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Many people want more leads, and for those that want more leads, it’s natural to want it as cheap as possible. Organizations and businesses can get more leads by understanding potential opportunities, and then by utilizing the resources they have available to them.
A new strategy often starts with the foundation, and a website should be a priority to keep the foundation stable for all the other marketing needs. Building a new website then becomes a beginning place for businesses to jump-start closing more leads as part of an overall marketing strategy.
Before learning more about how a new website can bring you leads, it’s important to understand how people come to your website and how those people are converted. We can do that by fully understanding leads and lead generation.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is when your business receives a lead from inbound or outbound marketing and sales efforts.
A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. It’s important to understand that leads are part of a full lifecycle that consumers follow when they transition from visitor to customer and that not all leads are created equal. Leads are based on how they come in as a prospect and how they express interest.
How do leads find you online?
There are a variety of ways in which people find products and services online. Here are some ways people can find you.
Email is a great method of communication for people who already know about you. Email is best used when there is an established relationship with the person. If the person knows who the sender is, they are much more likely to engage with the email message. Email can be used well for previous paying customers, current customers (offering new products and services), or people who sign up for an email list.
Ads and retargeting
Search, or general awareness ads, are great tools to reach people who do not know about your product or service. These ads reach out to people when they are searching specifically for you, or are placed in front of people who have certain interests. Search ads are useful when an individual is looking for something that you specifically offer. Placing ads based on interest can be accomplished by using general awareness ads on social media platforms that have a variety of targeting options.
Oftentimes, people do not immediately purchase the first time they reach a new website. For this reason, using retargeting ads to get in front of people who have viewed your content is very important to remind them about your product or service. The way you can do this is by effectively using retargeting when they perform certain actions on your website or visit specific pages on your site.
You can make your ad strategy better by sending people to specific landing pages so that you know the traffic retargeting ads will be sent to the right people who interacted with your ad.
Blog
Writing blogs creates the opportunity to target very specific topics that people may be interested in. Blogs can be shared on social media, and they also work well with search engines because they can talk about very specific phrases for people to search. Those topics become indexed keywords on your website domain, and when people look for longer tail keywords that a blog discusses, search engines can point people to your blog.
Social Media
Social media can be used organically or with paid opportunities to generate leads. Both usually deliver content natively within the social media experience. Creating content that sparks attention can drive people to a specific landing page on your website by either visiting more of your social media content, following a social media post link or looking for more information about your product or service on the profile of your social media page.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing occurs when people find your product or service on another site that links to your website. This often occurs on platforms relevant to your business that have an audience in need of what you offer.
An example of referral marketing is when a website like TripAdvisor shows a list of hotels in a specific area and provides information about each hotel to help consumers to decide where to stay. In this case, TripAdvisor will have a link to visit the hotel’s website or provide a direct booking experience. When the user clicks on a link to the hotel’s website, they are referred to the site.
In other cases, referral marketing can occur when websites write blogs about a specific topic and reference your offering as a resource.
Landing Page
In all the above marketing methods, it’s important to have a fluid user experience. This means that people receive similar information at each step so it doesn’t look like they have reached the wrong page in their online journey. For example, when someone clicks on an ad, they expect to see very relevant information after that first click. When users do not see relevant information immediately, it often causes a higher than needed bounce rate.
Having a specific landing page that is in line with a customer’s online journey is more likely to make a user feel they are in the right place and have the mindset to receive very specific information. A landing page can also create the opportunity to share a clear call to action (CTA) to allow users to make the next step in their online journey to experience your offerings.
Another benefit of landing pages is that, like blogs, they can index well with search engines because they can talk about a specific topic and can have proper metadata for search engines to read.
What a New Website Brings
With a new website, you’re able to better utilize all of the above methods. This is because you’ll be able to strategically plan the website content needed to meet the expectations of the user interacting with your business. You’ll want to consider the following on your website.
Create a Better Call to Action (CTA)
A call to action (CTA) is a prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action. This specific action should relate to how and why they reached your website. For example, if someone reaches a website to buy t-shirts, they should see t-shirts and action on how to buy the t-shirt they saw in the previous marketing experience.
Use Landing Pages for Unique Experiences
A landing page should be expanded information on what a user had experienced in the previous marketing action. The more specific the landing page addresses the previous online experience, the more likely they will feel comfortable that they are in the right place. This will lower the potential bounce rate and increase the likelihood of a conversion. For example, if someone sees a Facebook ad on sunglasses, a good user experience would be a landing page with more information. More information could include pictures, reviews, unique specifics about the glasses, and answers to questions people may have before purchasing.
Optimize for Mobile Traffic
Since 2017, about half of the overall website traffic is on mobile. By building a new website you can prioritize the mobile experience, and even consider a mobile-first strategy. When making the mobile experience a priority, you’ll be able to increase the ability to convert the leads that are coming into your website.
Produce High-Quality Content
High-quality content on a website is vital for a website’s success. By having better content, websites can reap the benefits of content that can be found easily by improved search rank positions, site score, website usability, user experience, and targeting the right audience. A new website can focus on optimizing content by making it easier for search engines and users to read and see it. Setting up a new website will allow it to have the functionality you may want as you move forward for blogs, whitepapers, webinars, and videos.
Build Online Community
Talking to people who are interested in your products or services is one of the best ways to create recurring and new business with the leads you have. Your website can help with that by creating various opportunities to capture information from users to make them part of your future online community. One of the ways to do this is by creating different opportunities for the user to subscribe to your business. A simple way to do this is with an email sign-up form, which you could use when people purchase a product or service from you. Other techniques that can be used are tracking people who visit your website with cookies—you can retarget those users.
Both of these methods, gathering emails and retargeting people based on website visits, open up the door for you to further engage with people who have interacted with your website.
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Up Your Lead Generation Strategy with a New Website
Creating a new website provides people with the opportunity to strategically plan on how to increase lead flow and better convert your leads. A few steps to start with include considering the call to actions (CTA) you want people to take, what landing page experience you want users to have, how you will prioritize the mobile experience, what content you will produce, and how you will recapture people who are interacting with your business. You’ll be able to use a variety of lead generation strategies including email, ads and retargeting, blogs, social media, referral marketing, and landing pages to bring people to you. For all of these reasons, a new website will increase your overall lead generation strategy as you move forward.