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If your company is like most, you're looking for ways for your website to work harder for you.
As you think about gaining leverage in your lead generation efforts, we've identified three B2B lead generation strategies you can employ to get more leads (and customers) from your website. These strategies are driving traffic, lead optimization and conversion optimization.
Strategy #1: Drive more traffic
We've talked before about making your website a customer magnet, and the same rules apply here. To attract more prospective customers and drive new traffic to your website, your website content has to have value to your prospects.
When you write content for your website, it's important to answer your customers questions as well as to optimize your content for the search terms that your customers are likely searching for.
All else equal, more visitors to your website equals more leads. Of course, you need to get qualified visitors, so that's where keyword research comes into play.
Perhaps the best free way to do keyword research is to use the Google keyword tool, which is a tool marketers use to find out how many people are searching the Web for certain keywords and phrases. Use this tool to enter words or phrases that you think your customers might be searching when they're looking for products/services similar to yours.
Our favorite keyword tool is HubSpot's Keyword Tool, which allows you to add keywords to a portfolio, understand how much traffic you're already getting from those keywords, what your current search engine rank is for those keywords, and suggestions for what to write about in order to get better search engine rankings.
In a pinch, an expensive alternative is to pay for search engine listings by advertising on Google Adwords. Only pay for search engine advertising if:
- Your website is new
- You're just starting your search engine optimization efforts and need an instant lift in traffic
You can spend (and waste) a lot of money very quickly on Google Adwords, so be very careful to set your budgets appropriately and monitor your ads daily.
You may also want to read "7 Ways to Drive Quality Traffic to Your Website" if you're looking for a list of tactics to get more website visitors and raise awareness. You can also download our free guide to creating a magnetic website to learn more about getting more visits to your website.
Tactics to drive more traffic include:
- Using social media to promote your content
- Blogging to address customer questions and concerns and to build credibility/trust
- Search engine optimization (SEO) to build visitors over time
- Paid search to get an instant bump in website traffic (at a cost, of course)
Strategy #2: Optimize for more leads
Lead optimization is the process of analyzing your website to create easy "paths" for customers to follow, ultimately ending in a lead. It's also one of our favorite B2B lead generation strategies because you can optimize your existing website using existing assets.
Check Out The Ultimate Guide to B2B Lead Generation
The optimization process can involve web design, copywriting and the organization of the pages on your website. The most important thing, though, is to know your target customer. Creating detailed customer personas will help you envision your customers as you design and write for their web experience.
Answering the following questions about your target audience will help you create a more compelling experience:
- Who are they (job titles, seniority, etc.)?
- What do they care about most (budgets, approval from upper management, mitigating risk in a purchase decision)?
- How do they use the Web to find information?
- What are their purchase criteria for your product or service?
Once you know your customer, you can evaluate each page on your website to determine the appropriate intent of the page. By taking a detailed look at every page on your website you'll start to think about which target audience that page is intended for, and how you'll get them to become a lead.
Tactics to optimize your website for more leads include:
- Persona development
- Conversion paths
- SEO audit
- Creating calls to action
- Creation of landing pages
Strategy #3: Convert leads to customers
Once you have leads, you have to sell them on your product or service. Many B2B companies accomplish this with a dedicated sales staff, but if you're working a high volume of leads, even that becomes difficult. Enter marketing automation, a way to nurture leads and to help shape their buying decision.
For example:
- You work for a software firm selling licenses on a yearly basis and offer a free trial of the software.
- Rather than have your sales staff work every new lead you get, you might put automated lead nurturing emails in place.
- In doing this, you might send them helpful tips about your software product, answer frequently asked questions, highlight helpful features or offer to speak to someone about the software during the free trial.
- You put a lead scoring system in place to help you understand the quantity and value of interactions that customers have with your product or service.
- When the free trial of your software is over, you have a prioritized list of prospects to follow up with in person. The higher the lead score, the higher priority the lead.
Tactics for converting leads to customers include:
- Lead nurturing
- Trigger emails
- Lead scoring
