Is your website a lead-generating machine?
Lead Generation | Web Design
Key takeaways
- Good looks aren’t everything – even if your website looks great, it may not be converting users into leads.
- A good website should move users down the sales funnel and encourage them to make an enquiry.
Why looks aren’t everything!
Everyone loves a snazzy website. Cool graphics, slick design, gorgeous photographs. A great looking website is an important tool in developing a successful business. An unattractive website will put users off straight away, making it harder for you to convince them that your company is worth doing business with.
But as in real life, good looks are not everything!
If all the website does is look good, if you have no sales and no enquiries through your website, it is not working hard enough on your behalf.
A website should generate leads for your business. If it is not, then you will be missing out on a huge opportunity. A website should work as hard as you are working. It should be transforming potential customers into paying customers as part of your company’s sales funnel.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is the term used to describe the process that turns potential customers into clients. Any potential customer moving through a sales funnel is called a lead. Depending on who you speak to, there are varying stages within a sales funnel. There are lots of different opinions out there, and the stages all have different names. Some funnel models are more complex than others, too, so it can make it a bit confusing.
But when you cut through all the noise and focus on the lead – the customer themselves – you can see that they go through three general stages when they are in a sales funnel:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
What happens during the different stages of the sales funnel?
1. Awareness
The first stage describes the process of a lead learning about your business for the first time. By the end of this stage they are aware of your company.
But it cannot happen without the potential customer realising that they have a problem that they need to solve. Once they are aware of the problem, they look for a business that can meet their needs. This might be via the internet, picking up a flyer, walking by your store or searching a social media channel, to name but a few.
So, a business may become aware that its premises are unclean. Realising they have a problem, they search for a commercial cleaning company that provides an office cleaning service online. The search engine generates a list of potential cleaning companies, and at this point, the user is made aware of your brand.
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2. Consideration
Once they have found you, they enter the consideration phase.
During this phase, a lead investigates the products and services you are offering in order to figure out whether they are a good fit for their needs. A lot of this involves reading the information that you display on your website and/or your social media profile pages. If you have a physical store, the consideration phase includes their experience during their visit to your physical premises. If your website prompts leads to make an enquiry this forms part of the consideration phase of the sales funnel, as depending on their experience after this enquiry is made they still have time to withdraw their custom.
3. Decision
Once a lead has received your quote, they reach the point where they make a decision to buy from you.
Potential clients move along the funnel at different rates, spending time at each stage of the journey. The process is not always linear either, sometimes customers move back and forth within or between stages before making the final decision. As soon as they decide to make a purchase, put down a deposit or sign a contract they convert into a “sale”.
Sometimes people use the term “conversion” to differentiate between those who are “enquiring” still and those who are “converted” into a sale.
So now that we have described the different stages of the sales funnel, let us think about where your website fits into all of this.
Where does your website sit within your sales funnel?
Your website should work to build brand awareness and help leads evaluate your services.
1. Brand awareness
If you want to find a product or service and you do not know where to start, generally you do one of the following things:
- Ask a friend
- Look online
If your friend is clueless, normally most people resort to using a search engine to find what they need. This is when a website can really work hard to bring in new leads. Depending on what search terms (called “keywords”) you put in, the search engine will give you a list of results. This list is ranked according to different criteria, the three most crucial being site popularity, company proximity and site authority within your industry. The search engines always want to give you the best results, as they know that you will probably only click on the first ten websites, maximum.
If your website is in the top ten of a search engine results page, it has worked hard to make that lead aware of your brand. That potential customer has now entered the brand awareness stage of your sales funnel. They did not know you before they started their search, and now they know your name. As soon as they click through to your website they will transition to the consideration stage of the sales funnel.
2. Consideration
Once on your site, the lead starts considering your company. The information that your website contains will either encourage them to make an enquiry or purchase, or it will put them off. So, it is important that the right information is included on your website.
That might be a description of your service or product, it might be testimonials from previous customers talking about how great you are, or photographs of your product. A well designed, easy to use, and informative website should encourage people to move to make an enquiry.
At the point of making an enquiry, a website has done its job. It made a potential customers aware of your company, it has given them enough information to pique their interest and it has given them a way to contact you for a quote.
3. Decision
For most B2B companies (B2B stands for “Business to Business”, a term used to describe companies that sell to other companies), your website does not form a huge part of this stage of the sales funnel; normally the lead makes an enquiry via your website and your sales team takes it from there.
But that is not always the case. There are plenty of companies out there that sell products directly to other companies via their website. A fell functions, smooth checkout process is key to ensuring that once the decision is made, customers do not abandon their purchase halfway through.
How to make sure your website is working hard at each stage.
Each stage of your customer’s journey through your sales funnel requires different things from your website.
1. Brand Awareness
To ensure that your website is ranking well, you need to optimise your website so that search engines can “read” it easily.
First of all, find out how well search engines are reading your website at the moment with a thorough audit. An audit will describe the website’s current performance in terms of users, ranking and reach online. It will compare your website to your competitors in order to determine whether your performance is below or above par. Get an audit that can determine how hard your website is working to make your potential customers aware of your brand.
Then, ensure that your onsite SEO is excellent. Being seen well by search engines requires excellent technical SEO.
What is SEO and how can it help?
Ranking well also requires your website to appear popular amongst users. This means that the number of visits to your website needs to be high. To do this, you need to regularly create content that users will want to read. This will require an ongoing content marketing strategy.
2. Consideration
To ensure that your website is working hard to help your leads consider your products and services start off by finding how well it is currently performing in this area. To do this, get a Content Audit on your website.
What is a content audit and how does it help?
Based on the quality of your current content on your site, you may well need to improve the user experience on your site, or have its functionality developed.
3. Decision
Functionality and user experience can also affect the ease at which a website can work to allow customers to buy products online. Improving the functionality of your checkout system can help this stage of the sales funnel.
Is your website working hard enough?
One of the red flags that should tell you that your website is not working properly is the number of enquiries that are coming through from your website. If you are getting no enquiries at all, then you have a serious problem on your hand.
Your website should be one of the best marketing tools that your company owns. Make sure that you make the most of its potential so you can work a little less hard!