Few things in business are more frustrating than spending time and money on something that doesn’t offer a decent return.
Take websites, for example.
You invest, you set loose your marketing team, you wait to hear the good news, and then… nothing.
No qualified leads, and therefore no converted customers. Even if your webpages are attracting visitors, if they aren’t converting into leads these visitors are simply vanity traffic.
If this sounds familiar, take a look at our 6 common reasons that websites fail to attract and convert visitors into leads, and find out how your team can start converting more, now.
1. Your Calls-to-Action are weak – or missing
Great content is readable, helpful, builds your company’s authority and encourages readers to stay on your website.
Sadly, not all marketing teams seem to realise that the point of producing quality content is primarily to move visitors along the marketing funnel – and that the way to do this is by offering compelling calls-to-action (CTAs).
Every piece of content should end with a strong CTA showing your audience what they can do to learn more. Old-school CTAs often simply linked to another article in your website. However, inbound marketing best practice recommends that you offer a tempting, gated piece of content and invite visitors to offer you their contact details in exchange for accessing the piece.
To increase the likelihood of your readers giving you their email addresses, marketing teams have to make sure that your CTA is compelling, relevant to your audience, and offers genuine value.
2. Your landing pages are flawed
It’s important to remember that there is no guaranteed way to produce a landing page that immediately converts visitors into leads; it is always a work-in-progress. A landing page should be trialed and tested, and your visitors themselves should dictate which landing pages are the most effective.
Here are some guidelines that may help with your landing page’s first draft:
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- Make sure your landing page’s CTA appears above the fold, and is big, bold and eye-catching.
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- Treat the content on your landing pages as being just as important as your homepage and your blog. Be succinct, compelling and persuasive.
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- Consider using testimonials, videos and social proof to demonstrate why your visitors should trust you and complete your landing page’s CTA.
- In your landing page form, only ask for the information you really need. For example, if your main aim is to build your email contact list, don’t request your visitors’ phone numbers, addresses, or to tell you what they had for breakfast that morning.
3. You don’t know your audience
It’s no use creating content intended to lead a visitor closer to buying a product if you don’t know who your content is talking to. An effective lead generation strategy must be based on a company’s buyer personas, because without creating profiles that describe your typical or ideal customers, you are working in the dark.
A basic buyer persona should include details about your ideal and/or typical customers. Details should include their:
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- Job role and title
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- Age
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- Gender
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- Challenges and frustrations
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- Their preferred social media channels and websites
- The kinds of messages that will resonate with them
This is just the start, though, because buyer personas should be expanded and refined over time. As you come to recognise more traits commonly shared between your customers, you can dig deeper into what interests, enthuses and engages them and add these to your personas.
If you don’t know who you should be targeting and attracting to your website, how do you know that you are appealing to the right people who are most likely to buy from you? Even if your website is being flooded with visitors, there is still no guarantee that they are going to be interested in what you are trying to sell.
4. Your content doesn’t solve your visitors’ problems
As we have mentioned before, great marketing content serves to ease your visitors’ pain points, builds trust, and demonstrates that your company is a thought leader in your chosen field.
Too many companies offer content in a haphazard manner, without tying it to an underlying strategy. They share industry news that visitors can find on other (probably better) sites. They tell stories about their employees and recent successes. Or they talk about nothing aside from their products.
Content such as this rarely serves readers, and does nothing to help them alleviate pain. It either offers them something that will almost certainly not interest them, or it demands that they buy a product without earning the right to do so.
Visitors are unlikely to care about what you have to say unless it directly serves them to care, and unless the content truly benefits them.
Alternatively, great marketing content attracts a company’s ideal potential customers and helps relieve them of their unique problems. Successful inbound marketers create guides, top tips, ebooks, whitepapers and other such valuable copy that connects directly with the problems their visitors are experiencing, and more importantly demonstrates how to overcome them.
5. You aren’t blogging
The average B2B company that blogs receives 67% more leads than companies that don’t.
A great blog serves as a vehicle for the content described above.
Firstly, it attracts the right visitors via the SEO advantages it provides. By offering flexible content that is primed for frequent updates, Google will recognise that yours is a dynamic website with accurate and valuable content that it should rank highly.
Secondly, a well-written, engaging blog provides reasons for your visitors to stay on, and keep coming back to, your website. It allows you to discuss the exact topics that are of the most interest to your potential customers, on an ongoing basis. It also gives your company a platform from which to demonstrate itself as a thought leader in its field, and by appealing directly to them it serves as a direct bridge to your perfect customers.
6. Nailing inbound marketing
Great content needs to be underpinned by a strategy that turns every piece of copy you produce into a converting tool. This is the key to successful inbound marketing: not just attracting visitors to your website, but the right visitors who will want to engage further with your brand, and hopefully progress into leads and finally customers.
Having a website that is designed around attracting and converting sets you on the right path towards inbound marketing success – but it is just the beginning of the journey.
To become a powerful marketing machine in the current climate, you will need to incorporate social media, adverts, events, marketing automation and a sturdy CRM that will tie everything together into a single system.
