1. Generating Traffic
To generate more leads from your website, you need to have traffic to get eyes on your content. You have two choices: either you pay for it or leverage your site’s content and SEO strategy. Before you ask, “what the f*ck is an SEO strategy?” let’s examine these things separately:
Paid Traffic: It’s exactly what you think it is. People pay companies like Google, Facebook, and other popular, traffic-rich websites money to get their content and advertisements in front of tons of people. To get the most out of your paid campaign(s), make sure you understand where your target audience spends the most time. Also, find out what keywords they’re using to find the services or products you offer. Once you have this piece of the puzzle down, it’s time to create a landing page that’s focused on capturing the contact details of your potential customers.
Organic Traffic: Everyone loves free traffic. So, of course, this is the most appealing method of generating traffic, but also the hardest. Driving organic traffic to your website involves creating content through articles, blogs, and page content that ranks for a keyword or phrase (a.k.a long-tail keyword). There are two tools you can use for free to help you rank for your keyword(s); these are Yoast SEO and Ubersuggest.
- Yoast SEO is probably the world’s best SEO plugin for WordPress. Yoast allows search engines to easily index your site’s content and rank for a specific keyword or phrase.
- Ubersuggest allows you to gain valuable insight into the keyword and SEO strategies of your competitors. Having this information will enable you to adopt, develop, and improve your own keyword and content strategy and gain the upper hand—better content and better keywords equal better traffic.
2. Data Analysis
Analyzing your website’s traffic and how your users behave on your site is essential. You can quickly gain access to this information by integrating your website with Google Analytics. Most website platforms have documentation on how to do this. Once you’re ready to go with Google Analytics, review your data every quarter and pay attention to:
- What pages are being viewed the most?
- What content are people consuming?
- How much of your traffic is coming from organic search, and what pages or pieces of content are driving that traffic?
- What devices are your users consuming content on, mobile or desktop?
- What does the flow of traffic look like, and what pages are you losing your customers on?
Knowing this information allows you to understand what content needs updating, what pages need better calls to action, and how to prioritize your lead generation efforts.
4. Creating A High Converting Landing Page
A high converting landing page is critical when creating a compelling offer to generate leads for your startup or non-profit’s services. To create a top converting landing page, you need to do the following:
- Get on Mailchimp: We want to focus on keeping costs down, and we can easily leverage Mailchimp’s free and fully functional landing page builder and automated email campaigns.
- Use Video: Whether you speak directly to a camera yourself or use whiteboard animation, placing a video on your landing page will compel more people to stop what they’re doing, watch, and listen to your content until the end.
- Focus on benefit-driven content: In your landing page text and video focus on the results and benefits you’re offering to your customers. Converting visitors into leads is a lot easier when your content is focused on solving a problem your users have. People don’t buy into services they buy into solutions.
- Social Proof: Your landing page needs testimonials. Testimonials validate the solutions you are providing with your products and services. People love to see reviews from other people just like them, especially from people who’ve had the same problems.
5. Gratitude & Following Up
A thank you page and follow up email is vital. Set up a thank you page on your website so that when a user acts on a specific call to action they are redirected to a page that thanks them for taking action and outlines what to expect next and when. If you promised to get in touch within 24-hours, get in touch within 10 minutes. If you promised an eBook, let them know it’s on the way or how to download it. Again, express your thanks and deliver on your promises. Don’t be afraid to follow up and check in to make sure that they received their goods.
6. Live Chat
Live chat has been around for a while; however, it’s just starting to pick up traction as one of the most effective lead generating techniques in the industry. Chatting with customers in real-time gives you a real fighting chance to turn those visitors into leads. Capturing contact details early on allows you to follow up later via phone, email, or in person. You can do this easily by using a pre-chat survey.
7. A/B Testing
Optimizely sums it up best:
“A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage…against each other to determine which one performs better. A/B testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.”
What are some examples of A/B testing?
- A business coach created an A/B test of their landing page and found out that page “B,” which included an explainer video of his coaching service, converted 18% better than the same landing page without a video.
- A garage door sales and service business found that landing page “A,” which included logos and testimonials, increased leads generated by 59% than the same page without them.
Whatever your experiment’s outcome, use your experience to inform future tests and continually iterate on optimizing your website’s experience.
8. Social Media
Using social media to generate leads without spending money (so no paid advertising) is probably one of the best ways to generate quality leads. Although having a presence on all of the most significant sites does seem to be essential to get yourself found, it doesn’t mean you have to spend all your energy juggling your time on all of the platforms. Choose your top 3 platforms with your target market on, engage with the audience with video, and deliver high-quality content every day that gives a clear call to action. Doing this makes you appear as an expert in your niche, and the only source of information people need to turn to when seeking to solve a problem.
9. Nurture & Educate
Email nurturing is an important part of the sales funnel process. It convinces the lead to move further down the funnel and towards a higher-paid service. It does this by keeping the lead engaged and getting them to know who you are. Familiarity-building. As soon as the lead converts, they are moved out of the sequence and onto the next email nurturing campaign. The standard email nurturing sequence typically consists of 3-5 emails sent over a 2-3 week period and refers to the original piece of content that caused the conversion. Nurturing sequences are extremely important because not everyone that becomes a lead will convert immediately. They need time, and they need to be educated in a nurturing way.
There are many different sequence options out there:
- Stories that help build a connection
- Case studies that help build credibility
- Free offers to warm up cold lists
- And paid offers to drive sales home
Some send out emails every day ‒ others strategically stagger delivery.
Have questions or want to learn more about a specific topic I covered? Let me know in the comments below. I’m always accepting feedback and suggestions on what to write about next.
