Ten Great Ways To Optimise Lead Generation For Small Business
You spent good money on the new website for your business. It looks great and is a decent tool to refer people to when they already know about your business and want to learn a bit more.
It’s kind of like when a salesman hands a brochure out to someone who’s already in the showroom looking at a new car.How can you do even more with your website though? Is it possible to turn your business website into a lead generation machine?
Reach out to potential customers before they tour all the different car showrooms. Most importantly, what steps can you take to automate this lead generation process so that your website does all the hard work for you?Forgive the car showroom analogy. No matter what business you’re in, you can maximise the use of your website.
Driving new customers towards it, keeping in touch with existing customers and compelling all visitors to act while they’re surfing your pages. These are the three main things your site should be aiming to achieve.Whether that’s buying a product, signing up to a newsletter or sending a request for further information, there’s plenty of great ways to optimise lead generation with your website.
Let’s explore ten of the best ways to convert your website’s visitors into your business’s customers.
1. SEO Improvements And Higher Traffic
Well, first things first, you need visitors to your website if it’s going to turn into a key part of your lead generation strategy.
Having a great SEO strategy, using keywords and phrases to your advantage and having awesome written and visual content on your website is a sure-fire way to drive more potential customers to your business.
If you’d like to learn more about all the different SEO services available, click here.
2. Speed Is Of The Essence!
Turning up late or forgetting to attend a job interview probably isn’t the best way to impress your prospective new boss.
Will you get a second chance? That’s exactly what it’s like for customers when they try to visit your website and it either loads really slowly or, even worse, crashes and doesn’t load at all!
According to recent Google studies, 53% of mobile users abandon the site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This is a stat that seems to be ever-increasing too.
3. Call-To-Action (CTAs)
You may have come across the acronym CTA or call-to-action to give it its full name.
Strategically positioned CTAs throughout your website can be very useful for making people take action and ultimately give them the opportunity to easily do what you want them to do.
These work best on pages that have higher traffic and usually following on from either some compelling sales copy or identification of a customer pain-point and an idea on how to solve the problem.
4. Offer Useful Information; It’s Not All SELL SELL SELL!
A common mistake some business owners make is by having all their CTAs as sales aides. ‘Buy Now’, ‘Add Item To Basket’ etc.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Sure, when done well the sales CTAs are perfectly fine but you can also use CTAs to sign people up to your mailing lists or give them a free copy of an E-book about a certain subject for example.
Not all customers are going to buy straight off the bat.
It’s well worth developing relationships over time to make sure you’re well positioned when someone does want to buy.
5. Landing Pages And Paid Ads
Sometimes it’s best to create an entirely separate landing page to get people to sign up to a certain offer or buy a certain product.
A landing page coupled with paid advertising is a superb way to drive leads fast.
6. Automate Your Email Marketing
As your customer and potential customer lists grow, you can start tailoring your automated marketing content.
With services like Active Campaign and Mailchimp it’s easy to reach a wide audience and further refining can be done as well. For example, you can send certain offers to newly registered people or special discounts for existing/long-term clients.
It’s worth trying lots of different things with email marketing too. Do text-based emails or ones featuring pictures work better?
Was your offer of a free trial more productive than your countdown/limited time offer?
7. A/B Testing; What Works And What Doesn’t?
A/B tests can help shape your digital marketing strategy. By understanding what works well and what doesn’t will allow you to optimise and improve your lead generation, moving forward.
A/B tests can be aligned to review campaigns side-by-side or even which title for the same blog gets more interest.
There are some great tools out there including Optimise by Thrive Themes. Well worth a try if you want to enhance the effectiveness of your marketing output.
8. Share Insightful Content With Blogs And Social Media
There’s no better way of gaining the trust of a prospect than by being a leading source of knowledge on your specialist subject.
With interesting content output on a regular basis you’ll become the go-to source of information and this will also give people a reason to visit your website blog or your social media pages.
9. Follow Up After Events
A simple ‘thank you for subscribing’ email to a new subscriber goes a long way to building familiarity and confidence.
It might sound obvious but reaching out to new contact after networking events or seminars is also a great way of improving lead generation.
10. Make The Most Of Dynamic/Smart Content
When email marketing or a piece of content is personalised to someone, click through rates increase by 14% and conversion rates by 10%.
On the flip side, in a recent survey, 74% of people get frustrated when content isn’t tailored to their interests.
Dynamic content, or smart content as it’s also known, is a rising star within the lead generation world.
Giving people the information and offers they want to see will help drive sales through the roof!