For most companies, the primary purpose of their website is to have an online presence where they can provide people information about the company, the products and services, the management team, and a list of clients. While this information is useful from a purely information gathering perspective, it’s generally not enough to get someone to take the next step to contact the company.
By creating an inbound marketing process for your company, you can dramatically increase the number of inbound inquiries for your products and services.
Step 1 – Publish Blog Content Regularly
Publishing interesting and informative blog content on a regular basis around your keywords serves as the foundation for the magnet that’s going to pull in website visitors from the search engines, social networks, and social bookmarking sites.
This process is a marathon and not a sprint and depends much on you knowing what to publish when. Creating an editorial calendar that outlines a list of topics organized by month will keep you focused on producing interesting blog content on a regular basis.
Step 2 – Create Compelling Offers
A compelling offer is anything that you can make available on your website that someone can download in exchange for their contact information. This may include any of the following:
- eBook
- Video
- Whitepaper
- Presentation
- Calculator
- Template
The information contained in the compelling offer needs to benefit your target audience by providing them with a packaged resource that helps them define or solve a specific problem. In many cases, the information contained in your compelling offer may be freely available on the web, but you took the time to compile it, provide an assessment, and package it for easy consumption.
Eliminating all of the research and editing for someone else is certainly valuable.
Step 3 – Design Call to Action Buttons
To make the compelling offers available on your website, you need to have well-designed call to action buttons that you can include at the bottom of blog postings or on your website content.
The call to action buttons need to clearly explain what you want your website visitor to do. Some call to action examples are:
- Download Now
- Learn More
- Join Now
- Sign Up
- Take the Tour
You can include other descriptive text within or around the call to action button, but relative to the surrounding text, the actual call to action should be very prominent.
Step 4 – Build Landing Pages
The bridge that connects the call to action button and the compelling offer is the landing page. Landing pages are usually stripped down versions of a website page that have all navigation removed.
The landing page’s primary purpose is collect information about the website visitor and to convert the website visitor to a lead by providing a clear description of what it is they will receive once they submit their contact info and how it will benefit them.
The most basic contact information you would want to capture from someone is their name and email address. Collecting additional contact information will made your lead qualification process easier, but the more information you want someone to provide, the less likely it is they will complete and submit the form.
You will need to test what information is best to collect from your leads.
Step 5 – Create Confirmation Pages and Emails
The last step is to create a confirmation page that provides website visitors with the ability to view or download the compelling offer. At the same time, be sure to setup an auto-response email that is sent to the lead and contains a link to view or download the compelling offer as well.
Sometimes people become distracted and forget to download the compelling offer, but providing them an alternative way to access it through their email is a good backup measure.
By implementing these five steps, you will drastically increase the number of leads from your website because you’ve given your website visitors a reason to contact you. Repeat this process as many times as you want to test different offers and to optimize conversion rates. Once this is working for you, the purpose of your website will have completely changed.
