Turn your website into a lead gen machine
So, what is lead generation?
Lead generation captures information from people interested in your products or services to engage in your sales process.
You may have heard the saying “The money is in the list”.
This refers to your email marketing list. The bigger it is, the more people you can communicate with and run offers to.
Lead generation helps you build your marketing lists through your website.
Leads can be captured in many ways
- Through your website
- Through social platforms (Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook)
- Paid Advertising
- Phone Outreach
- Email outreach.
In this step, we’ll focus more directly on capturing leads through your website.
Not all leads are equal.
Not everyone who comes to your website is looking to buy now. In fact, at any one time, only 5% of visitors may be actively looking to buy.
35% may be looking for more information about your product or service. Some may have come to your site from another site or interacted with an email or ad on Facebook or LinkedIn that got their attention.
That’s why it’s important to have several different ways for people to engage with you based on their stage of the buying process.
Transactional Call To Action for Hotter leads
Someone requesting a quote or consultation through your diary would be classed a hot lead as they are actively saying I want to know how much this will cost or work and want to have a conversation. You’ll be able to capture more information and start the sales process at a higher point.
Transitional Call To Action for Warmer Leads
We also want to talk with people who are not looking to buy right now.
By offering other types of information, such as a free ebook, checklist, webinar replay, or product brochure, you can give them more information to be more informed. You can have a way to continue to communicate with them until they either self-opt out or buy from you when they are ready.
If someone signs up for a free download or webinar, they will be classified as warm leads and go into an automated email sequence.
Here are a few examples of different types of lead generation
Transactional Lead
A quote request web form
It can be a simple form designed to capture the information you need to supply a quote to your potential customer. Keep it fairly quick and easy to complete.
An Online Diary Booking
It is an online tool that connects to your online diary and allows people to book video calls directly with you or your team. The example below is using Google Meet. The most popular tools here are Calendly and Acuity, but there are a lot of available.
A live Chat Request
Live chat tools are typically third-party services you embed on your website. They allow you to interact with anyone using your live chat system in real-time, and they are quicker and easier for website visitors to use.
Transitional Lead - Lead Magnet
A lead magnet form is a simple web form, normally only 2-3 fields designed to capture the user’s information in exchange for something of value.
A few examples of lead magnets
- A free quiz or assessment
- A free Ebook
- A free webinar
- Checklist
- Whitepaper
- Product Brochure
Anything of value that may help the user to learn more about a subject or your product or service
Here are a few examples from a few websites
Creating your lead magnet
If you dont have a lead magnet on your site I would recommend following this video on what makes a good lead magnet
4 Simple Rules to make your lead magnet convert better
- It should solve a need
- It should create a desire to solve a problem
- Educate them and help them achieve a quick win
- Automate the data capture, delivery and follow-up emails.
Capturing information
Now you have your lead magnet. We need to put it in front of people so they can sign up for it and capture leads.
But how do we capture leads through our website?
You’ll need a web form.
You can build web forms in a number of ways.
Creating your lead capture forms
In the videos below, I’ll show you the different ways you can add lead capture forms to your site.
Passing their information to your CRM
So now that we have our web form created, it’s important to pass and store their information in our CRM or email marketing system.
Connecting your forms to your CRM
In the video below, I’ll show you how to pass their information to your CRM in this video.
Lead Magnet Delivery - Automating Your Follow up series
Now that we have our form connected to our CRM, let’s create a simple email autoresponder to deliver our lead magnet, continue the conversation, and make them an offer.
Creating a simple Automation
Watch this video, where I show you how to create a simple email auto-responder sequence.
Adding your lead magnet to your site.
You can add your lead capture forms to your website in a few different ways.
- On pages
- Dedicated landing pages
- On blog posts
- Pop-ups
In the videos below, I’ll show you how to add your lead capture form to your site in multiple ways. The tutorial uses Elementor.
Adding web forms to your website
In the videos below, I’ll show you the different ways you can add lead capture forms to your site.
Now, you have a web form, and their information is being passed to your CRM. We can start to automate things a little more.
2. Automation
Automation is the process of things happening automatically without humans needing to be involved.
This could be sending the ebook to the person who just requested your free ebook or a thank you next steps message to someone who requested a quote.
More advanced sales automation example
Someone requests a demo through your online diary system. The request is passed into your CRM, and a deal is created inside a sales pipeline; this notifies your sales team and creates a series of action steps for the sales team to work through to try to close the sale.
