Inbound marketing is all about driving traffic to your website and getting visitors to convert on a landing page (making them leads), and ultimately nurturing them into becoming customers. But once you build up enough traffic to your website, how do you get people to actually convert into leads for your business?
Here are three main inbound marketing principles you must master to start collecting leads on your website.
1. Have a clean website that is easy to navigate.
When visitors arrive on your website, they need to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly. People do not like to spend a lot of time sifting through content on a website; they want to get what they need and move on. Also, be sure your website has a navigation bar at the top that lists prominent website pages, such as your About Us, Contact Us and a Products & Services pages. Be sure not to get too caught up in an elaborately designed website. While a fancy website may look beautiful, it can cause load times to be slower on different devices and can hinder people from finding what they need easily and quickly. Finally, be sure your website has clear and concise text describing what you do and why you can help them.
2. Tell your visitors what to do with CTAs
In addition to having a clearly formatted website, it’s important to guide people to landing pages where they can become leads. If you offer ebooks, case studies, a free trial, or other valuable offers, you need to highlight those in obvious ways on your website so people can see where they need to go for additional information or to contact you. A call to action (CTA) can be a button or an image, but it should be clear that people should click on it to get to the next page, perhaps by including some text on the CTA that describes the offer along with the actionable text such as, "Click Here" or "Learn More!"
3. Create optimized landing pages and forms
Each call to action you create should lead to a landing page. A landing page is a page of your website that allows visitors to take advantage of an offer or get in touch with you. It should include a form that requests contact information in exchange for the offer or for the purpose of reaching out to the visitor. It’s best practice to remove your main website navigation and any other links from your landing pages because the goal is to get visitors to focus on filling out the form rather than clicking away to something else. It's a good idea to include an image of the offer to show people what they will be getting.
Finally, be sure to ask only for the information that’s really necessary for your company. For an ebook, you likely only need the person’s name and email address. For a contact form, however, you'll likely need a phone number and want to include a message box. Play around with the length of your form to see which version gives you optimal results.
By following these basic inbound marketing principles, you are sure to start generating more leads from your website! For more detailed information about inbound marketing, click the image below to watch our video!
