An effective inbound marketing campaign involves more than simply generating traffic to your website: it also means optimising your website for lead generation.
You may be getting plenty of traffic, but if it’s not resulting in leads or engagement, you need to do something about it.
What you need is an inbound marketing makeover, and here are five steps that will ensure you increase your chances of converting every visitor.
1) Check Your Analytics
The first thing any inbound marketing expert will tell you is that before you start optimising your site for leads, you need to know how it is performing.
That involves using your analytics software (the free Google Analytics is the most popular) and finding out what’s working so you can benchmark your current efforts.
Where are you getting the most leads?
Which product pages are converting?
Which blog posts are generating sign-ups?
This will give you a good idea of what is working – and what’s not – and this allows you to form a plan. Check out this awesome guide from Moz as a starting place!
2) Optimise What’s Already Working
After you’ve done the basic research, it’s time to tweak. There’s often no need to start from scratch because you might already have solid foundations in place. It’s just the implementation that’s the problem, and that’s where an inbound marketing expert can help.
Let’s say you’ve already got an email sign-up form offering your latest white paper in exchange for your visitor’s name and email. It’s a great report, and you’re getting conversions, but they are lower than they should be.
So try changing something up, such as the call to action copy. Instead of a bland ‘Submit’, try ‘Download My Free White Paper’. Writing call to action copy in the first person often works better and generates a conversion bump.
But you could equally change the forms:
placement
colours
font
sub-heading
All the details can make a difference, and a few small tweaks here and there might be all that you need.
3) Change What’s Not Working
Where things are not working, it’s time for some more drastic changes.
If you currently use a sign-up form at the end of your blog posts that fails to generate leads, create content upgrades instead. Provide free reports, bonus tips and other high-value content directly related to the blog topic, and use a click pop-up to sign up visitors directly within the blog post.
Experiment with other types of pop-ups, such as an entry pop-up or an exit pop-up. Web users often complain about how annoying these are, but the fact is they often work.
Create a new offer that is relevant to your audience. Although this may sound simple, you must understand who your audience are. Try brainstorming what their problems are and create your content around solving these problems. This will help create your future content as well as solve your customer’s problems!
Place a sign-up form above the fold of your website where no one can miss it, rather than hiding it somewhere further down the page.
Or perhaps you need more social proof in the form of testimonials and case studies, which will help to boost trust – a crucial factor when generating leads.
4) Create Dedicated Landing Pages
Consider launching dedicated landing pages for your products and offers. These are pages that are created for one purpose: to generate leads.
Optimize your landing page for conversions by:
Creating a compelling headline
Using clear and simple design
Not including any links to other pages
Placing directional cues like arrows to lead your targets to the CTA
Making your sign-up form stand out from the rest of the page
Adding testimonials
Displaying trust symbols such as associations you belong to
Also make sure you have good message match, meaning the copy on your ads that you use to send people to your landing page closely matches the copy on your landing page.
5) Test Continuously
Once you’ve gone through all of the above … the work is just getting started. The secret to successful conversion rate optimisation is to constantly test.
Even if you’re getting impressive conversion rates, you can always increase them.
A/B testing is the best way to do this. This is where you test a new version of your page against the original (the ‘control’) by changing a single element and seeing what difference it makes.
It may lead to even lower conversions, but if it increases conversions, that means more leads – and potentially more sales.
Maximize Your Leads
Continuous testing and optimizing is the secret to successful conversion rate optimization. So experiment, and don’t be afraid to try something new. Even a small increase in your conversion rate could translate to many more leads, and that could have a big impact on your bottom line.
So give your site an inbound marketing makeover and start generating more leads – download our free guide to inbound marketing now!