In today’s ultra-competitive digital marketing landscape, having a website is probably the single most important marketing touch point your business has when it comes to generating website leads. Whether it’s inbound or outbound marketing, your website plays a critical role in your company’s success.
In fact, even when you’re building brand awareness off-line through direct human interaction, it’s your website that those prospects will eventually visit and use to formulate their personal perception of your brand and the overall value it might be able to provide them.
Simply put, having an out-of-date, non-informative and difficult-to-navigate website can quickly overshadow any positive in-person interactions responsible for bringing people to your website in the first place. Whether it’s the result of an outbound or inbound marketing tactic, the fundamental key to any commercial website is to:
- Increase Brand Awareness
- Provide Relevant Information
- Enhance Brand perceptions
- Capture Interested Visitors
- Self-serve existing customers
The good news is that even if you’re website doesn’t provide the type of user experience today’s online prospects demand; you can easily bring your existing site up to date by implementing any or all of the four recommendations below that will help you generate even more leads from your website.
Implement Online Lead Capture Techniques
Many businesses will use a single lead capture form on their Contact Us page and call it good. This would be great if every site visitor visited that page, but we’re willing to bet that if you look at your site’s Behavior Flow you’ll quickly realize this isn’t the case. This however doesn’t necessarily translate to their unwillingness to provide such information; it may just mean that you haven’t provided them with the right trigger to pull.
Try using lead capture forms on other pages of your site and experiment with trying to capture different types of information. For example, you might have a great white paper on your site that people would be willing to give you their email address for but not their phone number. If you insist on only having one lead generation form it’s ok, just make sure that it’s easy to navigate to from every single page on your site.
Create a Company Blog and Actively Contribute
For a lot of business owners, the idea of creating and maintaining a blog seems like a huge waste of time with little to no reward when it comes to generating website leads. I’ll be the first to admit that I use to be on that bandwagon too until I realized just how powerful blogging can be. The reality is that most people won’t actually ever read or share your blog posts but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their not being read at all. In fact, the two most important people that should be reading your blog posts are – people genuinely interested in the topic of discussion and most importantly, search engines.
Generating new and relevant content (new pages) on your website is one of the most effective ways to improve your search engine rankings. And blogging is one of the easiest ways to generate new content. Blogging also helps position you as a thought leader when the content is relevant and adds value to discussions about your target industries.
Use Video Content On Your Website
Online video is one of the most effective marketing tools available today which is one of the reasons why YouTube is the second largest search engine with over 100 hours of video being uploaded every minute. When you add video content to your website, you’re essentially giving your online shoppers and visitors exactly what they want.
There are lots of benefits of video marketing. Video not only helps you engage with your online prospects better; it can also help improve your SEO rankings too by keeping people on your site longer. The longer your site visitors’ session times are, the better your page content is perceived, thus contributing to higher organic search rankings.
Share Your Companies Reputation
Whether it’s a case study, a testimonial video or a link to a public domain review site like Yelp or Facebook, adding customer testimonial content to your website will help you generate more website leads. Online reviews, customer success stories and testimonials help build trust and are an extremely powerful marketing tool.
Testimonials can help your online prospects better relate their own situation to those of your previous customers. They create a frame of reference, a sense of corporate transparency and third party validation of your value proposition claims.
About the Author
Peter Horton is a co-founder of Telideo Productions, a Denver video production company and video marketing agency that specializes in corporate video, product video, and testimonial video production.