The primary objective of B2B websites should be to help visitors find the information they’re looking for. But, on top of that, they should be helping their organization capture qualified leads for their product or service.
A lead generation website does just that. It educates your visitors on your product or service and the industry you operate within in addition to giving visitors the opportunity to provide qualitative information to your sales team.
What are the common issues with websites that hinder lead generation? Many websites are not constructed for lead generation, and they can be slow, thin on content, and unfriendly to mobile users. These challenges can be countered by evolving the website into a lead-generation website. This involves improving website speed, adding valuable content, and optimizing the website for mobile users.
How to create a Lead Generation website?
What is the first step in building a lead generation website? Prior to building a website, you need to define your target audience. Having a really strong understanding of who you’re selling to, whether that’s persona-specific or segment-specific, and understanding the pain points they experience is the best way to start this process. Then, layer everything else you do on top of that.
What should be considered when setting up the infrastructure and navigation of the website? The infrastructure and navigation should be best suited for the target visitors. For example, if you have niche, industry-specific content that speaks directly to your personas’ pain points, you should make it easy to find through your main navigation along with information on the solutions to those pain points.
Another essential element is your actual conversion points strategically placed throughout the website.
After initially building your personas, you need to come up with conversion paths for your personas. Ideally, you’ll start with at least one conversion point for each funnel stage so you have three conversion points per persona:
- Top of the funnel (ToFu), that’ll convert them from visitor to lead,
- One in the middle of the funnel (MoFu) will indicate they’re marketing qualified and one at the bottom of the funnel, and
- (BoFu) that indicates they’re ready to start the sales process.
Having these conversion points developed in advance helps you ensure that once you start identifying the specific pages of your website and their intended personas, you can leverage their appropriate conversion points. CTAs should be dispersed sitewide to convert visitors along with forms that collect the information your sales team needs to take future actions by the sales team.
For example, if one of your personas is beginning the discovery process and they’re just starting to learn about their challenge, you’d want to offer them a ToFu offer, like a gated introductory ebook.
The next step you offer to visitors needs to be intentional. You don’t want to present someone with a BoFu offer, like an assessment, right off the bat because that can scare them away. The three-tiered ToFu, MoFu, BoFu approach helps prevent that from happening.
What are the essential elements of a lead generation website?
In addition to the foundation based upon your buyer personas and their conversion paths, there are a few more things a lead generation website needs to be successful and create a positive user experience. Here are more details on the requirements of a minimum viable lead gen website:
A BoFu CTA that isn’t “Contact Us”
Because “contact us” appears so frequently on websites, many B2B companies think it’s a good choice for their primary BoFu CTA. However, as a user, “contact us” is a very vague and general action to take; it’s unclear what exactly will occur after filling out that form.
Instead, you should try to use more definitive copy for your CTAs. Even if “download a free trial” or “request a readiness assessment” aren’t appropriate for your company, “talk to sales” or “book a meeting” still gives the site visitor more context about the next step. Providing more information about what to expect can help increase conversions overall.
CTA strategy and organization
We build a lot of our websites in HubSpot, and there are a couple different ways you can generate CTAs in HubSpot. You can create unique CTAs on each webpage and have some of them lead to the same place and say the same things.
However, if you have a large site, that can make reporting of the efficacy of those CTAs complicated. Instead, you can create a single CTA and place it in multiple locations, leveraging Google Tag Manager to track the individual button clicks on pages. On top of minimizing the number of CTAs you employ, you can also make it easier to manage your CTAs by using a clear and consistent naming convention. That way, if you do need to make an update, you can locate the CTA easily.
Utilizing CTAs in a way that’s easy to track and report on is vital for your website’s success. To continue to improve your strategy over time, you need to understand the analytics behind conversions just as much as you need to actually bring in leads.
Strategic conversion points
It’s OK if you only have two or three forms for users to convert on. Don’t feel like you need to have five or ten content offers for each persona from the start. What’s important is that there’s intent in how you’re routing site visitors.
When determining which CTAs to place on a page, think about where visitors are in their discovery process. For blog posts, you typically only want to drive towards one offer in the text — blog posts are targeted at visitors who are earlier in the buying process and still learning about their problem and your credibility. Offering multiple next steps can make them feel pressured.
However, on a product page, it’s completely fine to have multiple CTAs. The best step for your company is for the visitor to jump on a call with sales, so including that is a logical next step. But, the visitor might still want more information about your product before speaking to sales, so guiding them to a case study for that product is also a relevant next step.
