You’ve launched a website. Fantastic!

You’re excited. It’s a work of art. It went through countless revisions, the board got involved, legal weren’t happy and the lead developer quit (Gavin, nice guy).

But despite all that, it’s live 🎉. 

Naturally you’ve told everyone - your partner, children, friends… the lady at the checkout in Sainsbury’s.

So now you sit and wait for the leads to roll in. It’s a work of art, remember? Surely any minute now the floodgates will open and voila! Leads.

But nothing happens. No magic influx of sales-ready contacts. Just the same number of users browsing a prettier website and then leaving. 

It’s a bit frustrating* but it’s not a complete disaster. You just missed a few opportunities to make your website a powerful lead generation tool. 

​​*Actually it’s really frustrating. Blame the board. Or Gavin, who isn’t even here to defend himself.

Here’s how to fix it 👇🏼

Building a lead-generating website 

If you’re after the quick version: 

1. Attract the right people.
2. Don’t sell, give. 
3. Interact with visitors on their terms.
4. Provide lots of opportunities to convert. 
5. Never stop improving.
6. And FINALLY… nurture your leads until they’re ready to purchase. 

Or simply give us a call and we’ll audit your website free of charge.

1. Attract the right people.

Inbound marketing focuses on attracting the right people to your company. One of the best ways to do this is by creating content through blogging.

5 steps to writing a winning blog

1. First, work out who the “right people” are, think about their job title, pain points, and which social media accounts they use.
2. SEO research - learn what they’re searching for.
3. Write - make your content helpful by solving a problem they have.
4. Publish - publish the blog on your website.
5. Promote - shout about your blog on social media and via email to increase traffic.

👉🏼 View: The FINALLY guide to creating buyer personas

2. Don’t sell, give.

Cutting your own hair, becoming a homebrew hobbyist, converting a van into a camper and escaping British suburbia - it all seems a bit more doable thanks to the wealth of information available online.  

If you sell haircuts, beer or caravans then you might be nervous about all this information being available for free. And sure, some will go it alone and share a communal shower in Normandy with a terrible haircut and a Ford Transit full of s**t beer. But they weren’t going to buy from you anyway. 

This desire to do our own online research is just as apparent in B2B sales. The majority of offline B2B sales are influenced online. And for many B2B purchasers, the last point of influence is digital.

Providing ‘top of the funnel’ content will help prospects find you earlier in their journey. A search for “how can automation help reduce overheads?” could result in the sale of a new automation system. Likewise, “how to optimise metal removal rates?” could turn into sales of tooling or machinery.

On top of that, by educating your audience, you are positioning yourself as a thought leader - something which 89% of c-suite execs say enhances their perceptions of a brand.

3. Interact with visitors on their terms.

We live in a world where people want answers to their questions immediately. When it comes to your website, you can address this sense of urgency with live chat.

How to introduce live chat on your website:

1. Use Google Analytics to find out when visitors are browsing your site.
2. Out of hours? Use a chatbot to provide information and answer questions.
3. Tailor your chatbot to each page (never have “can I help you” across all your pages!).
4. Train your sales team to pick up and respond to messages.

👉🏼 Read: Use conversational marketing to grow your engineering customers

4. Provide lots of opportunities to convert. 

Having a contact form is useful, but if it’s all you’ve got you’re missing lots of opportunities for visitors to make themselves known.

They might not be ready to fill in a contact form, but give them a handy guide about something they’re interested in and they may just give up their details to get it. Once they have, you can warm them up until they’re ready to speak to you. 

Quick ways to increase conversion opportunities: 

1. Start with a basic CTA on your homepage.
2. Add forms to the pages that get the most traffic.
3. Offer white papers for download on specific blog posts.
4. Qualify visitors via live chat.
5. Remove unnecessary form fields.
6. Allow visitors to book meetings into your diary through tools like HubSpot.

5. Never stop improving.

Launching your website is the beginning, not the end. Leaving it to get stale like an old loaf would be a waste of the time and money you’ve put into it so far. This isn’t just about keeping information on your products and services up to date, but a constant effort to measure, review and optimise in order to increase conversions.

How to optimise your website: 

1. A/B test your landing pages.
2. Personalise content for your visitors.
3. Measure the performance of each lead generator.
4. Optimise each step of the lead generation process.
5. Test, test, test.

👉🏼Read: Your basic guide to A/B testing

6. ... and FINALLY: nurture your leads until they’re ready to purchase. 

Don’t jump on someone the second they part with their details. If all they’ve done is download a white paper, chances are they’re not ready to speak to a sales agent. 

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore them. We recommend an inbound marketing approach to warming up new leads to the point that they are sales ready. By staying visible and helpful, but not pushy, you’re keeping your company at the forefront of their minds. When they’re ready to purchase, it’ll be you they contact.

👉🏼 Read: The what, why and how of multi-channel marketing for manufacturing

And that’s it! Easy 🤥.