Finding new customers in this climate is harder than ever and your web site could be the best marketing tool that you possess. If it’s not bringing in new leads for your business, then what purpose is it really serving?
Whether you’ve got an existing web site that isn’t working hard enough or you haven’t got one in place yet, I’ve put together a 7 step process to help you create your own web based lead generation system and bring lots of customers your way.
Step 1: Market research and segment prioritisation
You can be anything you want to be but you can’t be all things to all people, Dr Glenn Livingston
Otherwise you will lack focus and credibility.
So what does that mean? You have to get to know your market and work out who you want to appeal to the most.
- Carry out keyword research – find keywords and phrases which relate to your products or services. Use tools like “Google Keyword Suggestion”
- Segment your market based on the keyword research findings
- Prioritise those segments
- Be very focused at appealing to those priority segments. You can only have one headline on your web page. What will yours be?
- (Read my blog 2 Niche Finder Golden Rules for more tips)
Step 2: Set up a domain name
If you’ve already got a website, I’m guessing your domain name reflects your company name in some way. But how are people going to stumble across your site if they have no idea who you are?
What you want is to find a domain name that is close to the term that your customers are searching for; this brings in targeted website traffic. Now the search engines know you are highly relevant and put you high on their list.
Having decided on your domain name, here’s a quick tip. Register your domain name independently from your hosting company so it’s yours to move where you want, without being tied to one hosting company.
www.ukreg.co.uk and www.godaddy.com are domain registration companies we often use.
Step 3: Hosting and web set up
You need build your website on a content management system (CMS) platform to allow you to add your own content on a regular basis. It needs to be search engine friendly with pretty urls and metatag set ups. We’re big fans of the WordPress CMS system. (Don’t worry if this all sounds alien, it will become clear as these blogs unfold).
The structure of the website needs to be search engine friendly. Optimise every aspect of your site including the invisible descriptions seen only by the robot crawlers. But most importantly: the highly visible domain name, title and headings can increase the rankings of your website tenfold. You need to make certain that key sections are addressed such as Contact Us pages. Not only will this have a big impact on Google quality scores but it provides an opportunity to build a layer of trust with your audience, as the users gets a sense of a bonafide company behind the website.
Step 4: Content creation
Content is king online. But remember you need to create content not just on your web pages, but on your posts, blogs, autoresponders, lead magnets to name but a few.
When you are thinking about the type of content you need to create for your priority market segment, an important step is to understand the difference between content that fulfils a point of entry requirement and content that fulfils a point of differentiation requirement.
Let me explain. Point of entry information is a mandatory requirement to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about. However, your customers can find out the same information in a lot of other places too. On the other hand, information that differentiates takes you a cut above the pack. Customers want to know this information and are having great difficulty finding the answers elsewhere.
For instance, I think most customers understand the importance of building a list and have a fairly good idea how to do it. A differentiator would be, how to build a list of hyper-repsonsive customers. The 20% of raving fans that are far more likely to buy, rather than the 80% of customer that don’t respond and just clog up your systems.
Points of differentiation will set yourself apart from your competitors, grab their attention and prove that you know your stuff. They would be hard pushed to find this out anywhere else unless they parted with some money or did some serious research.
Think of your website in the same way. Make sure you provide information that addresses the point of entry requirements at your first contact with them, then in order to get them to sign up or visit again, give them a flavour of the point of differentiation information they will learn. You want to put good stuff after you have got their details but you want to allude to it before. They need to have an incentive to sign up.
Step 5: Autoresponder service
It’s very unlikely that your customers will buy from you straight off. You have to develop trust from a series of exposures. Email auto responders are a great way of doing this. You can keep expanding the information and build trust over a series of emails rather than trying to get your information across in one hit. We use Aweber which you can find at:
It’s important to set up a proper auto-responder service rather than using an autoresponder script built into your website. No-one likes receiving spam. Subscribing to services like aweber keeps you out of spammers jail by providing double opt-in and proof of sign up features, as well as giving you sophisticated analytics and messaging management.
Step 6: Set up your promotional campaign
Before running any campaign to increase your traffic you need to have analytics in place, otherwise any optimisation efforts will be pure guess work. It’s likely that you will have multiple campaigns running. Whether it’s pay per click, with multiple keyword groups and split testing or an organic campaign, you need to be able to monitor it. I recommend Google Analytics, a comprehensive and free service.
The types of promotional campaign you will carry out will grow with your experience. Whether its onsite optimisation such as keyword stuffing, or offsite optimisation through backlinks, JVs, article marketing and so on, it’s important to develop a checklist to make sure you cover off all the possibilities and monitor your analytics closely.
Step 7: Optimisation
You can’t start optimisation until you have a feedback loop in place. Every change you make you can assess in the context of traffic, conversion sales, leads and so on.
Now begin the optimisation:
- Create your system
- Run the system
- Check your analytics
- Identify the weakest point
- Fix
- Monitor improvements
- Look for next weakest point and run the system again
Addressing anything other than the weakest point is wasteful because it will not compensate for that weakest point.
If this all seems too much, it is worth it, this will generate business and generally it will be new business that you couldn’t have reached through other means. So persevere.
For more information on web based lead generation systems download my free report now.
P.S. If you’re in a hurry to set up your own web based lead generation system or you unsure of where to start yourself, get in touch and we can do the whole lot or a mix according to your budget. Some clients handle all the research and content generation and leave us to do the technical part, for others we do the whole shebang.
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