Does your company have a solid product or a valuable service but not enough quality leads? We feel you. Being growth marketers, we know exactly how to create the black-belt B2B lead generation machine you need.
In this series, we’ll take you through the 40 most powerful strategies to maximize your B2B lead generation process. Compare this journey to climbing a mountain: it takes several small steps to build this lead generation machine. Each step is a metaphorical screw in the machine, so don’t skip any or it will fall apart.
This article is the first part of a quadrilogy:
- Optimize your company profile and website for lead generation
- Learn how to use content marketing to convert your audience into leads
- Program your lead generation machine to start collecting leads
- Let the tools do the work for you by automating the lead generation process
Discover our 8 ways to optimize your website for lead generation!
1. Formulate a catchy headline that includes your value proposition
It takes the average user 3-5 seconds to form their opinion on a website or a social media profile. Therefore the first impression is absolutely crucial for deciding whether or not they will continue browsing your company website. So make sure your value proposition is the first thing visitors notice.
A good value proposition is a short yet compelling summary of the primary benefit that you offer your prospects. It’s the unique identifier that solves problems in a way your competitor can’t.
Now let’s pretend you’re speed-dating your potential customers. In this situation you want to immediately trigger them to check out your business page. The clearer your value proposition, the more this facilitates your lead generation process.
Here are our top value proposition tips:
- Less is more. Generate interest in your business in 4-6 words
- Involve your reader, don’t just throw your value proposition at them
- Talk less about the product and more about its value
- Calls to action are great, calls to value are better
- Don’t overdo, people love genuine lines
- Be casual in your tone and address your reader directly
- Be specific, 37.2% savings is better than more savings
- Make it sound more human and humorous
- Make it memorable rather than likeable
- Be clear, don’t complicate the originality of your business
For more on value proposition, check out How to write a value proposition
Don't limit your value proposition to the homepage of your website. Often, when people are browsing a website, they miss the value proposition. So to optimize your lead generation process, make sure that you repeatedly remind them why they should buy from you.
Add it to all of your pages (landing pages, blog posts and so on), preferably at the top of a form that you use to collect personal data. This makes sure your potential leads pay attention to your value proposition at least at some point, which then causes higher conversion.
2. Take the 5-second test to rate your value proposition
Once you feel confident about your catchy headline and value proposition, try the 5-second test. Adopt your (potential) leads’ point of view and check out your own company website and profile.
Send a screenshot of your business’ website to outsiders and ask them the following questions:
- What product or service does this website offer?
- What is unique about this product or service?
The answers to these questions will tell you how your visitors perceive you, which won’t necessarily be the same as how you want them to perceive you. For proper lead generation, you need these two questions and answers to be perfectly aligned.
Once you obtain the responses to these questions, identify the challenge your target audience faces and figure out a solution to that. If people’s perception already matches the aim of your company’s product or service, bravo. But if not, replace your headline with a rephrased value proposition to help generate leads and acquire higher conversion rates.
3. Demonstrate professionalism
Your online visitors don’t only read your value proposition, they also notice your level of professionalism. No matter the size or industry of your business, being professional is quintessential for achieving both short- and long-term goals.
These are the top elements visitors base their opinion on:
- Is the website secure? Visitors are paranoid when it comes to surfing unsafe websites, let alone leaving their email addresses or phone numbers. You might have read articles telling you not to trust websites that don’t start with https://. If your website URL looks like this (↓), then forget about lead generation. The very first thing you need to do is get a SSL certificate.
- Is the website mobile-friendly? According to Statista, mobile users account for more than 50% of total website visits. If your website doesn’t work well on mobile phones, you already lose more than half of your potential leads;
- Are all the links on your website working? A broken link tells visitors that your website is careless enough to leave mistakes unfixed. It shows negligence, which obviously doesn’t stimulate lead generation;
- Is your language flawless and your content relevant and up-to-date? Grammatical errors show laziness and lack of detail. Outdated content tells your audience you’re not keeping up with the trends in the market.
The thing with looking professional is that people aren’t actively looking for signs of it. It’s only until they notice something being off they tend to remember this better than things you did perfectly well. So simply don’t give them an opportunity to criticize you. This, again, will help you improve your conversion rate.
4. Show social proof
92% of people check reviews before buying from a new business. People want to know whether the company they are buying from is capable of delivering. Be proactive to showcase your work to your clients before they ask for it themselves.
When people visit your website, you need to show them they can trust your product. By identifying your top customers using them for example, your visitors will take you more seriously.
The more your customers are highly-esteemed brands, the more it shows that your business offerings aren’t just empty promises. This makes a potential lead feel more confident buying from you.
A good practice is to show your top clients’ company logos immediately after your value proposition. Next time your visitors read your value proposition, they’ll associate it with your top clients.
Once you gain the trust of your target visitors, they will be happy to turn into leads.
In addition to that, it’s even better if you get your customers to mention you somewhere on their website. This activates solid backlinking, optimizing your website for search engines, leading to better organic traffic. You can track your backlinks from your Google Analytics account.
