Inbound lead generation is all about capturing potential clients to your business. It differs from the outbound variation, which focuses on going out and being more in-your-face. There are many elements of a successful B2B inbound marketing strategy, but your website is perhaps one of the most integral.
What role can a website play in B2B inbound lead generation? As it happens, your site is capable of doing a variety of things that help you generate high-quality leads. If used correctly, then your website will help you capture lots of new leads and figure out how to optimize them.
With that in mind, here are some key things to consider with regards to inbound lead generation and your website:
Create & Understand Your Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a representation of the perfect type of customer for your business. You should do tonnes of market research to try and figure out what companies are best-suited to your products/services, and what traits they have.
To do this, you’ll look at different things – like the ideal customer demographic. What are their biggest fears or pain points? Where will your perfect customer live? What gender are they likely to be? How old are they, is it a range? What goals does the company have?
By collecting all of this data, you understand who your business should target. As a result, this changes everything about your website. All the content and material on your site must be geared towards your buyer personas. Therefore, they’re more likely to be intrigued by your site, and the odds of generating inbound B2B leads increases.
Figure Out What Makes Your Business Special
Having clear buyer personas helps you attack the rest of your inbound marketing strategy. The next step is defining your positioning within the market. In essence, what sets your business apart from all the rest? How do your products/services benefit other companies more than what’s already out there? Think about what you’re selling, then look at the buyer personas and consider the main challenges/pain points of your target customers. Ideally, you should target these pain points and talk about how your product/service can solve them.
In doing this, you’re enhancing your brand and showing people how you can help them. Your positioning should be clear to everyone that visits your website. They should understand what you sell, and how it can help solve all of their problems. Not only that, but it should also tell them how you’re different from the other businesses offering a similar thing. Always remember that the niches are the richest. You can’t sell to everyone, think about those brands when you want to develop your position statement, Ferrari, Lumbering, Rolex etc, those brands are not made for everyone.
Inbound Lead Generation Needs Conversion Focused Web Design
Naturally, if you want your website to help with inbound lead generation, then you have to design it for conversion. Too many companies have websites that are basically just digital versions of a print advert or brochure. There’s such a thing as being too corporate, and it makes your site very boring and not that effective.
When people land on your site, they should almost be guided through to become leads. An excellent way to start is with a full-screen pop-up or ‘welcome gate’. This can instantly offer something to your web traffic, encouraging them to provide an email address or to sign up to something. If the offering is good – like a free sample of your service or a free ebook – then you’ll be surprised how many leads you generate right away.
There are too many other aspects of web design that contribute to the conversion. We can’t run through them all, but we can touch on another couple of vital factors. For one, limit the number of choices a visitor has. If you give them too many options to choose from, then they’re less likely to convert. But, if you provide one or two clear options with prominent calls-to-action, then the conversion rate is likely to increase. Secondly, make sure your site looks good and is easy to navigate.
Create Informative & Engaging Content For Your Audience
Content marketing is the best way to generate inbound leads. You can use your website to create content that informs and teaches your potential leads. The best way to do this is through blog posts. Write blogs on topics relating to your industry, and you can give out free advice.
In turn, people will find your articles, love the advice you give, and hold your business in high esteem. It’s a fantastic way to market your company and show off your skills. Your traffic will be engaged as they enjoy the content, but they’re also more likely to follow-up and give you a call or sign up to something when they know you offer valuable information.
Use Digital Marketing To Flood Your Website With More Inbound Leads
Your website won’t play a role in B2B inbound lead generation unless it gets a lot of traffic. So, focus on driving traffic to your website through inbound marketing methods. Improve the SEO of your site to boost your search ranking and improve your visibility. This will help you gain traffic through search engines.
Take to social media and create a presence on various platforms. With an excellent social media content strategy, you can drive more traffic to your website. This is where your buyer personas are essential as they help you figure out which keywords to target for SEO, who to engage with on social media, etc. As a result, you drive targeted traffic to your website, which is more likely to convert.
Find Smart Ways To Capture Your Leads
You must have clear lead capture options on your website. We mentioned the idea of signing up to get something for free, and this is one of the most popular lead capture options out there. But, you could also have a lead capture form at the bottom of each web page where people can fill in their information to get in touch with you.
Another example is a quote request form, or asking people to subscribe to a regular email newsletter. The bottom line is that you must have a way to capture information on your leads.
Use Website Analytics To Improve Your Inbound Lead Generation & Conversion
Keep in mind that websites need constant optimization and improvement! This isn’t a one-time investment. You must continue to check your analytics and tweak things based on your findings. So, it’s beneficial to build your website on a CMS that can help you adjust your content & call to actions in order to capture more leads. This way, it’s easier to keep going back and making alterations on the fly.
By analyzing all of this, you’ll soon see what’s working and what’s not doing the job. For example, your analysis may point to social media as your primary traffic source, so you can focus more attention on that. Or, you notice that most of your leads are generated from a call-to-action on blog posts. In effect, you can optimize your inbound lead generation strategy by viewing all of the analytics and altering your approach based on what seems to work best.
Lastly, your website is critical to B2B inbound lead generation as it lets you analyze so many things. You can view the conversion rate of your site, and you can see how your traffic is getting to you, what the traffic profiles are like, and so on.
Summary: Inbound Lead Generation Relies On An Excellent Website
Your website plays a central role in generating inbound leads. Use it to drive hoards of traffic to one place, then make sure your site is designed to convert. As a result, you will see more leads, which gives you more chances of converting these leads into paying customers.
