most important marketing activities of any (growing) business. Growing your business starts with getting into contact with the people and companies that have an interest in what you are selling. It’s basically what we define as a lead: a person or company that is interested in what you have to offer. Lead generation is the core business of every marketing team, which has resulted in a great number of ways to generate leads.
Generating Qualified Leads
The main issue marketing teams have to deal with is making sure leads are qualified. Generating leads itself is not the most difficult part, the challenging part is making sure the people you target are (potentially) interested. What defines a qualified lead is the degree to which the person is interested in what you are selling.
But how? That’s the magical question. Below we list a number of effective ways to generate more qualified leads on your own website.
1. Write Quality Content
An effective strategy, that will positively influence your lead generation and improve your marketing in general, is content marketing. Producing quality content will not only increase awareness, engagement, and trust in your company and products, it’s also the optimal way to increase SEO. Improving search result visibility will provide you with more traffic which leads to more potentially interested customers.
Creating content is not the biggest challenge ahead. It’s about creating the right type of content for your potential customers. What’s important is to keep in mind who your audience is and what they’re interested in reading/watching/hearing.
Building a content strategy means that you should diversify the way in which you communicate to potential customers. Popular content formats in order to generate leads on your website are reports, whitepapers, blogs, e-books, videos, and infographics.
The next important objective is to have the quality content properly promoted in order for your target group to learn about your offer. Creating content is a perfect way to increase awareness of something that is beneficial to them. There’s a variety of strong ways to properly promote your content.
Facebook Ads
Important to promoting content is that you’re aiming at the right target group (your potential customers). Facebook generates a lot of data from its users that allow you to very specifically aim your advertisements at your target group. Using Facebook ads will increase the website traffic of people that are interested in your offer. As a result, a larger portion of your traffic is likely to convert into leads on your website.
Webinars
A webinar is a live video session in which an expert can give in-depth knowledge about a specific topic that your company specializes in, has conducted research in, or can provide other interesting insights.
You can host the webinar yourself, but you can also partner up with other companies or organizations. In the latter, your credibility is higher because fewer people will consider it self-promotion. Just like guest blogs are considered more reliable than blog posts on your own websites.
Having people subscribe to your webinar is an effective way to generate more qualified leads.
Content Upgrades
You can give the public access to a part of your content and provide people with the complete document when they enter their email address (and other contact details). What’s important is that the first content provided triggers and interests people to read the rest. You can do so by revealing some interesting insights that you are addressing in the article/report/whitepaper.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is another effective way to generate leads. The advantage is that you can use sites that are already generating traffic of an audience that can be relevant for you to address.
In the first place, it’s important to attract your target audience’s attention by creating qualitative content. You can do so by:
- revealing interesting statistics about your business;
- Talking about innovations that have helped you to grow your business;
- Address new trends and developments that are relevant in the industry you are active in.
Guest blogging helps to increase the way your target audience perceives you as an expert in the products and services you offer. You can make use of this by directing people with a link to your website and/or a download link of your e-book/whitepaper in the bio of the author.
2. Help Website Visitors Through Live Chat
Most marketing departments focus on generating as much website traffic as possible. This is an essential activity in order to create awareness of what you have to offer and tempting consumers to buy your products. However, often this is not enough. Website visitors have questions and most of them are not going to directly buy your products. They are going to compare offers and go for the best deal. The best deal is not necessarily the best price, it’s also the way in which information is provided, questions are answered and people are guided through the customer journey. All these aspects add to the buying experience.
A way to help your website visitors during their customer journey and generate leads is live chat. Live chat is an approachable way for website visitors to ask real-time questions during their website visit, to human chat operators. The emphasis on human operators is important when it comes to generating leads because website visitors are more prone to give their contact information to a human operator. Human operators are better at defining the real problem of the visitor, showing empathy, and helping them find the solution to their problem. You will see that it’s easier to generate a lead The investment of helping the visitor is often likely to result in a lead when the build-up to asking for contact information is done right.
An analysis of 150.000 chats of the first half-year of 2019 showed that our chat operators on average generated 16.4% leads of all website visitors that chatted. The reason why chat is such a good tool to generate leads is that visitors are reciprocal. In return for receiving guidance and help they are more eager to give their contact information to receive specialized help in the future.
3. Use Good Landing Pages
Landing pages are an ideal method to direct potential customers to a lead. It’s essential that your landing pages are designed well and contain the right information for your visitors to convert.
Many landing pages contain too much information and too many CTA’s. Moreover, it’s important to reduce the number of required contact information in your lead form. Most people don’t want to commit themselves too strongly by filling in too many contact details.
A good example of a clean and clear landing page is one of Uber. The title tells people what they can do with Uber and at the same time, it gives them an incentive to do it. To earn money in a way that fits you.
Moreover, the CTA is placed high, avoiding the chance of people missing it. Below, the advantages of being an Uber driver are mentioned. All three are clear and straight to the point, increasing the chance of people signing up.
4. Testimonials Make You Credible
An indirect way to increase the number of leads you generate on your website is by increasing your credibility. Consumers buy from those that they trust and believe in. Therefore, credibility has a strong connection with increasing the effectiveness of your website.
A way to increase your credibility is by adding testimonials to your website. Testimonials are customer reviews that say something about their experience of your company or your service/product. An important touch that will make your testimonials even more credible is adding a picture. It makes the testimonial more personal and trustworthy.
5. A/B Testing Is Crucial to Any Website
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about your landing page, placement of CTA’s, testimonials, or the type of content you write, it’s always important to the A/B test. Split testing changes in your website settings allow you to see what works best for you and your website visitors.
It is important to have the right analytics software in order to determine what settings work best on your website. A/B testing can also be applied to the way in which you handle your customer contact through chat. If you are unsatisfied with the number of chat conversations you can try to reduce the time after which a proactive meeting is sent. You can also try to send a different proactive greeting if not enough people are using the chat. To increase efficiency, you can choose to only provide the possibility to chat on certain website pages.
The Importance of Qualified Leads
In order to grow a business, you need qualified leads. If you take the above-mentioned strategies into consideration you will see more qualified leads coming in ‘hot’. Good luck!
