Can potential customers find your website?

“Our website isn’t generating enough leads”

This is a common problem that customers often come to us to solve. They know that their website, and digital marketing activity, could be doing better, but they’re not sure what they need to do to get there.

There are many ways to improve your website’s lead generation capabilities, but first you need to diagnose what’s causing the problem in the first place.

The common barriers to effective lead generation

In our experience, we find that the majority of our client’s lead generation issues can be boiled down to three factors:

1. The wrong visitors are coming to the website
2. Potential customers cannot find the website
3. The website is not optimised for lead generation

In this three-part series, we will take you through some of the steps you can take to identify where your lead generation efforts are going wrong, and what you can do to fix it.

Potential customers cannot find the website

How can you expect users to get in touch, download a whitepaper, or book a demo on your website, if they cannot find it in the first place?

The second barrier to lead generation can come in the form of your marketing activities.

Create a content strategy centred around SEO content

The key to any successful lead generating website is content.

However, before you can create content that converts; you first need to understand what the goals of your content are.

This will require taking an internal look towards your business, and establishing a series of objectives that your content should look to achieve, for example:

• Achieve more sales
• Build awareness
• Further your pipelines
• Create a community

Once you understand the goal, you will be in a much better place to create a content bank that will meet these objectives.

You also need to ensure that the content you’re creating can be found by search engines.

Tools such as Google Ads’ Keyword Planner can help you find the target keywords and phrases that your audience are searching for, and we recommend that you use this as a foundation for building your content calendars.

The secret to creating great SEO content is to fulfil a need and answer the question of ‘what’s in it for me?’

It should be immediately obvious for the reader within the first five seconds of a piece of content what they will gain from it.

Great ways to do this is to answer questions related to challenges your audience is facing around particular topics, for example:

• Education: “What is…”
• Improvement: “How to…”
• Consideration: “X vs Y”

And, within your copy, always be benefit-led.

Provide outcomes to your readers across your content title, headings and copy. This could be a simple title such as ‘Learn how to create content that converts’.

Once you’ve created a killer title, follow up the answer to the question with more benefits. Use headings to clarify what it is a customer will gain from this content, and how it will help them.

A great way to format your copy in answering this question is via the advertising principle of AIDA.

1. Attention – what will draw their eyes to your content?
2. Interest – how are you going to keep them engaged?
3. Desire – what will make them want to use your product or service to meet their need?
4. Action – what action do you want your users to take after reading?

Use Paid Search advertising to reach your customers at the top of search engines

Paid Search mediums such as Google Ads and Microsoft Ads represent a huge opportunity for your business to increase its visibility in search engines and get found by your prospects, especially if your existing SEO visibility is low.

If you’re not showing up in search engines when users are looking for your products or services, than chances are it’s extremely unlikely that they are going to find your website to get in touch.

Conduct advertising activities on the channels your audience are using

There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to advertising. For example, whilst Instagram Ads may be extremely effective for a fashion retailer, it may not be as useful for a specialist B2B organisation that manufactures industrial products.

Using your audience and persona research, take the time to also uncover where it is that your targets are frequenting online, and strategise on what would be the most appropriate medium to reach them.

Invest in email marketing

If you thought that email marketing was dead, think again.

For 40 years, marketers have used email as an effective tool in their arsenal to reach and communicate with potential customers, and it’s still very much in vogue post-GDPR.

According to the Data and Marketing Association, the ROI on email marketing is still very profitable.

For every £1 spent there is still an estimated return of £35.41 which means an impressive 3,441% return on ad spend, who wouldn’t want that?

In fact, 81% of B2B marketers state that email marketing is their most used form of marketing, and an impressive 87% state that it is their top free organic distribution channel.

However, like with any effective campaign, you need to ensure you are following best practice guidelines.

Here are our recommendations for great email marketing:

• Be clear and concise – don’t use jargon to alienate your reader or over share content, unless that’s how your target audience like to be spoken to.
• Make your subject line attention grabbing – lead with an outcome, raise a question, or make the offer too good to refuse.
• Don’t be too wordy – keep it to short, snappy paragraphs.
• Make sure your “unsubscribe” button is accessible – you don’t want consumers on your list who are flat-out not interested in your products or services.
• Don’t bombard your list with too many emails – the more emails you send the more likely that email providers and users will view your emails as spam.
• Consider your CTA carefully

About Generate UK

We empower ambitious B2B companies to generate growth through creative marketing.

Our mission is to help companies understand the true value in digital marketing and set out to help those organisations develop and implement new technology and processes to deliver a growth marketing strategy in line with their goals.

Partnership is key to our approach. We work closely with you to identify what will drive growth for your business, and provide a range of digital marketing services to achieve it.

We remain the only UK marketing agency to be awarded the Customer Service Excellence+ Accreditation, demonstrating our commitment to our clients.