Optimize your landing pages, your website, and your bottom line.
If you’re managing a business, you know it’s important to maintain a website and basic a digital presence across search engines. Unfortunately, this can leave a lot to be desired when it comes to effectively capturing potential leads. Are your landing and webpages optimized to actually capture the information of the visitors arriving to your site? If not, you might be missing out on some valuable return on investment when it comes to the website you’ve built; because if you never capture their information, you can never sell them on an eventual deal. Here are a few tips to improve both your web and landing pages for visitor conversion, lead generation, and sales opportunities.
1. Build a signup CTA into your universal footer.
A very simple and quick first step in optimizing your site for conversions is building a signup form into your universal website footer (i.e., the one that appears on each of your web pages). If you have a monthly, quarterly, or even yearly newsletter, a call-to-action (CTA) button for a newsletter signup is a great option. Ideally, the visitor will have found something of value on your website and be inclined to share their email in exchange for future learnings from your brand. Simultaneously, you can use your footer to host a straightforward “contact us” form so that potential leads can reach out directly with questions (and give your their email address in the process).
Whatever your approach, the intention is to ensure that each page, no matter the content, has a mechanism to capture a lead.
2. Invest in great content.
How do you increase the likelihood that your visitors will reach that footer CTA and be inclined to share their information with you? Your website has to have great content. Great content goes a long way to prove your brand’s value as a thought leader, illustrates the way your team thinks and works, and helps to establish trust in your brand prior to a sale.
How can you create great content? Here are a few quick tips:
- Obsession mapping: Write out the content topics relevant to your brand. Do the same for the interests of your target customers. Focus your content development on the topics that live in the overlap. Your team will be experts in the matter, and your customers will be excited and grateful for the knowledge.
- Write content that is relevant, reflective, and actionable.
- Learn how the buyer’s journey impacts what content a lead may need at a given time.
- Then, start talks between your marketing and sales team to develop content that supports all stages of that journey.
Your website often creates the very first impression of your brand for a lead. Load it up with sales enablement content that covers each stage of the buyer’s journey and appropriately reflects your brand’s personality.
3. Create landing pages to host gated, high-value content.
Blog posts are an important content investment, both as a free resource to encourage leads to sign up for your email list and for organic search engine optimization. But what about the heavier hitting long-form pieces like whitepapers or PDF guides? These often share more extensive and more high-value, in-depth analysis than a blog post. Should you give these away for free? Yes and no.
Long-form content should be leveraged for their higher value by hosting them on a gated landing page, where visitors are prompted to exchange their email address for access to the content. Landing pages are streamlined webpages that focus heavily on visitor conversion and are often used as the destination URL for a digital ad campaign. Landing pages capitalize on the visitor’s attention to a subject matter and offer minimal distractions, increasing the likelihood of information capture as there are less opportunities to click away. A landing page should host no prominent links to other pages–just a hyper-focused argument to compel the visitor to trade their information in exchange for the great resource you’re offering.
A cost-efficient strategy to increase total conversions is to run targeted search engine and/or social media ads directing visitors to your landing page. Driving visitors to a streamlined landing pages, as opposed to a standard webpage, will ensure a higher visitor-to-conversion rate and a higher return on investment.
To further optimize landing pages for the benefit of your bottom line, build in an automated trigger for a thank you email to fire when a visitor shares their information for the gated content. Thank you emails have higher engagement rates than normal emails. Use the thank you email to reshare your whitepaper for easy access, drive leads further into the buyer’s journey with CTAs for additional content relevant to their interests, and provide opportunity for leads to self-escalate toward a sale with CTAs that link to product pages, case studies, or demo requests.
4. Keep track of high-traffic pages.
Are you noticing that certain web pages have higher traffic rates than others? Leverage this traffic by streamlining these pages to include more conversion pathways and more opportunities for you to capture new leads. Consider building in a popup form that appears at 50% scroll of the page, and include embedded forms in the page for content offers, newsletter signups, demo requests, or a simple “Let’s Talk” CTA.
5. Test, test, and test.
The best way to know what works is simply by trying out a few different approaches. There is plenty of psychology that goes into building a user experience that compels visitors to share their information. A Google search will give you an endless amount of insights. But some of it is simple trial and error to understand what your own unique audience responds to. Try experimenting with:
- The placement, shape, and color of a CTA button
- The CTA button copy
- Replacing a CTA button with a standard hyperlink
- Where and when a popup form appears
- And more
If you have a web CMS that includes A/B testing, you can run these tests very easily. If not, these tests can be done manually with little effort, so long as you’re comfortable using a web analytics platform like Google Analytics.
6. Drive visitors further into your website to increase your value and the likelihood of capture.
Piggyback on a visitor’s interest in a specific topic to drive them further into your site with additional relevant, valuable content. If you’re hosting a blog post about a specific topic, include several links at the end of the blog post that drive to additional posts and resources on that same topic. The more expert content a visitor reads by your brand, the more likely the visitor is to view your brand as a thought leader, and the more likely they are to happily share their email address to receive additional content and communications from your brand.
7. Consider a live chat tool.
This is not relevant to all brands, but if your business fields a lot of early-stage questions from customers, consider a live chat tool to quickly answer new visitors’ questions. It both captures information and prevents any friction the visitor might experience in sitting too long with an unanswered question (and potentially moving on to a vendor that is more immediately available for responses).
8. Nurture your new leads!
Though it varies by service or product, only about 25% of leads are typically ready for a sale. The rest of the legitimate prospects in a pipeline will need to be thoughtfully nurtured and educated on your brand and its offerings to move them toward an eventual sale. Ultimately, the leads you capture on your website are only as good as your nurturing efforts.
Ensure that you have content developed and queued up in an email workflow to nurture new leads through the buyer’s journey. If it’s appropriate, consider creating unique content and workflows tailored to each of your buyer personas. You may also want to consider automating the nurturing process to relieve your sales team of the manual effort, so they can solely focus on highly engaged or warm leads.
Your brand depends on a healthy pipeline of new leads to close sales and grow your business. While it’s a bit of work, optimizing your website to capture as many new leads as possible is a worthwhile investment that, over time, pays dividends for your bottom line.