Clear labels
Let’s talk about having clear labels. Your users will want to know what they’re cliccking on, right? Whatever your button text says should match the page the button takes visitors to. If someone isn’t actually requesting a demo, don’t use that text on the button. Describe what they’re actually doing instead. Make text on buttons large, legible, and brief.
The recommended approach for button text on a lead-generating website is to use the first-person perspective. Instead of using generic text like 'your' or 'submit', make the button text more personal and action-oriented. For example, you can use phrases like 'get my free trial' or 'claim my offer'. This approach creates a sense of ownership and encourages users to take the desired action.
Visitor-centric navigation
The specifics of your navigation layout depend on what industry you’re in, what you’re selling, and who your site visitors are, but there are a couple of best practices that hold true, regardless of those details:
- You should always have a BoFu CTA button on the top right-hand corner of your nav. Folks could be anywhere on their journey when they come to your site, so always providing that opportunity to convert will reduce friction for people looking to convert right away. Using fixed navigation reduces friction even further so that BoFu CTA stays accessible while visitors are scrolling through your site pages.
- Additionally, your navigation labels should align with the pages they lead to. People will subconsciously recognize the terms you use as they move around your site. If what a page is called in the navigation doesn’t match the page visitors arrive at, they might feel like they’ve been brought to the wrong place.
A balance of aesthetics and usability
At the end of the day, people are vain. So if your website doesn’t look good, the likelihood people are going to convert or purchase your product decreases. That’s just the way the human brain works.
There are design principles that people are just drawn to, and when users see a website that’s aesthetically pleasing, they’re more likely to be interested in that product or organization. But there’s a balance. The primary purpose of a B2B website is to be helpful to users — and that doesn’t come from a pretty design.
Some of the biggest things to consider are spacing and contrast to make sure everything on a website is legible. Contrasting colors can be used strategically to attract user attention to specific elements. By choosing colors that stand out from the rest of the design, such as using a bold color for CTA buttons or important sections, you can draw the user's eye and make those elements more noticeable. This helps guide users towards taking the desired actions, such as filling out a form or clicking on a specific link.
Additionally, your website design should align with your company’s overall brand. It’s better to have a website that’s consistent with your brand than something new and flashy that’s unrelated to how your company presents itself elsewhere.
Strategies to increase website Conversion Rate.
Whether you’re building a new website from scratch or giving your old one a facelift, these best practices for making your website attractive to users will help bring home conversions.
Identify your target audiences
Identifying your target audiences ensures you have an effective foundation to build from. When you have a clear idea of who your ideal customers are, you can create focused campaigns and messaging that are tailored specifically to them. Utilizing data such as demographics and psychographics – this includes age, gender, interests and more – will help you segment audiences correctly and provide the right content to the right people at the right time.
Create buyer personas for each of your target audiences
Buyer personas serve to help you give your target audience a face and a name, becoming more than just segments or chunks of data. This persona should include all the information about that particular type of customer, including lifestyle, cultural influences, needs, and wants. Use this to personalize your messaging with triggers and topics that appeal to different buyers. Acting on these insights will help you create effective campaigns with laser-focused content tailored specifically to each buyer persona.
Design a user-friendly website
When people browse your website, or visit a single landing page, you want their experience to be as smooth and intuitive as possible. That’s why having a user-friendly website is essential for lead generation.
Good navigation, the right amount of content, visuals that draw the eye, and an easy-to-find contact form will help guide customers through your site and lead them to the place they need to go. Having a strategy in mind when designing your website will also help you create an effective call-to-action that triggers customers to act quickly and ultimately convert into leads.
Improve loading times with technical SEO
Recent studies show that 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load! To make sure your website is loading quickly, optimize it for both speed and usability using on-page SEO and website development best practices.
Compress images and videos, minimize the code and file requests, create lazy-loading components, prioritize the visible content that loads first, and leverage browser caching amongst many other web-optimization techniques. Doing these can help you decrease loading times so visitors can easily navigate from page to page with minimal delays.
Other recommendations for improving page speed on a lead generation website include:
- Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript Code: Improve page speed is by minimizing the size of your website's code by minifying CSS, HTML, and JavaScript involves removing unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments, reducing file sizes, and improving loading times.
- Compress CSS, HTML, and JavaScript Files: Compressing these files further reduces their size, allowing them to be transmitted more quickly to the visitor's browser. This can be achieved through various compression techniques like gzip compression.
