Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Magnet with CRO

Your website is the digital face of your company. It is most likely the first, or second, place a prospect will go to find the information they are looking for. And while that information may be plentiful with many content pieces, they may still not be ready to reach out and talk to someone. So, how do you optimize your conversion rate?

Is the only page on your site where someone can learn more about you a “Contact” page? Do you offer your site visitors other ‘places’ to convert from a simple visitor into a lead – marketing or sales – that you can nurture?

Let’s check out these 4 ways you can turn your website into a lead gen machine and increase your B2B marketing conversion rate.

 

#1: Sprinkle Calls to Action Throughout Your Site

Calls-to-action (also known in marketing speak as CTAs) are prompts on a website that tells the visitor to take some specified action. Typically written as a command or an action verb, a CTA generally takes the form of a button or text hyperlink. It serves to keep your visitors moving along on their journey to conversion.

An effective CTA will ultimately draw your visitors’ attention and piques their interest. Then, it smoothly guides them through a form submission or purchase process.

Conversion optimization is the art of increasing your website traffic and engaging your visitors in a way that influences and encourages action. Ultimately, this action will result in a qualified lead or a conversion into a new customer. Watch this whiteboard video to get a high-level understanding of how this works and which digital strategies impact the process:

 

 

CTAs not only keep the reader engaged, but they should also lead to pages that are ‘gated’ in order to view specific, high-quality educational content. By gating content, you’re requesting a simple email, a name, and other information in order to view the content.

This content needs to be of extreme value to the visitor such as calculators, data-driven white papers, webinar signup or recordings, and more. It’s essential to make the reader want to provide you with pieces of their personal information.

 

#2: Determine and Follow Along Your Customer’s Journey Map

Some of your prospects may reach out to talk to you quickly. Others may take their time and do a lot of research on your company – and your competitors – before they’re ready and willing to fill out a form and/or chat with someone.

While each potential customer will have a different path to purchase, they can follow similar paths to purchase. A customer journey map lays out these paths to purchase based on audience needs, pain points, challenges, and other motivating factors. It allows you to identify where prospects are searching, their mindset, feelings, and frequently asked questions.

These items will be important based on where they are in their own journey. Whether it be awareness, consideration, decision, or post-purchase, we all go through the journey in nearly every purchase we make.

For example, if you are thinking about buying toothpaste, the journey may be very quick. It could just be based on cost, functionality, or brand. However, if you are thinking of whitening your teeth, the path may be a bit longer. You could simply choose a whitening toothpaste or consider using something a bit more involved like strips, trays, or going to a cosmetic dentist.

While this is a simple example and a customer journey for your service or product may be a lot more complex, the same principles apply. By determining that journey, you can anticipate their needs to help allow for a quicker conversion and path to purchase. And a quicker conversion rate can help to increase revenue.

 

 

#3: Track User Behavior with Heatmapping

If you’ve never heard of heatmapping, you definitely need to check it out. There are many tools available and some even have free subscriptions (with more limited functionality, of course). Heatmapping is extremely insightful when trying to fully understand just how users interact with your web pages – both on mobile and on desktop devices.

Heatmaps show where people click, where their mouse is most often, and what’s ‘hot’ on your website. The more ‘heat’ on a page, CTA, video, or other assets, the more your audience is interacting with it.

Once heatmapping is installed and running long enough to collect data, check it out. We recommend gathering at least 100 unique visitors before analyzing your results. See what visitors are interacting with. Learn where you are losing them as they scroll down a page. Understand if there are links in your navigation that people tend to click on most.

Is your audience mostly clicking on your About page? Your Services or Products? Once you get this deeper dive into your audience, you can learn a lot about what they want – not just what you think they want.

 

#4: Consider Adjusting Your Site’s Information Architecture

Information architecture – also known as an IA – focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help visitors find the information they seek and move them along their customer journey. It is a blueprint that includes the navigation, application functions and behaviors, content, and flows.

As mentioned above, installing heatmapping helps you truly understand what site pages are most important to your audience, not necessarily to you. Yes, of course, there was a lot of due diligence and research on how a site should be structured, but that does not always mean it is correct.

Not interested in heatmapping? Check out the Google Analytics on your site. Look at behavior flows and learn where you are losing people along the way. What pages are getting the most traffic? Why is that the case? Where are these pages as a part of your IA?

By asking yourself the right questions, you can learn a lot about your users and what is most important to them. Keep in mind, too, that this will change over time.

 

Start Optimizing Your Site for Conversions

The 4 ways listed above are just the tip of the iceberg. The way in which a prospect converts depends on the audience and what they are looking for. Wondering if your website is converting your prospects into customers?

You may need a solid CRO strategy to increase your revenue, help grow your business, and reduce the cost of customer acquisition. Let us provide you with a free CRO analysis to ensure that your prospects are gaining value from your website.