Situation: A CEO wants to revise his company’s website to be a more effective source of leads. What has worked well for others gaining leads from their companies’ websites? What has intrigued potential clients and prompted them to contact the company about its products and services? What are effective website features and metrics?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Have as much usable content as possible – useable by those who visit the site. This will drive traffic to the site. Traffic will produce leads from a certain percent of users who are impressed by the company’s capabilities.
- Does the site meet the company’s target customers’ needs? If so, are the search terms optimized to attract them to the site when they perform searches?
- Create an interactive demo on the site that will be of interest to the company’s current customers and potential customers.
- Use the company’s customer extranet to create a “wow” experience that will create buzz within client companies and help to attract additional business from those companies.
- An extranet is an intranet that can be partially accessed by authorized outside users, enabling businesses to exchange information over the internet securely.
- Put a freebie tool on the public site and extranet that helps clients to solve a frequent problem. This helps to segue customers and potential customers from personal use to product or service choice.
- Whatever tools are used, include a unique link to each approach or tool and offer the customer a modest discount for using the link.
- Counting the frequency of links used is a simple way to determine which tools or features are most effective with customers.
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Effective websites features and meaningful metrics depend on the type of business, the clientele* and the sales cycle.
For example, the prime function of a B2B Industrial website is to generate leads to acquire new clients.
The “home”, “about” and “contact” pages are important in this type of website. The number of valid prospects generated by these pages is a vital metric too. The rest of the website pages can’t generate leads the way well written and designed home, about and contact pages do.
Reps using content on other pages, can help prospects find the product information they need to make a bid request or a buying decision.
Except for low value items or some repeat business it’s usually not practical for B2B Industrials to rely only on their websites to book business.
B2B websites can qualify prospects. But human outbound contact is essential to generate a better sales level.
As to “intriguing” potential clients: That’s often the job of a “unique sales proposition” coupled with easy to read web Copy. A unique sales proposition is something one offers or does better than anyone else.
It’s often on the Home page after or within “who we are” and “what we do”.
It can relate to product, price, place or promotion (Textbook marketing mix of controllable factors).
A good website is whatever works, regardless of whether it respects accepted norms. In fact, when something becomes best-practice it means everyone is doing it and it no longer differentiates companies or products.
Cheers
*Clientele: Persona of decision-making individuals one wants to reach as opposed to the market one wants to reach.
PS: Email campaigns with links to appropriate pages of a site are a good additional idea.