With a few simple steps, you can turn your web site into a lead generation machine. Grab the attention of your audience, direct your audience, get feedback, keep track, optimize follow-up efficiency and market. Here’s how:

Hook

Get your audience interested in what you have to offer. Make it exciting with catchy copy and compelling graphics. Project professionalism and let you potential customer know how much better off they will be with your product or service. Do this as soon as possible on the entry page.

Direct

Tell your audience what to do. If you tell your audience what to do and you have created the impression of authority, they are likely to follow your advice. Tell your audience to buy your product or, if it is a service you sell, fill out an information request form.

Lead Generation Form

Use your information request form to grab essential information about your potential client. Use an online form to find out exactly what your potential client wants. Use tracking tools to see where the lead originated from, such as what search engine and keyword phrase.

Database

The information from the form should be inserted into a database for easy searching, scheduling and record keeping. Having a good data base system is essential for the next step.

Follow up

Follow up with your potential clients, using your database to schedule events and send marketing material. Stay in front of your clients with an email newsletter and friendly calls scheduled through out the year. You want your potential client to remember who you are, so they think of your company when it comes time to make a purchase.

Marketing

Use search engines, advertisements, television, radio, magazines, billboards, word of mouth, web ads and anything else you can to bring people to your site. If there are no people coming to your site, the best lead generation tools in the world won’t help you get new clients.

Web sites can be very effective lead generation machines. Put some thought into yours and you should benefit.

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But why is SEM so effective? A good SEM campaign can vastly increase your website’s traffic and boost sales, more so than any other marketing campaign. So why does it work so well?

The answer is variety. SEM draws on many different strategies, rather than relying on just one. SMO “gets the word out” to entire communities of people who stand to be interested in your products and services. Pay-per-click advertising works much like standard marketing, placing your advertisements on the monitors of hundreds if not thousands of people across the internet. Paid inclusion makes sure that search engines get around to evaluating and listing your website in a timely fashion. And SEO ensures that your website’s META tags, keyword content, and backlink promotions all work together to ensure that your website places as high as possible on said search engines.

In essence, where your traditional marketing campaign might target only one or two areas, good SEM covers the full spectrum of marketing possibilities.

Be sure before paying for SEM that you know what the company is offering, however. A good SEM service will be upfront about which of these services it offers, and how much it charges for them. Some SEM services focus on only one or two aspects of online marketing, such as search engine inclusion and SEO, for example. Others offer certain services for low prices, but charge significantly more to include the full spectrum of SEM. And there is nothing wrong with paying an SEM service to do strictly SEO or strictly search engine inclusion. But you should know upfront that that’s all the service plans to do, and that anything more will cost extra.

SEM is effective because it works with the natural patterns of traffic on the internet. It capitalises on advertisements, on search engines, even on word of mouth through social media. A good SEM company knows how to use each outlet of marketing to its best advantage, and your business booms as a result of it. That’s the true secret of SEM; knowing how to work with the internet, instead of working against it.

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In addition, some companies build a web site for branding purposes, or to provide information to potential clients, thinking that one-way communication is a valid goal. I’m afraid that I disagree. Using a web site merely to provide information is like using an airplane to drive around town without ever leaving the ground – you’re missing the real opportunity to help your business ‘take-off’ by creating leads and sales.

After all, a web site is a corporate resource, and like any other resource it should provide a return on investment. That return should be immediate and measurable, meaning that the bottom line for any website is – how specifically has the web site grown my business today/this week/this month, and so on. Enter the concept of ‘conversion’.

What is Conversion?

For a business web site, there are three primary goals:

• generating leads
• selling products via e-commerce
• generating referrals

The reason that I say this is because these are the only actions that lead to real dollars. So, they’re the only way for your web site to produce a return-on-investment. When a visitor takes one of these actions, that is counted as a ‘conversion’ (as in converting visitors into leads and customers).

I do understand that websites can accomplish other less-tangible benefits. I call these secondary goals. Typical secondary goals might include:

• building credibility
• supporting existing customers
• recruiting partners or affiliates (this may be a primary goal if your business is largely affiliate based)

I consider these goals secondary because if this was ALL that your site did, then you’re probably missing the real potential of a company website.

Conversion Aids Site Development and Management

Deciding that you want/need a conversion web site is actually a tremendously empowering moment. For example, your new goals can actually help you to determine what should or shouldn’t be included on your site (removing much of the politics of website development). In a sense you build your site backwards – start with your site goals and then flesh out the structure and content from there. As you use your goals document as a set of criteria for determining site content, there’s much less room for disagreement.

Secondly, having specific web conversion goals allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site after it’s completed and live. That’s key because if you can’t measure web site performance, then improving it becomes much more problematic. So you’ll find that measurement and improvement are the keys to that ROI you’re looking for.

Tips for Improving Conversion Rate

Here are few tips to increase your conversion rate:

1. Give Direction
   To build interest in a product or service, consider structuring your website as a logical sequence of information, rather than a smorgasbord. The way to accomplish this is to reduce the number of links, and identify the best next click for each page. Then provide a specific link which is essentially a signpost pointing where you want your visitor to click once they’ve read the page they’re currently on.
2. Trade Value for Value
   For lead generation sites, collecting visitors contact information in exchange for something is the desired outcome. The exchange should be high perceived value to the recipient, low cost to the provider, and have a low perception of commitment. Typical on-line exchanges of this sort include free-trials, product demos, and whitepapers. Be careful not to ask for too much information in the exchange (this raises the perceived commitment level). Ask only for information that’s essential to you.
3. The Work’s Not Over
   Once your web site is up and running, the work isn’t over! Pay careful attention to the results you’re getting. Establish a baseline of results and then begin making changes to impact your conversion rate. Make sure you allow enough time for changes to show an impact, if your site gets only a few visitors, each test element might be in place for a month or even longer.

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