Feet Up Friday: How Do I Convert Website Traffic?

Below is the transcribed version of the video.

The Problem

Hello everybody, welcome to another edition of Feet Up Friday. I am your host Brendan Gilbert. This week we're going to talk about converting website traffic. This is the convert phase of the inbound marketing philosophy. This is our converting machine, it's very high tech as you can see. Anyways, the purpose of this illustration is to show you that right now we have people visiting your website and we don't know who they are. We want to know who these people are, we want to send them through this machine and pop them out over here to discover who they are, what they have been looking at, and what they might need help them with.

Mindset

One thing that we hear a lot is "Hey, we need a new website" "Can you guys build us a new website" "We need a new web presence". These are good things and we want to encourage this mindset. Having a modern presence on the web, especially in today's device driven world, is highly important to your business success and public image.

Think Differently

However, we want you to think about it differently than "I need a new website". For example, let's say you are shopping for a vehicle and you decide to buy a brand new beautiful car. After your purchase, you drive it home and park it in your driveway. You then decide to never drive the vehicle again. Now, obviously, that is not the point of purchasing a vehicle. For it to just sit in your yard is a waste of your hard earned money. It's purpose is to get you from point A to point B and that's why you purchased the vehicle.

This same idea can be applied to a new website. You want your new web presence, that you have spent a lot of time and energy building, to actually do something other than look pretty. You want it to turn all those mysterious visitors into leads. You need to use your website as your vehicle for converting visitors.  One way to convert these visitors is to use forms, call to actions, and landing pages.

Call To Actions

Call to actions are to be placed throughout your website, ideally above the fold and at the bottom of blog posts. These call to actions should be kept in the forefront of your mind during the design process.  In our example, notice how this construction supply company has multiple call to actions on the page. You can request materials, download a drywall product guide, contact them, and even get an eBook. This will help drive lead generation in multiple buying stages and result in more customers.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are where you direct traffic when someone clicks one of your call to actions. On these landing pages you want to offer premium content for people to interact with, such as downloading an eBook or case study, or perhaps they can sign up to gain access to a webinar or podcast. The purpose is to simply offer them something they would value for their information. This will help you deliver quality content to them and keep them happy with your company while gaining information about your visitors.

Forms

Forms are simply the mechanism that allows you to capture a visitors information. Forms will generally always go on a landing page if your intention is to generate leads from the landing page you have created. You may also want to consider having contact forms available on the side and or bottom of your website so people can contact you at any point in their website session. Once someone fills out a form they are taken to a page where you fulfill the promise and deliver what you were offering in the call to action and on the landing page.

Summary

A typical business will spend $92.00 to get a visitor to view their website and only a $1.00 to convert them. That means companies are spending over 9,000% more to get a website visitor than a lead. Interestingly, content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less. Therefore, businesses can have more leads for their sales team by simply changing the way they think when it comes to building a new website all while saving money. Offering valuable content to your visitors will result in lead generation and strengthen your business image as a thought leader and expert.

So the next time you're looking for a new website, or you are evaluating your current web presence, remember you're not actually buying a car, you're buying a vehicle to get you to your destination.

PS - Download our 25 Website Must Haves eBook below to discover how you can make your website a lead generation machine.