Lead generation and conversion rates are some of the most important aspects of your website and are crucial for generating online business. You can focus your entire marketing strategy around lead generation and come up with a campaign that generates interest by the bucket loads. However, if those leads don’t turn into customers, then something has to give!
Many companies focus on lead generation as a priority and place its importance right at the centre of their marketing strategies. B2B marketers in particular rely on a multitude of channels to generate inbound leads. In 2021, it’s all about focusing on high-quality content and excellent user experience. Why? Because both of these elements focus greatly on what the user wants. The user wants to read valuable and relevant content whilst navigating around your website seamlessly and efficiently. This includes a nicely optimised site for mobile users which is quick to load.
These are the elements that are converting top-of-funnel visitors who are coming to your website into converted customers. And the stats don’t lie. Hubspot reported that approximately 54% more leads are actually generated by inbound marketing rather than paid methods!
As we are learning to deal with Covid-19 and are seeing business patterns shift back to normal, we have put together a list of ideas that can help you increase the all-important conversion rate of your website to maximise user experience!
Place your call-to-action in people’s natural eye line
While this may seem like a pretty obvious statement, not many companies actually take the time to put their main CTA in the right place to generate interest and enquiries.
It is best practice to place your CTA above the fold. It is still important to tweak and test which CTA placement has the most impact on your website. A study of how people read websites shows that placing your primary CTA in the top right of your site – directly across from your company name has actually generated the most success.
As the reader reads across the top of your website, the CTA should grab their attention.
Keep this in mind when you’re placing your CTAs, especially on your homepage and your other popular web pages.
Your homepage is probably the most important page on your website. It will most certainly have the most traffic coming to it… especially if you have been promoting your brand/message across other channels.
So a simple add-on tip for this point is simply to constantly be reviewing and updating your homepage. Does your homepage reflect your message well? With great calls to action, concise copy, and a message that is completely reflective of the business you are – you can’t go wrong with conversion.
Make your website easily navigable and easy to use
We cannot stress enough how important user experience is in 2021. From a conversion perspective, you are never going to be able to convert a user into a customer if they are waiting a crazy amount of time for every page to load! Or even a single page to load. The most likely scenario is the consumer will bounce off your website and never return. Soar Online can check the speed of your website on mobile and desktop, whilst providing recommendations on how to speed it up.
Almost 70% of online visitors have stated that page speed directly affects their willingness to buy from an e-commerce website. Listen to the people, people.
Don’t be afraid to use pop-up forms & slide-in forms
While many consider pop-ups to be an irritant if they are used in the correct way they can be a fantastic tool – rather than a disruption to your readers.
If you want to use a pop-up or slide-in form, remember that you need to make it relevant and valuable to the user. If they are reading a blog for example it may be worth using a pop-up once they have read a certain percentage of the content.
Or if a user has spent a certain amount of time on a particular page/product a pop-up that offers discounts could help earn new business.
The most important takeaway here is to align what you offer on a pop-up with the webpage you’re adding it to, and make sure it’s actually adding substantial value.
Add relevant anchor text to blog posts that align closely with your offers
Many blogs already include a CTA at the end of the post to try and entice the reader to click through to a product or offer.
And while these have proven to be an effective tool, they can occasionally seem like advertisements which lead to users ignoring them. One to avoid this is to place call-to-actions in the anchor text of your blog/post.
So if your website is based around press releases, the first thing that’ll catch your eye is an anchor text that reads, “Download our free press release template here” in the anchor text of one of your posts.
If you decide you’d like to experiment with anchor text CTAs, be selective about the posts you add them to.
Support new marketing campaigns with a blog post
Whenever you launch a new campaign it is imperative that you support it with a feel-good blog. This can help grab the attention of your existing users by providing them with all the information they need on your new products or services.
Following up your initial post with a number of smaller related posts, published over a number of weeks. This will help keep the campaign fresh in the minds of everyone who visits your blog and also provides great additional content for your site.
The goal here is to expose your audience to more content related to the offer and to reach a new audience: specifically, people who were searching for related topics on search engines
When you’re planning out your next campaign, be sure to include both a launch post and supportive, follow-up blog posts.
Blogging i.e. adding content to your website is a marketing strategy used by the vast majority of B2B marketers now. Blogs should not only accompany your other marketing campaigns but in itself be a strategy to pump time, energy, and resources into. It is obvious how content creation generates leads but how to does it help with conversion? It gives your brand a voice. The power of a strong brand voice cannot be quantified nor underestimated. A potential customer will consider buying from you if you appear an absolute authority in your industry.
Strategically use social media as part of your campaign
Social media is an extremely powerful tool for generating leads and increasing conversion rate optimisation for your site.
Posting blog posts to sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook is one of the most common ways to generate leads but also posting with links directly to the landing pages of offers that have historically performed well for lead generation.
But remember the social media post should let people know they are clicking to a landing page.
Social media competitions are another great way to generate leads, they are fun for the audience, expose your brand to a wider audience and bring more traffic to websites.
Hopefully, these tips will come in handy for your website.
Create a flawless landing page
A landing page is a page on your website that seeks to solve one singular issue. Its whole purpose is to complete a goal. That goal may be data collection, getting a web visitor to sign up for something, or completing a sale.
Don’t just create your landing page never to be touched again! You must test. Test the design, the elements, the calls-to-actions, length of copy, position of copy, and when you’re done… test them all again! If consumers have willingly found themselves sliding down the lead funnel which you have created for them, an excellent landing page should tip them into the conversion bucket!
