In this day and age, it’s hard to imagine a business without a website. Websites are an integral part of communicating with your audience, informing them about new products and services and showcasing what you currently offer.
But websites can be so much more than just a digital storefront. Creating a website to generate leads is a powerful technique that can give you a competitive advantage by throwing more leads into your sales funnel, allowing your sales team to work their magic.
While generating leads via a website involves more than sticking in a ‘sign up here’ button, it is relatively simple, as you’ll see in our step-by-step guide below.
What is a Lead Generation Website?
A lead generation website captures important information about your website visitors. This is usually information that can help keep you in touch, such as name and email address. But depending on the nature of your business, lead generation websites can go much further than that.
They can collect information such as age, gender, and even a person’s income bracket, helping you to personalize future marketing.
You can dedicate the whole of your site to lead generation, or just a page as part of your main website, depending on your business needs. Ultimately, a lead generation website aims to help you turn leads into customers and repeat customers and it will usually include a range of CTAs to catch site visitors at the right moment.
What Makes a Good Lead-Generation Website?
Before we look at the tools needed to make a good lead generation website, let’s consider the type of website that works well in enticing users. Of course, a lead generation website should load fast, be mobile friendly, and be safe and secure, but there are other things to consider.
Build trust
Asking website visitors to hand over personal details will be more successful if they trust your company and product. If they haven’t used you before, there are a few ways you can try and build up trust, such as:
Including customer testimonials
Having star ratings
Showcasing kudos from other businesses or media.
Use exciting copy
The aim here is to keep the user reading for as long as possible. The more time they spend engaging with your website, the more likely they will be to complete your lead generation form. The fact they’ve visited your website suggests they have a general interest in what you have to offer. It’s your job, now, to use the right language to convince them to keep in touch.
Identifying a need for your product can help you write copy that creates a sense of urgency for the buyer. Showing you understand a customer’s problem and then demonstrating how your product or service can help solve it is a powerful tool in generating leads.
Be clear and easy to use
Websites that are too cluttered and poorly laid out can put a user off. Similarly, if CTAs are hard to spot, you could miss potential leads (or rather, they could miss you). Instead, think about how to draw the eye with attention-grabbing headlines, clean copy, crisp images, and clear instructions on what you want people to do.
Comply with data privacy regulations
It’s important to remember that when you generate leads, you’re collecting personal data, which in many countries, is protected by law. It’s important to remember to check data privacy regulations for the regions(s) you’re targeting.
How to Generate Leads from a Website
Once your website is ready, there are several ways in which to generate leads. Almost 50% of marketers recognize that web forms are their highest-converting lead generation tool, but how do we encourage people to complete the form?
Use a lead magnet
Lead magnets involve offering something for free in exchange for handing over personal information. This could be a free makeup tutorial on a cosmetic brand’s ecommerce site, a free ebook on debt management leads’ website, or a free gardening guide for spring on a local garden center’s website.
Once a user has completed the form, you will usually send the free document to their email along with an introductory/follow-up email.
Offer free consultations
This is a popular strategy of giving away something quite valuable, for free. Free consultations offer no risk and are non-obligatory, allowing both you and the customer to see whether or not you’re a good match to work together, as well as allowing you the chance to make a pitch. Solicitors often offer this service, as do therapists, hairdressers, and tradespeople.
Free consultations may not always lead to an instant sign-up, but they can paint you/your company as an expert in your field and help you or your staff create a personal relationship with a potential client.
Use discount codes and coupons
A too-good-to-miss deal is often irresistible. Most websites will use a pop-up window to showcase the deal, meaning it’s hard to accidentally miss the offer. It’s a great way to entice new customers to make a purchase as well as handing over their information.
Offer free trials
Free trials, such as ‘Sign up for 3 months and get your first month free’ are great lead magnets for subscription services. Signing up for a new subscription can feel risky as a customer, so allowing a free month with an option to cancel can encourage more people to join and see if your product or service is for them.
How to build a lead generation website
Okay, so you know what your website should be like and how you’ll collect leads, but how do you build the actual website? In the past, it would have cost a fortune to hire a web developer to design and build a website, but fortunately, there are plenty of easy-to-use web creation tools available today, which means working with an expert is not necessary. Here’s what you need to consider.
Establish your goal
Having a clear goal in mind before you build your website is important.
Obviously, you aim to generate leads, but you’ll need to dig deeper than that by considering the following questions:
What is our USP?
What kind of leads do we want?
What type of information do we want to collect?
How will we collect data?
How will we engage our visitors?
How will we use the information?
Select popular keywords your target market uses
Conducting keyword research can highlight what your audience is looking for. This can help you create content using relevant keywords, making SEO work better, and improving your organic reach.
Knowing what your audience searches for can also help give you an idea of how to build your website in terms of what to include, so it’s important to take the time to do the research.
At this point, you may even want to consider the right domain name to use, too, as this can help target specific countries (.co.uk for the UK, for example, or .it for Italy) or even interests, such as .ai to indicate an AI company.
Choose a website platform
From free platforms such as WordPress that are fairly easy to use to paid-for platforms or even bespoke solutions, there is a range of options when it comes to website platforms. Most of these will enable you to select a template and theme, so it’s important to keep your brand in mind.
Whichever option you choose, it’s important to start building your homepage with these key elements:
Attention-grabbing headline
A few sentences of engaging copy
Bullet point to emphasize key benefits
An eye-catching image of your product
A strong CTA button
The other pages of your website can be used to provide more information and interesting copy but remember, each page should have at least one strong CTA.
Many website platforms can offer some level of UX support, but it’s important to consider more in-depth strategies for UX website design, too, as this can help improve the user experience.
Consider how you’ll handle leads
If you’re generating leads through your website, it’s important to have a CMS tool to help manage those leads effectively. Inconsistencies in lead handling can lose you potential customers.
Good CRM tools include built-in optimizations geared toward lead generation. Usually, they include forms (sign-up, contact, etc.), email marketing capabilities, live chat, and analytics so that lead generation can be tracked. This can help even novice IT users build an effective lead-generation website.
It may also be necessary to look at how to start a virtual call center, as this is a great way to scale up your operations as leads start to increase.
Building an effective lead generation website may sound complex but it is generally a straightforward process if you follow the steps above. While there’s a lot to consider in terms of building trust, SEO, copywriting, and imagery, there are plenty of tools available to help.
However, the work doesn’t end there. While creating an effective lead generation website is a key part of data capture, it’s not the complete process. Your next steps will involve putting measures in place to drive traffic to your website.
Want to learn more about website design, optimisation and user experience? Take a look at one of our Ironhack UX/UI courses!
