Lead generation, lead quality and lead conversion are typically the three most common challenges for most businesses from a marketing and sales perspective. In this article, I'm going to provide a few tips for those asking "how do I generate quality leads to my website?"
Know your target market
If you've read our blog for any length of time, you'll know that we always begin with knowing who your target customer is and what makes them tick. Generating quality leads to your website always begins with attracting the right types of visitors. All visitors are not created equal, so it's important to have a focus on WHO you're working to attract to your website.
The best way to accomplish attracting the right visitors to your website is to perform your buyer persona research. What this is in a nutshell is an outline or profile of your ideal customer. Items you'll want to uncover in your persona research are your target customers:
- Demographic and interest information
- Where they go to find information/places they hang out online
- Goals
- Challenges
- Paint points
- Common objections
- Frequently asked questions
- How you help
Once you really know and understand your target market, you'll be better equipped to create online marketing strategies aimed at attracting the right types of visitors and ultimately, being a step closer to generating quality leads to your website.
Types of traffic
There are a few different types of traffic to your website. Traffic you own, control and don't have full control. Owned traffic is typically those on your email list. Controlled traffic is often the website visitors you pay for such as paid search and online advertising. Traffic you don't necessarily have the most control over are visitors from the search engines or referring websites.
Let's start with traffic you can control. If you want to generate quality leads, then be strategic with the communication to those on your email list. Ensure the information you send is inline with what was discovered in your persona research. Send them content that aligns with your marketing and sales process as well as helps them through the buyers journey in discovering your product or service as a potential solution for them.
Other than the fact that most controlled website traffic costs money, it really can be great traffic because... well, you can control it! What I mean by this is if you consider information found during your persona research, you'll know what keywords prospects might type into the search engines. That can drive your Google AdWords campaign for example. Another example is the demographic, interests and other information you collected. This can be used to drive your Facebook Advertising, ensuring your ads are placed EXACTLY in front of the right audience.
Build a funnel
As I mentioned earlier, you want to build a marketing funnel that mimics your prospects buyers journey. This allows you to attract the right website visitors, and nurture them from being cold traffic to warm, QUALITY LEADS! Create content, automations and retargeting to cover all phases of the funnel - top-of-funnel, middle and bottom-of-funnel. Educate your prospects along the way, helping them sell themselves while you reap the benefits of a staged conversion process and higher quality leads.
Qualify leads with marketing automation
One mistake I often see when first working with new businesses is they commonly only have one type of lead. This alone can cause "low quality" leads because the simple fact that not every "lead" is hot and ready to talk at the moment. If you talk to a prospect too early, you'll deem them as a low quality lead and move it aside, when often times they could be a great lead, but just a little further out in their buying process. This is why it's important to build a marketing funnel that generates prospects and nurtures them to becoming a lead.
One of the best ways to nurture a prospect is through marketing automation. The most common way to accomplish this is to create a lead magnet or top-of-funnel offer that your website visitors will deem valuable enough to trade their name and email for. This initial conversion would trigger an email automation that could last anywhere from a few days or weeks to several months, depending on how long your sales cycle can be. Leverage tools such as ActiveCampaign to help automate communication tasks.
Also, let your marketing automation help you qualify your leads. What I mean by this for example is you can ask your prospects questions along the way, often in your forms as well as taking advantage of learning from their behavior and "scoring" your leads. Once you figure out what would make a quality lead, then you'll know when to pass the lead over to your sales team. This keeps your sales team focused on following-up with hot, quality leads while your marketing systems nurture prospects. Once you build a machine like this, you'll always have a steady stream of quality leads to your website.
There are many ways to improve the quality of leads generated from your website, but the ideas above will make a dramatic and noticeable difference in your lead quality as well as maximize the time you spend working those leads.
If you would like more information on performing persona research and how to structure a content marketing campaign aimed at attracting the right visitors and nurturing them into quality leads, download our free eBook below.
