Your website is only as good as the leads it generates for your business. A beautiful website will not necessarily improve your sales. If you are struggling to generate leads and improve your sales, perhaps it’s time to give your website a new look. And more than looks, you want to give it the spark that will turn it into an inbound marketing machine.
Ready to get started? Here are a few tips that will make your website an inbound marketing machine.
Where are you?
Before you call a design agency to redesign your website, you have to know where you are. What results does your website produce at this time? In particular, you want to look at the following:
i) Traffic and Brand Visibility
Determine the channels through which visitors find your website. Answer the following questions:
- Are visitors coming from search engine query results or direct referrals?
- Are visitors finding your website from social media sites or PPC?
- On average, how many visitors stop by your website every month?
The channels through which visitors find your website will help you know whether you really need a redesign. For example, if most of your visitors come from direct referrals i.e. they directly type your URL to reach your website, then your brand is strong and you may not need a complete website redesign.
You don’t just want any traffic on your website. Instead, you want quality traffic. These are visitors that are interested in what you provide. Research the keywords that your prospects type in Google when searching for your products/services and optimize your website content for them. On the same note, optimize your on-page website elements to improve your site’s SEO score.
ii) Determine Your Buyer Personas
Next, identify your buyer persona. This is the ideal customer that you are targeting. You can determine your buyer personas by considering different factors such as demographics, income levels, interests and so on that identify your web visitors. Determining your buyer persona is not only important when designing your sales funnel, but also your website.
The buyer persona will help you know the kind of redesign you need. For example, if you are an optician, you will want a responsive website so that visitors can increase or decrease the website on their screens depending on their sight.
The buyer personas will also help you determine other inbound marketing techniques to use to guide the leads to close a sale. For example, your email campaigns will have to be tailored to the different buyer personas based on their needs or interests.
iii) Provide Value Through Content
Before you sell to your leads, you need to build trust by providing educative, entertaining and valuable content. Visitors will come to your website to get information on a problem or need they have. Your website should address their needs in a way that resonates well with them.
Providing quality content will also help you emerge as a thought leader in your industry and make your website the go-to hub for information. Experiment with different types of content including blog posts, eBooks, videos, and others to see which ones resonate well with your visitors. The more visitors trust you, the easier it will be to sell to them.
Creating content has to be done on a regular basis both for immediate and future benefits. The immediate benefit is that you get to bond and identify the pains of your current visitors and leads. Another benefit is that the content will get indexed by search engines and drive targeted traffic to your website for a long time. Every content you create is a lead-generation asset for your business.
iv) Generate and Nurture Leads
Generating and nurturing leads is perhaps the most important activity in the sales process. You can generate leads by providing quality content or services. For example, you can provide high quality content in exchange for a visitor’s email.
Don’t assume visitors will want to be in your email list if you don’t tell them. Use various opportunities to get visitors into the sales funnel. Place a subscription box on your website, include engaging call-to-action messages in your content, promote subscriber-only premium content and so on. Use landing pages for every unique offer you have. Using landing pages will help you know what the leads are interested in based on what they downloaded.
The above 4-quick fixes will help to improve your website’s lead generation capability. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more you need to do to get high quality leads that will want to buy from you. Download our FREE EBook “10-Step Checklist For Your Next Website Redesign” to find out 10 proven ways that will help to improve your site’s lead generation.