5. Create an automated webinar strategy
Business customers are always on the hunt for solutions to their problems. With increasing numbers of tasks, they are now also looking for ways to moderate their work.
If your company offers a solution to some of the common problems your target leads face, then hosting webinars is a great way to spread awareness. Especially during the pandemic, webinars have become increasingly popular.
As people nowadays are working from home more often, they also have more time to attend webinars than ever before. And a big plus, they don't even have to get dressed or leave their house. That leaves them no excuses not to attend a webinar.
Organizing webinars is one of the preferred ways for B2B clients to learn more about the companies they work with. Hosting regular webinars will greatly help you and your potential leads to get to know each other.
During a webinar, you get the chance to talk about the latest trends your company follows. If you are a SaaS business, you can give a solid demo of your tools. Creating a webinar schedule helps your target audience to free time in their schedule to attend at least one session.
Or you can co-host webinars with companies that share the same audience. This isn’t something you want to do with your competitors, but it’s definitely worth it to try out with businesses that complement your product or service.
To automate webinar strategies, follow these steps:
- Schedule your webinars in advance, make sure to add some regularity. Do it once a week or once a month, depending on your own agenda;
- Add popups to your website. This serves people who read multiple articles or can be an exit intent popup. Experiment to find out what works best for you;
- Promote upcoming webinars through newsletters and social media so that people can share them with their friends and connections.
The more your target audience knows about you and your business, the more likely they are to leave you their contact information.
6. Connect with industry leaders
When you do decide to co-host webinars with other businesses, try to immediately connect with the industry leaders. This also spreads awareness towards the customers and partners of your co-host.
If you manage to collaborate with the industry leaders, your audience will multiply. Above that, people will start associating your business with theirs. So bare in mind you have to select your collaborators very carefully.
Connect with the industry leaders in these simple steps:
- Start by making a list. If you haven’t identified them yet, use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find people of your interest based on their specific role, location and industry;
- Once you compiled this list, export contact details to a spreadsheet using data scrapers;
- Write multiple versions of personalized cold emails and run an A/B test;
- Automate emailing by feeding the contact list and emails in Phantombuster.
Not only can you co-host webinars, you can also complement each other’s articles, publish blog posts or a joint eBook or make an appearance on each other's social media page. This has proven to be a qualitative practice for generating leads.
By collaborating with reputable businesses, you’ll spread awareness on your company towards a new audience. The more people know about you and understand your value proposition, the more leads you’ll obviously generate.
7. Observe how B2B buyers browse your site
You may have read multiple sources advising you to optimize your website in order to maximize conversions. This, however, often confuses businesses because they simply don’t know how to do so.
One great way is to check heatmaps of user activity on your website. A tool we recommend you to use is Hotjar. It allows you not only to observe heatmaps on your website but also records visitors’ cursor activity.
Use this information to understand which of your website’s elements visitors most engage with. Make these as user-friendly as possible and create better CTAs to generate more leads.
On the other hand, also try to understand which elements are not working (well). You can easily differentiate by looking for cold spots on your website or parts where visitors don’t bother taking their cursor. This could be broken links, poorly phrased calls to action or unattractive colours.
Using heatmaps to your advantage will help you develop your website in a more user-friendly way and ultimately generate better leads.
Experiment with Hotjar today: it's easy to implement and takes less than 5 minutes to set up.
8. Make sure you have more followers and connections
As superficial as it sounds, people actually check which connections and how many followers your company profile has on social media. The more followers you have, the more popular you appear. And guess what? Indeed, the more effective your lead generation gets. Fact is that having a huge follower base gives the impression that you must be good at what you do.
As it is crucial to have a significant and qualitative following, you want to make sure that these followers are relevant to your business offerings. They can’t just be gained by follow-for-follow or like-for-like principles. Using these practices will only lead to a short-term spike in followers and tarnish your brand image.
Once you have a decent follower base, add the following metrics to your website. They act as social proof for your lead generation. Easy social share buttons is a good tool to set up your social media follower count on your website and landing page.
Useful tips to acquire more followers:
- Provide them with value;
- Make them feel connected;
- Incentivize existing followers to invite their friends and colleagues;
- Have a clear content strategy;
- Make sure you create content that people want to engage with;
- Promote your social media accounts everywhere, especially on your website.
If you are still in the developmental phase of a new business, try joining engagement pods to generate the initial momentum. However, always make sure you don’t overuse these.
Bottom Line
You now have our top 8 actionable strategies to optimize your website for maximal conversions. All these strategies are very easy to implement and don’t take much time. Try them out for yourself.
If you are still struggling with any of the above or need more strategies, feel free to schedule your FREE call with David.
Read more additional articles that will help you with your lead generation process:
B2B Lead Generation Strategy: How We Increased Leads By 200% For A SaaS Company
Top 50 Lead Generation Software in 2020 with Pricings
7 LinkedIn Automation Tools For B2B Lead Generation + Use Cases