Sitting on your website right now are a million and one opportunities to generate and capture leads and fill your marketing troves with potential customers. Okay, while maybe a million and one is a bit of an exaggeration (give us a break, we’re creatives!), there are A LOT. And at the end of the day, most customers aren’t going to come knocking with all their contact information written in a love note. They will, however, give it to you if you ask nicely, speak to their heart and offer real value. But how do you know what they want to hear? How do you want what they value? And once you do, how do you use that information to fill your basket with juicy leads? That, my friend, is what we’re diving into today. So let’s get started.
Do Your Research
We’re really starting to feel like a broken record with this one (which you totally know because you totally read all our posts, right?), but it’s worth repeating. Research on the front end will make your leg work in the long run much simpler and smoother. To generate good content your leads will want to invest in, you first need to know what they are looking for. Start by asking yourself, “Self, what problems does my product solve? What pain am I easing?” Once you have an idea of what those pain points are, it’s time to do your keyword research. What are those potential leads typing into Google as they look for solutions to their issues? Make a small but succinct list to include as you speak to those pain points.
Make Sure Your Content Doesn’t Suck
Too harsh? It seems like a silly piece of advice to give, but based on the sheer volume of sucky content floating around the web on a daily basis, it seems worth stating. It doesn’t matter if you answer those pain points or even do your keyword research if leads are being bored into slumber when they land on your page. Create content that speaks to their interests, doesn’t sound like an encyclopedia (unless they’re in to that sort of thing), and offers real value. This will keep them on your pages longer and increase your conversion chances. By the way, when we say have good content, we don’t just mean on the web page itself. It’s also a great idea to have content offers available to your leads. These little bits of gold offer you the chance to serve your customer, create trust, and capture their information in exchange for the download. Make sure these kind of valuable pages are easy to find. Just like you wouldn’t hang priceless art in a closet, you shouldn’t be burying your most precious pages deep down in your site.
A Blog a Day Keeps the Crappy Lead Gen Away
Have you been blogging the recommended amount? Ok, maybe it’s not every day, but you should be blogging regularly in order to increase your lead generation. Along with so many other marketing benefits, blogs increase the number of visitors to your pages. Remember all that fancy pants keyword research we did earlier? It’s relevant here, too. Be sure to create posts around content topics and clusters that relate back to those pain points and keywords you’ve got listed. After your content is created and posted to the blog, the real lead gen begins. It’s time to take that content and break it out into a bevy of social media posts. Think of this as the spotlight you’ll install to shine on that priceless artwork of yours. Draw attention to your blog by breaking social media posts into different pull quotes from the blog, images, statistics, even comments from readers.
Include Landing Pages and Lead Capture Forms
Like we briefly mentioned above, forms and landing pages are some of the best ways to generate valuable leads for your business. Whenever you have a new resource, event, or freebie, don’t just stick it on a product page with a download button. Use the opportunity to create a unique landing page with a lead capture form. This will allow you to gather real intel on your leads, as well as qualify them. Ask for valuable tidbits like email, title, first name, etc. Most users are used to these lead capture forms today and are typically willing to trade this
information for your resource, especially when you’ve written well researched, valuable content. Be careful, though. It’s not the time to go asking them for their whole life story. A few fields is best, we suggest keeping it around two or three. Remember, you can always get more later.
How are you using your website right now to capture leads? A little? A lot? Less than not at all? We know it may seem like a lot to take on, which is why we suggest creating a S.M.A.R.T. goal that will get you there. Want some accountability? Tell us your S.M.A.R.T. goal for upping the lead generation practices on your site in the comments below!
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