Once you have traffic coming to your site, the next step is to convert them into leads and customers by gathering their contact information. Start by identifying how your business defines what a prospect, lead and customer is. Prospects and leads are looking for different types of information at each stage of the process. In the early stages, prospects and leads are more interested in how your product or service will help them. Then they're looking for information about your company, your credibility, expertise, proven results. Next, when they are ready to convert, they will want to know what the buy/purchase process is and what to do.
At the very least, you’ll need their email addresses. For the online marketer, contact information is the most valuable currency. In order for your visitors to offer up that currency willingly, you need to offer them something in return. That “payment” comes in the form of content, like ebooks, whitepapers, or tip sheets -- whatever information would be interesting and valuable to each of your personas.
The purpose and importance of lead generation is to get the contact information of people who have visited your site. After you've spent all the effort to increase traffic to your site, you want to know who was interested in your product or service. Some of the most important tools in converting visitors to leads include:
Calls-to-Action- For most companies, calls-to-action are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action, like “Download a Whitepaper” or “Attend a Webinar.” If you don’t have enough calls-to-action or your calls-to-action aren’t enticing enough, you won’t generate any leads. What is a call to action? In simple terms, a call to action tells a reader, visitor, or potential customer exactly what you want them to do.
Unfortunately, call to action buttons are often neglected or not used to their full potential. Designers often don’t understand fully what makes a good call to action button besides being attractive and fitting into the overall website design. But call to action buttons are too important to be designed without some kind of understanding of what makes them effective. After all, the main point of a call to action button is to get visitors to do something.
Landing Pages- When a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they should then be sent to a landing page where the offer in the call-to-action is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that your sales team can use to begin a conversation with them. When website visitors fill out forms on landing pages, they typically become leads. Every new landing page you create is another opportunity for your company to appear in search engines and get your link shared on social media -- and better search engine rankings and social media posts mean that you'll have more opportunity to drive traffic and conversions for your website.
Contacts & Forms- In order for visitors to become leads, they must fill out a form and submit their information. Optimize your form to make this step of the conversion process as easy as possible. Keeping track of an organized record of the leads you are converting in a centralized database is important. Having all your data in one place helps you to make sense of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts -- whether it be through email, a landing page, social media, or otherwise -- and how to optimize your future interactions to more effectively attract, convert, close, and delight your buyer personas.
Keep in mind, these people may not be sales ready and they may not be sales ready for a long time, but their contact information is extremely valuable to you. Once you have contact information from website visitors who are interested in your product or service you can begin nurturing these leads with valuable information to stay top of mind until they are sales ready.
