Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Machine

Marketing your business has always been about creating awareness and generating leads.  In the world of online marketing, the goals are no different.  Your web presence can be your primary vehicle for creating awareness and generating leads.  And better yet, you can test, measure and continually improve your effectiveness and success in reaching those goals.  You can, in fact, turn your website into a lean, mean, lead-generating machine.

Is your web presence doing the job?  This first of a 2-part series will talk about how to Create Awareness  – that is, bring traffic to your website.  Part 2 will address how to Generate Leads – e.g. convert your website visitors into qualified leads and customers.

Who is Your Target Visitor and What Are They Looking For?

When you generate traffic to your website, you are filling the top of your sales funnel.   You’ll want to make sure you understand who your target audience is and what they’re looking for, so you don’t attract a lot of ‘tire kickers’ who are unlikely to buy.  If you want the other end of the funnel to produce qualified buyers, follow these 3 simple steps on the front end.

courtesy of Hubspot

Define your target visitor.   Who are you trying to attract?  What is their basic demographic profile (age, gender, location, income/education level, occupation, etc.)?  How would you describe their personality, attitudes, values, lifestyle?  A  45-year-old work-at-home mom, for example, may be concerned about safety and time-savings, while a 24-year-old urban professional is probably more interested in status and mobility.   Create a mental picture of your target audience, and make that the focus of all your online content.

Define your keywords. With this mental picture in mind, create a list of keywords your target audience would use when looking for a product or service like yours.  You’ll add to this list over time, and it will be a critical resource for planning your online marketing campaigns.

Find where your target audience spends time online. Using your keywords, search social media like Twitter and Facebook to find where your target audience is active online.  Listen to their conversations and find out what topics they care about.  Search blog directories to find who is blogging on topics related to yours. Read through blog comments to find out what your target audience is thinking, reacting to, talking about.  The web offers unlimited resources for exploring your market, and your keywords are your navigation tools.  Be sure to just listen at first; you can jump in with your own comments later.

How Will They Find You?

Once you understand who your target audience is and what topics interest them, you can start to plant the breadcrumbs that will ultimately lead the desired visitors to your website.  The Internet is all about content, but if your website content is static, like a brochure, it’ll never get noticed.  How, then, to get your website to stand up and be noticed?  There are several ways to do this, and you can pick one or try them all.

Pay Google to advertise your website. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising gives the most immediate return on your investment.  Google (or Bing) will display your sponsored ad each time a searcher enters one of your chosen keywords as a search query.  You pay Google/Bing when a searcher clicks on your ad – and the more you’re willing to pay, the higher up the in the search ranking your ad will appear.  Your ads will begin to appear as soon as you set them up, so expect immediate new traffic to your site.  Before you begin, you should consider what landing page you want visitors to arrive on, and be sure to tell them on that page what you want them to do next (see Part 2 of this series: Generate Leads).

Make your web content a magnet. Web users are always looking for good content – to educate them, entertain them, answer their questions, deliver relevant news, point them to good deals, etc.  When they find good content, they’ll share it with friends, colleagues, and their own followers.  So, if you want people to find your website or blog, give them high quality content they’ll want to pass on.  If you want it to show up in search results, optimize it with your keywords, and give your pages catchy, keyword-rich titles that will entice someone to click on it in a list of search results.  Make sure you update your website or blog content frequently, as search engines will return more often (and improve your search ranking) if they’ve learned to expect something new when they visit.  For more education on making your website a content magnet, visit HubSpot (they coined the term ‘inbound marketing’) or Junta42 (who coined ‘content marketing’).

Actively promote to your target audience. Before people can share your magnetic content, you  first have to get on their radar.  Here are the 3 most productive ways to do this.

• Social media. Getting active in social media is like attending a party or a business meeting.  You can speak up and be heard, drop your name (website link) for others to follow, share your wisdom, and learn from others.  Set up your profile on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, BizSugar (my favorite for small biz).  Be sure to listen for a while first (see #3 above), then join conversations to share valuable links or insights in addition to sharing links to your own content (NOTE: you won’t gain followers if you only beat your own chest, so look to offer value, not just promote yourself).

• Blogosphere. Another way to promote your content is to get active on blogs in your niche.   Once you’ve discovered the influential blogs for your target audience (see #3 above), get active in their blog comments section and interact with the blog author and readers.  If your comments are interesting, others may click through to your website/blog to see what else you have to say. The comment creates a link to your site, and the blogger might even link from a post.  Links bring more visitors – and more search credibility to your site.

• Link Building. To spread your net even further, and improve your search engine rankings, you can actively build links to your site.  Submit to directories in your niche, author articles and submit them to article sites, contact bloggers and see if they accept contributed articles or guest posts.  And don’t forget your own customers and suppliers; they may be happy to provide a link from their website to yours (especially with a testimonial).  When possible, include your target keywords in the link text, as that will further enhance your search ranking for that search term.

How Will You Know?

There are countless tools available – free and paid –to track your website and social media activity.  The trick is to not drown in the sea of data.  Especially for a small business, it’s best to keep things simple, so I’ll focus here on the key metrics that measure the things that drive our Create Awareness goal.  Part 2 will address the Generate Leads (conversion) metrics.  If you want to extend your analytics skills, see Google’s Analytics Training seminars, Web Analytics Association website, or – for really advanced practitioners – Occam’s Razor website.

Google Analytics – All You Need, Really.   While paid analytics tools like Omniture, WebTrends, or Hitslink offer great data, graphics & analysis, I find Google Analytics gives me all I need for most of our clients.  Be sure you have Google Analytics script on your website so you can track all activity that happens there.  Here are some of the top metrics you should check regularly to know whether you are growing your website traffic and achieving your Create Awareness goals.  The 2 questions we seek to answer here are:

1. How are we getting people to our website?
2. How well is it working?

Traffic. This is the primary measure for your efforts.  Is your traffic increasing over time?  If not, are you clear about what’s causing the peaks and valleys?  As you try different tactics, are you seeing the impact they make on the overall traffic volume to your site?

Traffic Sources.  Traffic sources tells you where people are coming from.  Direct traffic is coming from people who have bookmarked your site or enter your website address directly.  Referring sites are other websites or blogs that direct traffic to your site through links.  Search Engines refers to people who have entered a search term, and clicked on your listing in the search results.  You should have a relative balance among all sources – or a clear reason if they are far off balance.

Referrers. Google will list the top referring sites that are sending visitors your way.  This is important information for your blogging and link building efforts, as it will tell you which sites you need to treat well and build relationships with, and how to look for similar sites in your blog outreach efforts.

Keywords and  Content. Google will also list for you the keywords that are sending most visitors to your site and the content pages that are most popular.  Use these signals to better understand what search terms are working and what topics your visitors find most interesting – then do more of both!

Social Media Analytics. There are also numerous options, paid and free, for measuring what happens on your social media sites.  Don’t get distracted by how many friends or followers you have or how many times you are mentioned in conversations.  To measure the 2 key questions about how you’re getting people to your site and what’s working, just check the Referring Sites report in Google Analytics and see which social media sites are drawing visitors.  If you’re trying to get started in Social Media and want to find the best people and sites to follow, see this post on Social Media 101.