Is your organization’s website little more than a glorified sales brochure? Even worse, are you using pretty much the same text on your website that features that you already have in your printed materials?
If your company has a website because you would like to generate sales leads from it, then there are a number of factors to consider.
Firstly, that few companies can reasonably expect to compete in today’s business world without exploiting internet-based marketing tools. Secondly, that unless the site appeals directly to your target prospects, you run the risk of them visiting your website and not realising how your business offering relates to them.
When sales and marketing professionals are aiming to generate more leads from their website, they need to think not just about how to capture audience attention. Attention isn’t the goal – that just gets you in the same. The goal is the successful delivery of the message you’re trying to convey. Attention without message is just noise.
You need to consider how to structure the words, pictures (and increasingly video) on the site in a way that makes sales prospects want to find out more about the product or service on offer. In short, what’s required is a smart and well-considered lead generation strategy that includes the creation of valuable offers and experiences that fit naturally into the context of what your target market is already doing online.
How To Increase Website Leads
The way the internet is used has changed dramatically over the past few years. With the wealth of information now at hand, prospective customers are more aware, more informed and more demanding of their suppliers than ever before.
Creating more website leads goes hand-in-hand with increasing the rate of conversion. There are only two ways to increase conversion rate:
- Increase traffic. If you currently have a conversation rate of 5% and have 100 people visiting your site, you’re getting 5 sales. If you increase the number of (targeted) people coming to your site to 200, all things being equal you’ll get 10 sales. OK, that’s simplifying things somewhat, but you get the point.
- Increase Conversions. Keeping those 100 people who visit your site, if you can increase conversion rate to 10% you’ve got 10 sales – with the same amount of traffic.
Regardless of the number of visitors to your site, your conversion rate is less than 5% then you should be looking at site optimization rather than increasing traffic. Most business websites don’t have a traffic issue – they have a conversion issue.
There’s a whole sub-industry created around conversation rate optimization and maximizing the bang of your buck. In a nutshell, much centers around understanding customer behaviors. The days of sales prospect painstakingly researching every scrap of information contained in a company website have long gone. In the same way as TV ads have been getting shorter in duration, your website needs to hit HARD, and hit ACCURATELY, since your competitor is just a mouse-click away.
Text used in a sales brochure has a different job to the text on a website. Using the same copy for both is inefficient and ineffectual, since they’re doing different jobs. Being lazy with your copy is leaving money on the table.
Getting Better Website Leads Means Creating A Better Website
Recent studies have shown that up to 55% of the visitors to your website spend fewer than 15 seconds there, before going elsewhere. If the visitor doesn’t feel they can relate to your company, if they’re overwhelmed, confused, annoyed, frustrated – or just plain bored – then they will leave.
Your company website should be more than a digital brochure. Whether its purpose is to drive people to contact you, visit your brick-and-mortar location, or sell products or services; a website should be selling to your audience proactively. With the cost of entry for a commercial website at practically zero, competition within your industry is only ever going to increase.
By optimizing their experience on your site, you’re making the most of the time site visitors are giving you, to increase the likelihood of website leads that, ultimately, lead to sales.
Focusing on traffic is expensive, error-prone, and resource-intensive. If your site isn’t optimized and developed in a way that’s most conducive to maximizing lead generation, your business will suffer.