In this blog, Jon Brown, Senior PR Account Manager at Huble Digital, explains why a website might not be generating leads. If your website is failing to meet your expectations, the tips in this blog could help. Give it a read!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working in digital marketing, it’s this: websites are incredibly tricky to get right, even at the best of times.
From choosing the domain name to selecting which image should go on the homepage, every minor detail can affect a website’s ability to generate leads.
And this is especially true when it comes to B2B websites.
Due to the longer sales cycles in B2B, the website plays an incredibly important role in lead generation, helping convince people to convert.
It may be that you’ve thought of everything when it comes to building your website. So why isn’t it generating leads?
Your website is poorly designed
When it comes to website design, the user experience (UX) is almost everything. Eye-catching visuals, simple navigation, relevant content and prominent calls-to-action (CTAs) will attract, engage and convert website visitors.
Here’s an example – imagine you were in a shop looking for something. You walk around but everything’s a bit dull and you can’t see what you need. So, what do you do? You leave.
The same applies to your website. If it’s unappealing and users can’t navigate your pages, they’ll simply go somewhere else.
Your website needs to be fast, clear and easily accessible, while your most valuable proposition, product or solution needs to be front and centre, available for visitors to click on and find out more.
Try testing out different layouts and CTA placements to figure out what works best for engagement. Once the basics are sorted, then you can move onto the next steps.
You have no content
In the digital-first era, your website meets prospects long before you do, which means your website is now your first and best sales tool.
But prospects would rather search for tools and solutions themselves than be approached by a salesperson. With this in mind, you need to catch your prospects’ attention – and content is a big part of doing so.
Find out what kind of content you need to generate leads!
However, if you have no content for website visitors to engage with – or the content you have doesn’t answer their main questions – how will you convert website visitors into leads?
How can you solve the problem?
As well as understanding what content you need, it needs to speak directly to your prospects (your buyer persona work will help here), addressing the key questions they’re looking for answers to.
Downloadable assets such as eBooks, case studies and white papers are obvious lead generators, but there are other forms of lead-generating content that can help.
Pillar pages, for example, are certainly worth doing. Start by identifying the topics you want to rank for and create pillar pages for each.
You’ll also want to do a quick keyword scan to see the search volumes for the topics you want to write about and what others are talking about. Make sure these topics use specific keywords, as this will increase your search engine authority and chances of being found on results pages.
Once you have chosen your topics and created search engine optimised pillar pages for them, start creating cluster content (blogs) to link to and from your pillar pages. These blogs should cover aspects of the pillar page in greater detail.
For example, if your pillar page was on Inbound Marketing, it should have a short segment on the buyer journey and buyer personas – and linked to this segment should be a blog on the buyer journey and buyer personas.
You have no lead generation software
Once you’ve created your content, you need to get it in front of your prospects to drive conversions. But this can take time and effort, especially if you have no tools in place to manage the process.
This is where lead generation software can help, as it’s designed to help grow your business by automating labour-intensive manual processes and allow you to focus on other business critical activities.
Take HubSpot, for example – with it you have access to landing pages, forms, pop-up forms, live chat and chatbots, all of which can be used to support your lead generation activity.
You could create and configure a pop-up form that’s only shown to website visitors without a lead status, for example. This pop-up form could include any content asset or even be a request for the visitor to sign up to your blog (as that’s a conversion, too).
It’s no longer viable for businesses to have teams directly involved in website lead generation. Once potential leads are on the website, it’s on the lead generation software to do its bit to help support sales and marketing teams while they focus on other important tasks.
Website lead generation doesn’t have to be painful
Whether you’re refocusing your current website or starting fresh, all three of these points will help you boost your website lead generation.
It’s important to think about getting the basics right first before you start to optimise and aim for perfection.
But, of course, once they become a lead, the next thing is to turn them into customers!
