Your company’s website is perhaps the single most important place to collect new B2B leads — and yet many companies let visitors come and go without even so much as collecting an email address. If you want to make your website a key part of your B2B lead generation strategy, then you have to make “lead capture” the focal point of your strategy. Here are a few tips to ramp up your website’s ability to collect leads:
Tip #1: Provide plenty of downloadables
Within the marketing industry, downloadables – such as e-books, case studies, white papers and product specification sheets – are known as “sales magnets.” They are so important because they show purchase intent. In other words, the prospect has spent time on your website and has decided to request additional information. At the very least, they are intrigued by your offerings. In return for this free content, of course, you can ask for the prospect’s email address. If you ask for too much information at this early point, you could lose them — so just ask for the email, nothing more.
Tip #2: Showcase a brief product or company video
On today’s internet, the single most engaging form of content is the video. Thus, if you’re not using video on your company website, you are ignoring an important source of new leads. At the end of the video, include information on how the prospect can further contact you. This might be an email address, a phone number or a physical address.
There are several different types of videos that you can showcase. One is just a brief summary of your company and what it does. In terms of capturing leads, though, this is not the most effective strategy. It’s far better to explain what your products do. This can be a bit more complicated than just showing a bunch of smiling employees or a gleaming office tower – so some companies use something called the “explainer” video.
This explainer video does exactly that – it explains what your products do, all in 2 minutes or less. Some use cartoon-like characters to illustrate a point, but all of the best ones use some form of motion. Even the captions or words are somehow animated. This animation is key to holding the viewer’s attention.
Tip #3: Invite prospects to sign up for an email newsletter
Your website needs to become a hub for prospects to sign up for your weekly, biweekly or monthly newsletter. It really doesn’t matter how often your newsletter goes out. What does matter is that you have a regular way of messaging prospects. Once they have “opted in” to your newsletter, you have a powerful way to nudge them along the B2B buyer’s journey.
Tip #4: Give prospects a reason to come back soon
Ok, you’re not going to close a sale every time sometime visits your website. But you certainly want prospects to have a reason to come back. So you need to create the impression that your website is constantly being updated with something new – a new blog post, a new product video, or a new update from an industry event. “New” is what gets people to come back again and again.
Using these simple tips, you’ll be able to transform your website into a B2B lead generation machine.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.