Every business has the goal of increasing leads and many are focused on increasing their leads online. But with all of the chatter out there, all the competition, all of the distraction, how can your business stand out to help you increase your online leads?
It's not an easy task, but by following our ten tips below, you can begin to increase your online leads and continue to grow your business. Whether you're a small 'mom & pop' or a larger corporation, these tips hold true. Let's get started!
1. Understand your customer
If you haven't developed personas, depictions of what your best customers look like, then you need to do that immediately. How can you attract new visitors and get them to become leads if you don't know who they are, what they're interested in, or why it matters to them? Taking the time to understand who you want to attract to your business is one of the most important steps you can take to increasing online leads.
2. Focus on SEO
One of the biggest and best tools that we have at our disposal as marketers is the power of search engines. Continuously working on optimizing your website and online presence will help to get your business and your content in front of the people that are actively searching for it, as well as the services that your business offers, and the products that you sell. In today's world, we feel that a search engine optimization campaign is mandatory if you really want to compete.
3. Be smart about your calls-to-action
There are a lot of things that go into a successful call-to-action. Placement on each page, colors, action words, frequency, animation, and making sure that your call-to-action makes sense on the page can all affect how well your CTA performs. A couple tips from our experts:
- Use a call-to-action on every page that makes sense as well as every blog post
- Note: make sure that the call-to-action fits with the content on your page or blog post.
- Use contrasting colors for your design to help them stand out.
- Use animations such as pop up or slide in animations to catch more eyes.
- Triple check to make sure your calls-to-action lead to the correct landing page.
4. Lose the nav
This one can seem a little foreign to many business owners because they've heard so often that it's important to make sure their navigation is easy to find and use by their visitors, but losing the navigation on all landing pages is important. When someone clicks through to your landing page, you want to keep all of their attention on that page. You want them to be reading your content and filling out the form on your landing page, not looking to see what other pages and information that you have elsewhere on your site. Remove the navigation on your landing page and put it back for thank you pages.
5. Offers that your audience cares about
One of the best ways to ensure more conversions on your landing pages is to offer content that your visitors actually want. This goes back to understanding who your customers are and what they care about. If you're offering an eBook that your audience can't wait to get their hands on, they're going to convert at a much higher percentage.
6. Nurture all phases of the sales funnel
Far too many business only focus on the bottom of the funnel. A lot of the websites that we visit have a decent number of calls-to-action, but all of those CTAs are things such as "BUY NOW", "Schedule An Appointment" or "Get Started". What about the people that have visited your site for more information, education, or to determine if they even have the problem that you're solving for? You're doing nothing to nurture these leads if you're only focused on the "ready to buy" bottom of the funnel visitors.
7. Be where your customers are
One great way to increase leads online is to hang out where your customers hang out. If your main persona is women 30-45, you're probably going to be smart to be active on Pinterest. If you're focused on millennials, you'd probably do well to focus your efforts on Instagram and SnapChat. Spending your time and resources on the networks and websites that your customers hang out on will help you deliver higher quality visitors to your site and because they are higher quality, they'll be more likely to convert into a lead.
8. Be clear & deliver
Be very upfront about what you're offering on your CTAs and what your visitors will receive after filling out a form on your landing page and deliver on that offer immediately after conversion. Deceiving your visitors or even being unclear about what they'll get or when they'll get it is a great way to lose credibility and leads.
9. Encourage sharing
We all have friends, family, and acquaintances that share our same interests and work in our same industries. Giving your visitors the ability to share your offers with their friends through social media, email, and even text message will help you reach new and high quality visitors.
10. Testing
This one is probably the most important. It's important to monitor, compare, and analyze results to understand what is working, what is not, and most importantly - why. When testing, it's important to only make one change at a time and test the effectiveness of that change, then make another. Taking this sort of approach will allow you to understand what is resonating with your audience and what isn't so that your future campaigns can continue to perform better and better.
Now that you've learned a few tricks that many businesses (probably many of your competitors) are failing at, you are armed with the tools necessary to start converting a higher percentage of your traffic into leads from your website. In short, give your visitors what they want.
