Unless you have an e-commerce business where your website visitors can become customers directly on your website, you may find it challenging to get more customers online. You spend so much time on your business website—perfecting your homepage, writing your products and services, publishing blog posts, and more—but you have no way to tell how effective your content is, if at all. This can make it hard to stay motivated to maintain and update your website, but did you know there is a tangible way to turn your website visitors into quantifiable leads? In other words, you can obtain and measure results from your website content. In this post we’ll show you how to do just that.
What is Traffic-to-Lead Conversion?
A good business website is not just a digital version of a static brochure of your business. It is a marketing channel for your business, almost like a version of your business that is open 24/7. For your website to serve this purpose, it needs to have lead-generating content, where visitors have the opportunity, and feel the desire, to provide their contact information.
When a website visitor willingly gives their contact information to you, this is called traffic-to-lead conversion. You can dramatically increase that conversion rate by offering something in return for web visitors’ contact information.
How Do I Increase My Conversion Rate?
Give a little – get a lot. In today’s world of spam email and unwanted phone calls, people are generally reluctant to fill out generic “contact us” forms. However, if you offer visitors something of genuine value, they are far more willing to leave an email address or phone number and allow your business to contact them. By simply offering something that your web visitors want behind an information-gathering form, you can convert an anonymous visitor into an actionable lead. The visitor gets an item of value and your business gets the ability to follow up with a phone call or email. Even better, you can learn more about your target audience through the information you collect.
What Should I Offer to Capture Leads?
So what should you offer? Anything that your target customer will find valuable is a perfect offer. Examples of offers include:
- Whitepapers
- Webinars (An invitation to sign up or to download a previous recording)
- Free trials
- Free consultations
- eBooks on a topic related to your products/services
Make the Offer Attractive
It’s important to make the offer not just attractive, but attractive to the specific type of person you’re trying to convert. There’s no point in converting a website visitor into a lead if they are unlikely to become a customer in the future. If your target customers are marketing professionals, for example, then offering a white paper that outlines the “10 Financial Terms Every Business Owner Should Know” will be off-target. Overly general offers will have the potential to garner the greatest number of leads, but the lowest amount of “lead intelligence”. Offers with very specific content will generate fewer leads, but you may be able to sell to those leads more effectively if you know exactly what they’re looking for.
How Much Information Should I Ask For?
Many small businesses lose leads by asking for too much information. Forms are a great way to collect information on your target audience, but only to a certain extent. The greater the number of fields you require in your lead capture form, the greater the number of people who will abandon it.
Don’t ask for things you don’t need. For example, asking for the number of people in someone’s company is completely unnecessary when that information can usually be easily ascertained from LinkedIn. Only ask for the information you absolutely need to maximize your chances of closing the customer.
The first step in online marketing for small businesses is to generate web traffic. The second step is to convert that traffic into leads you can engage and/or follow up with. An early part of any online marketing strategy should involve some form of lead capture from an offer. Without a real offer, many visitors that could have been sold through a sales process will be lost forever. Using targeted offers, capture the opportunities you are creating by asking for the minimum amount of information your business needs to close the deal.
