These days it’s hard to imagine a business that doesn’t have a website. Very few businesses can sustain themselves without one. It’s almost like having a retail store with no street address.
Anybody who has started a business knows that websites don’t come free. Depending on the complexity and sophistication of a site, your business site could cost anywhere from $500 to $50,000 (or more). That’s a chunk of change. Regardless of how much you spent to build your site, you made a significant investment.
How is that investment paying off?
Despite the fact that almost every business has a website, most businesses can’t answer that question. They simply don’t know if the money they spent developing their website is producing any kind of tangible, measureable results. As a matter of fact, many businesses can’t tell you how many leads their site generates in a month.
Your website owes you some results!
One thing your website owes you is leads. Your site isn’t on the web just to give you legitimacy (although that’s important). It’s not there to entertain people (although, if you can pull that off, it can be a plus). Your website is a tool to help you do business—and lead generation is critical for that. So what are the keys to generating quality leads?
Providing Great Content: You need to have content on your site that’s helpful, fresh, and useful. In other words, you need to provide answers to the questions your customers are asking. This drives them to your site—and it helps establish you as an industry expert.
Creating Calls to Action (CTAs): Just providing information won’t get you leads. You need to get potential customers to take specific action and engage with you. You can’t just assume they’ll contact you—you have to ask them to do it.
Make Compelling Offers: Simply asking people to contact you won’t make it happen. You have to give them an incentive. You need to make them an offer that’s enticing enough to get them to type in their email address or call you on the phone. This isn’t a sale—it’s an offer of something of value they get in exchange for giving you sine contact information.
Nurture Your Leads: Having a list of email addresses doesn’t do you any good if you don’t use it. Respond to people. Find out more about them. Offer them additional help. Find out what they need. That’s one way you find out how serious they are about doing business with you.
You spent good money creating your website. It’s time for your website to pay you back by helping you generate, qualify, and nurture leads. By the way, if you don’t know how your website is performing against your competition, we can help you figure that out—and it’s free!
Blog Post Written by Spencer Powell
Spencer is the Inbound Marketing Director at TMR Direct. Spencer specializes in helping clients create and execute effective inbound marketing campaigns.