According to the Corporate Executive Board, 57% of the B2B sales process is complete before a prospect ever contacts sales.
This indicates that buyers are taking control and using the Internet to do their own research. In order to respond to this shift in the B2B market space, companies need to rethink their web presence and the value they’re adding to the prospect’s decision-making process.
Traditional outbound marketing spends for tactics like cold-calling and direct mail are not generating the quality leads that they once did. These tactics don’t yield a good return because they all have one thing in common: they interrupt people.
Today’s buyers are sick of being interrupted and they’re really good at filtering through the noise. They have caller ID, DVRs, and email filters set up all to filter out marketing messages.
Businesses are recognizing this trend and reallocating resources towards their online presence, while simultaneously cutting outbound budgets for old tactics.
Many companies are improving at driving traffic to their website, but are struggling to leverage the value of that traffic and generate leads from their website.
How To Generate Leads From Your Website
If you’re struggling with generating leads from your website, these 5 tricks will give you a jump-start.
1. Get The Right People To Your Website
It’s pointless to generate unqualified leads – and it’s pretty tough to turn the wrong people into qualified leads. Getting the right audience to your website is the first step in successfully generating leads from your website.
How do you actually get the right traffic?
Website traffic comes from three sources:
- Search – According to Conductor, over 50% of website traffic comes from search engines, either organically (~47%) or via paid (PPC ~6%) search results.
- Referral – Through social media, email, or other websites, referrals are a big source of traffic – and can be a great source for qualified visitors.
- Direct – The quantity varies significantly by industry, but direct traffic (users directly coming to your site by typing in your website’s URL) can be another significant source of traffic.
The best source, and combination of these sources, is unique to each industry and business, but all three sources have significant potential.
Just because you think your company is well-known, don’t ignore search engine optimization through blogging. Likewise, if you rank well in Google, don’t be afraid to consider Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook as outposts for driving better-converting traffic. It’s all about a holistic strategy that produces the best ROI.
2. Use Forms To Generate Leads
You got visitors through search, social, and direct traffic. They stuck around because your website stood out. What will it take to convert those interested prospects and generate real leads from your website?
Forms are a big part of the answer.
The vast majority of visitors aren’t ready to purchase, but many are ready to exchange value. They’re willing to trade some personal information (value to you) for in-depth, helpful content (value to them).
Offer resources like catalogs, spec sheets, case studies, and brochures behind forms. Those free resources serve as lead magnets to start building out your marketing database.
3. Create Helpful Content
Premium content is an incredibly effective way to generate leads from your website with consistency. Think eBooks, webinars, videos, white papers, checklists, spec sheets, etc. Any information you have that contributes to the educational buying process – give it away in exchange for information.
People love the ability to download helpful content – there’s something about seeing it on a hard drive instead of on the Internet that is psychologically comforting to users. It’s crazy, but it works to your advantage as you’re trying to start generating leads for your business.
4. Repurpose Existing Materials To Grow Faster
Do you have free resources like spec sheets and brochures just sitting on your website? This is low hanging fruit for lead generation.
Don’t get stuck thinking that you have to start from scratch. It’s tough to create enough intellectual property (especially when you’re starting) to get the quantity of qualified conversions that you need.
Repurpose existing print materials, create product or service comparisons, or aggregate and curate great content from others and turn it into a premium content piece.
One good example: Industrial Training International (ITI) repurposed tons of content and were able to quickly parlay that into 2x average annual revenue growth.
5. Be a Lab Rat
Dig into the data that your website analytics can provide.
- Do you know how many visitors come to your website each month?
- Do you know what your top performing pages are on your website?
- Do you know what traffic source produces the most revenue?
- Do you know what type of premium content converts the most leads?
- Do you know which website colors boost visitor engagement?
It’s all about testing.
You can avoid a lot of mistakes by learning from others and choosing strategically, but there’s also an element of trial-and-error to everything.
Pay attention to the numbers, measure everything, make adjustments, and never stop improving.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.
If you’re interested in learning more about implementing a smart lead generation strategy to work on your website, check out The B2B Marketing Checklist. Inside you will find step-by-step instructions that will help you build a lead generation machine that keeps your pipeline line.
Andrew Dymski is a Co-Founder of GuavaBox, an inbound marketing agency. GuavaBox is focused on helping companies in the industrial B2B market reach new customers and grow their businesses through content and inbound marketing.
For more information, checkout the Lead Generation Checklist for Industrial Manufacturers.
