by Donald Chan, founder and Business Director at IMPACT! Brand Communications
You’ve just spent a pretty penny to set up your new business website. It looks pretty awesome and everyone in your company says it’s super impressive. So you sit back and wait for the business leads and enquiries to flood in.
Except, there’s nothing. No calls. No emails. No traffic. Just deafening silence.
Does this sound depressingly familiar to you? Well, there’s no need to worry. Here, we’ll show you 6 tips on how to turn your website into a booming source of leads, enquiries and red hot sales.
1. Make Sure Your Website Is Set Up To Sell.
When potential customers visit your website, they’re looking to find out whether your products or services can help them with their problems. So make sure your website is structured in a way that anticipates their needs and provides the relevant information straight away.
When showcasing your product and services, make sure your prospect is able to identify which one they really need without spending too much time and effort. Keep in mind that the purpose of your website is online user conversion. So don’t forget to guide them on what to do next in order to buy from you – whether this is filling in a form, sending an email or calling the hotline.
2. Provide A Mobile Responsive Experience.
According to Google, the number of mobile search queries overtook desktop queries in 2015. If your website is not mobile responsive, this will diminish the user experience for a good number of online visitors. At the same time, your search engine rankings will be affected too.
If your website is built on a CMS (content management system), such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, the easiest solution would be to look for mobile plugins that can make your website mobile-friendly. Doing so will save you from a great deal of headaches.
3. Optimise Your Website For The Search Engines.
Building the most gorgeous website in the world won’t matter a single bit, if there’s insufficient web traffic (and potential buyers) to your website. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes into place.
SEO is essentially the process of improving a website’s ranking on search engine results page. Let’s say your company is in the B2B Software as a Service (SaaS) space. Since most online users don’t go past the first page of Google search engine results, you’ll definitely want to ensure your web pages rank on the first page for related key word searches.
While SEO is a highly technical process – covering quite a wide range of strategies and techniques – there are still some things you can do to make your website a bit more friendly for search engines.
These include speeding up your website load speeds, optimising title tags, URL structure and image alt texts, while ensuring that your website is easily crawlable by the Googlebot. That’s means optimising your robot.txt file, sitemap, and internal linking amongst others. All this should help you see some improvement in keyword rankings.
4. Start A Blog For Your Business.
There are many benefits to blogging for businesses. For one thing, blogging consistently can have a positive impact on search engine rankings. You can also share your content on social media, thereby attracting a new online audience.
Another strong benefit of blogging is that it can help your business establish a leadership or authority position in its niche, thereby attracting more leads and potential customers. By putting out content that addresses your target market’s challenges, you’re also creating value and building goodwill in the same instance.
5. Invest in Paid Traffic.
If you’ve taken steps one to four, you should already be seeing some upturn in the traffic numbers to your website. But that won’t be enough. To really take your online leads and sales conversions to the next level, you’ll need to scale things up with paid traffic platforms, such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.
Google Adwords are useful for attracting buyers with higher purchase intent. In particular, you should look at targeting long tail keywords (e.g. ‘best Mexican restaurants in Singapore’), as these are usually online users looking for very specific products or solutions (hopefully, yours). The cost per click also tends to be lower due to less competition.
Facebook Ads, on the other hand, work by targeting user geography, demographics and interests. With more than 1.5 billion users globally, Facebook is definitely an ad platform you can’t ignore if you want to scale your traffic, leads and business. Just don’t make the mistake of focusing solely on the number of fans or likes an ad is generating. The most important metric should be the number of targeted website clicks an ad is sending to your website.
6. Integrate Marketing Automation With Your Website.
Another way to help increase online leads and sales conversion for your website, is to integrate it with a marketing automation platform. Some of the more common platforms include Hubspot, Infusionsoft and Marketo. At IMPACT, we’re using and helping our clients deploy SharpSpring.
Marketing automation is important since not every lead is ready to buy from you on the first visit to your website (in fact, 98 per cent of website visitors don’t convert on the first visit). But, by offering content material such as online newsletter subscriptions and ebook downloads, you can collect their email addresses into your database and slowly warm up these prospects through automated drip email campaigns.
Website tracking and analytics can also identify when prospects return to your website. This will help your sales team determine if a prospect is becoming a hot lead, providing them with the sales intelligence they need to decide whether to reach out with an email or call.
Get Ready For More Business.
Following the process we’ve outlined, you’ll soon be able to turn your website into a major sales and marketing platform. And while some of the steps outlined might take a bit more time and resources, the important thing is to just get started first. Your efforts will ultimately translate into more online leads and sales conversions for your business.
Donald Chan is the founder and Business Director at IMPACT! Brand Communications, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses grow through content marketing, online lead generation, SEO and marketing automation. IMPACT! specialises in helping clients in the Technology, Healthcare and B2B sectors increase their revenue and profitability.
