Building A Better Lead Generation Website
Great Internet marketing campaigns are made, not born.
Even though it’s appealing to think of a successful campaign as something that just springs from inspiration, the truth is that behind the scenes, there’s complex machinery that must be kept in proper working order all the time to make it successful. Among Internet marketing companies, few have spent as much time dissecting and studying successful campaigns and lead generation websites as Straight North. This intense study has given us a unique understanding of what goes into a high performance lead generation website behind the scenes. No matter how good your product or service is, or how attractive your website looks to the eye, your website absolutely needs to have certain aspects under the hood if it’s ever going to perform the way you need to generate leads.
The following presentation outlines these critical elements that all high performance lead generation websites have in common. They fit into five main categories: usability, mobile design, SEO, copywriting and conversion.
Usability
For example, responsive web design improves your site’s usability by adjusting it automatically to the type of display your customers use. This keeps them comfortable using the site no matter what type of device they use.
Mobile Design
Responsive web design also incorporates features that make mobile browsing easier, such as sticky navigation bars that stay at the top of the screen as users scroll through the site. Visitors expect a website to function as well on their smartphone screens as they do on their desktops.
SEO
Sites with strong SEO typically are built using advanced keyword research. They also feature sitemaps to ensure there are no overlaps or gaps in keyword coverage anywhere on the site. Custom title tags, written by an SEO expert, are another key feature of sites with strong SEO.
Copywriting
Copywriting also is extremely important for lead generation. It must combine authority, relevance and persuasiveness in a format that users can read easily and share with others. If website copy features jargon or shifts between styles, readers can become confused and navigate away from the page.
Conversion
Once these elements are in place, the final step is converting the visitor. Successful lead generation websites are those that feature strong calls to action, and provide visitors with easy-to-use forms as well as a prominently placed phone number. Once visitors convert, however, it can be difficult to know which ones are true sales leads and which ones visited for other reasons. This is why a lead validation process can be a vital addition to a lead generation campaign, because it provides marketers with more detailed information about exactly how many sales leads were generated and from where they came.
Final Thoughts
Your site might already perform well in one or more of these categories, but unless you have all five of them firing in sync, you’ll never get the performance out of it that you need. Consult the following presentation to see how these various elements come together to form a complete and fully functional lead generation website.
featured image credit: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/one+photo
Brad Shorr is Director of Content Strategy at Straight North, a B2B Internet marketing agency in Chicago. With more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience, Shorr has been featured in leading online publications including Moz, Entrepreneur and Forbes.
