The Reason Your Site Doesn’t Deliver More Leads

I take pride in the ability of Walker Sands Digital to double, triple or often quadruple the number of leads that our clients get from their websites.

Companies that fail to get enough leads from their website have that problem in large part because they don’t know what they are doing. It’s a blunt explanation, I know, but it’s true.

To get leads from your site, you have to do a lot of things right. More importantly, doing one thing wrong can greatly diminish your site’s lead potential.

What It Takes to Get a Lead

Think about everything that has to go right for you to get a lead:

1. Somebody has to get to your website. They need to find you in their search engine results, read about you in a magazine, hear about your from friends. However they get there, you need them. You are going nowhere fast if you don’t get traffic to your website.
2. Once they are on your site, they need to find your site and your content engaging enough to stay. The messaging has to be strong and differentiating.
3. Next, they need to believe you can solve a specific problem for them, at a reasonable price.
4. Since you probably have some competition out there, they need to believe you can solve their problem better than anybody else can. You’re not actually speaking to these prospects, so the website has to make this case.
5. They also need to believe that you are a credible and legitimate company. In short, they need to quickly understand that you are a good company to work with.
6. If they are ready to engage, you need to now turn them from being a prospective customer into an actual customer. You need to go from them staring at your website to them engaging with you to the point where they give you a credit card, write you a check or sign a purchase order.
7. If they are not ready to engage, you’ve got to somehow get them into a program that allows you to nurture the relationship — and do so before they leave you and move on to the next vendor in their Google results. You’ve got to establish a continuous and long-term relationship with your buyers, which is no easy task.

Where Things Go Wrong

Sounds easy, right? But within those seven steps are hundreds of failure points. If you get one wrong, you can lose your prospect and never see them again — a forever-lost opportunity to capture a lead.

The problems are many. Most websites just sell, asking for too much too soon. They don’t court. They don’t educate. They don’t engage. They don’t add value to the buying process. And the worst sin of all is that they ignore middle-of-the-marketing-funnel dynamics.

Or maybe the worst sin is the lack of ongoing investment in the website after that first launch; here’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious: if you invest $0 in the site, you can expect that same amount as your ROI.

It goes on and on. The content is weak. The calls to action are not compelling. There’s no nurture marketing program. The ogres of mediocrity are everywhere.

At the top of the funnel, there’s complacency with the meager traffic to the site. A smart content marketing, SEO, social, PR and/or PPC program could triple traffic to the site, which could in theory triple the leads from the site. But other projects get the resources, for reasons that are often baffling.

More often than not, there’s no testing and improvement. Heck, the simple A/B testing of landing pages that we do can often double conversion rates, which of course doubles the leads generated from the site. Yet, many companies never bother with improving their sites after the initial launch and they don’t bother to run structured tests to improve lead gen.

Don’t even get me started on all the excuses. I’m likely to throw up the next time I hear somebody say “This is a complex sale that is based on relationship building. Our website should look nice, but we really don’t expect our online presence to do much for us in the way of lead generation.” Really? Are you serious? Give me a break. You are throwing in the towel and not being accountable to what your executive team expects you to do — generate leads.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

The bottomline is there’s more digital marketing malpractice out there than we all care to admit. Since so many do it wrong, very few know the potential that is possible when you do it right.

Of course, to do it right, you have to know how to do it right and you have to actually do it.

It’s a tautology no doubt, but we’re thankful to our clients who recognize it and bring us in when they need expert help to generate more leads from their online presence.

Double, triple, quadruple your inbound leads? No problem.

It’s easy and we know how to do it right. Give us a call at (312) 235-6171 to discuss how you can get more leads through better digital marketing.