- Limit Redirects: Redirects create additional HTTP requests, which can significantly slow down your website. Minimizing the use of redirects or implementing more efficient redirects can help improve page speed.
- Eliminate Render-Blocking JavaScript Code: Render-blocking JavaScript delays the rendering of a page until the JavaScript is fully loaded and executed. Optimizing your code to eliminate or defer render-blocking JavaScript can improve the perceived speed of your website.
- Compress Images: Images often account for a large portion of a webpage's size. Compressing images without sacrificing too much quality ensures faster loading times. Tools like image compression plugins or services can help with this.
- Optimize for Mobile Devices: With an increasing number of users accessing websites through mobile devices, it is crucial to ensure that your lead generation website is mobile-friendly. Optimizing your site for mobile devices includes making sure it loads quickly on smartphones and tablets.
Utilize A/B testing (or split testing) to identify the best way to capture leads
A/B testing is a powerful process used to test different versions of one element on a website to determine which one works best for achieving specific goals. To identify the most effective way to capture leads, try A/B testing your website with two different lead generation forms - one light version and one long version. By doing so, you’ll be able to measure which form converts more viewers into paying customers and optimize other elements accordingly.
How can Google Optimize be used to test and improve website elements?
Google Optimize is a powerful tool that can be used to test and improve various elements of a website, both small-scale and large-scale tests. By utilizing this free tool, you can conduct a range of tests including A/B testing, Multivariate testing, Redirect testing, and Personalization testing. These tests enable businesses to experiment with different website elements and identify the most effective strategies for attracting and converting leads:
- A/B testing: Compare two versions of a web page or specific elements within it, such as a button's color. By randomly dividing website visitors into two groups and showing each group a different version, businesses can measure the impact of each variant on user behavior and make data-driven decisions on which version performs better.
- Multivariate testing: With this feature, you can assess the performance of multiple variations of different elements simultaneously. For example, you can test combinations of different button colors, page layouts, or font sizes to determine which combination yields the highest conversion rates.
- Redirect testing: Allows you to test different landing pages or variations of a page to determine which one leads to higher engagement or conversion rates. By redirecting users to different versions of a page, you can gather insights into user preferences and optimize you website accordingly.
- Personalization testing: Customize website experiences based on individual user characteristics, such as their location or past behavior. With this feature, you can create personalized content or offers to enhance user engagement and increase conversions.
Prospecting and outreach tools
When it comes to creating a website, you need to know what tools to use to better increase your chances of landing a qualified lead that’s right for you. Reaching out to customers who are businesses is vastly different than connecting directly with individual customers, and it requires you to reframe your approach. Many B2B prospecting tools are built to specifically source and organize this data automatically so you can take the guesswork out of how to approach these different tactics.
Now let’s take a look at tools. The ideal sales prospecting software will help your sales team automate and simplify tasks associated with lead qualification. Your sales reps could manually find and organize emails to schedule meetings, but think about all the wasted time that goes into that.
With an organized CRM tool like HubSpot, you can organize your contacts and create conversion-ready emails, then report on that data to gain valuable insights into how you’re doing. Key features of the platform include:
- A sleek, easy-to-use platform
- Separate hubs that allow you to focus on different areas based on business needs, yet live inside one convenient tool
- Live chat functionality for any ticketing services
- Pre-made templates, scheduling, tracking, and engagement reporting tools
While there are hundreds of lead prospecting tools out there, it’s important to remember that a good one empowers you to increase the volume of leads you convert into prospects. This saves your sales reps precious time (and their sanity!).
How much does a B2B website cost?
Finally, let’s talk about price. The standard website redesign ranges from $15,000 to $35,000. Why such a difference in cost? Well, a good lead generation website requires thorough research, analysis, and an in-depth content plan. Every lead-generating element on your website needs to be based on data-backed insights. Once you outline and determine your goals, you can move on to adding a cool layout and lines of code.
Ultimately, setting out on the path to creating an effective lead generation website starts with defining your target audience. Having a really strong understanding of whom you’re selling to, whether that’s persona-specific or segment specific, and understanding the pain points they’re experiencing is the best way to start this process. Then, layer everything else you do on top of that.
The Takeaway
A lead generation website helps site visitors while gathering information about them for your company. It’s more than just a digital brochure; it’s an experience that educates and nurtures prospects.
Whether you’re developing or redesigning your website in-house or hiring someone else to do it for you, the primary focus should be creating a website your buyer personas can gain value from.