An Automation flow
Look at the diagram below, which details automated lead generation and sales funnels.
Your CRM
You can only automate things with a CRM or email automation system.
There are hundreds of these systems available. You may have heard of a few.
- Keap
- Mailchimp
- HubSpot
- Active Campaign
- Convert Kit
We use Active Campaign, and your system should match your requirements. However, most will allow you to run a simple email autoresponder series and send email campaigns.
If you are just starting with Lead Generation, I recommend a simple system like MailChimp or the ActiveCampaigns Lite plan.
Automation Discovery Call
If you still have questions about getting automation working for your business, book a Free discovery call with our automation master, Nathan, to learn more and see how we can help.
3. Marketing Tracking
"You can't improve what you don't measure"
If you are marketing your business in any way, you want to know what’s working and what’s not. That is where Tracking comes in.
There are lots of different things you can track and measure.
Here are a few of the most common things to measure.
- Where do people go on our website
- How many new leads did we get
- Where did the leads come from
- What is our most profitable advertising channel
- What keywords are we getting found for from organic search
There are different types of tracking tools you can use depending on the marketing you are doing.
At a bare minimum, you’ll want to have website tracking.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that helps you track your web traffic, popular pages, engagement type, locations, devices, conversions and other demographics.
It gives an insightful view of the performance of your website.
Setting up Google Analytics
If you dont have a Google Analytics account set up, watch this video on how to set it up and install it on your site.
Understanding Your Site Performance with Google Analytics
If you want to learn how to use Google Analytics to see how it performs, watch this video.
How to use Google Analytics
If you want to learn how to use Google Analytics to see how it performs, watch this video.
Create and Track Conversions
Conversion tracking gives you another layer of marketing data to use to know if things are working for you. Let’s say you want to track how many people sign up for your new lead magnet or track purchases of your products. Conversion tracking helps you see the number you have.
Let’s say you’ve had 100 people visit your lead magnet and 10 sign up. That’s a 10% conversion rate. Obviously, the higher the conversion rate, the better, but without this number, we’re guessing and making assumptions.
Watch the video below, which walks you through setting up conversion tracking goals.
Conversion Tracking – How To
If you want to create conversion goals inside Google Analytics, watch this video on how to set them up and track them
Google Search Console is another free tool from Google that is more SEO-focused. It gives insights into your site’s performance in organic search results — impressions, clicks, and most popular keywords. You can also use GSC to optimise and fix issues with your site.
For a deeper dive into using Google Search Console and setting it up on your website, see the SEO Step in this website improvement series.
Paid Traffic
If you run any form of paid advertising online, you must determine its effectiveness and the cost per click and lead.
The two most popular paid advertising platforms are Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Google Ads offers a service called Tag Manager that allows you to track the performance of your paid ad campaigns and run remarketing campaigns to previous site visitors.
Facebook gives you a “Facebook Pixel” to track your ads’ performance. You can also build audiences and run remarketing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram for people who have visited certain pages on your website.
Other Types Of Website Tracking
CRM site tracking
Some CRMS come with site tracking. Site tracking will track the pages that users visit your site, and you can run automated emails or SMS messages based on where they go on your website.
Let’s say they have downloaded your free guide. Your email sequence encourages them to book a call.
If they then visit the Book a Call page and dont book a call. A notification can be triggered to your sales team to call them because they visited the page, or an email can be sent asking if they would like to book a call with an incentive or special offer.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps allow you to see how people interact with your web pages.
Where they click, how far they scroll on the page
These insights can help you add links, change content, or reorder your pages to boost conversions.
Installing Tracking Codes on your WordPress website
If you need help adding tracking codes to your website, Watch this quick video.
Tracking Codes Warning
Tracking codes can affect your site speed.
If you no longer use a system like Facebook ads or heatmaps, I recommend removing this code from your website to help keep it as fast as possible. You can always add it again later.
Conclusion
Lead generation is a very important part of the success of your website.
Make it clear and easy for people who want to buy your products or services to contact you and capture Hot leads. Building your marketing lists with people who want more information (Warm Leads) so you can continue to communicate with them and run offers to them is a proven and effective way to grow your business.
Combine lead generation with CRM and automation; you’re ready to grow. Once you have this in place, tracking what is working and what is not will allow you to make changes and scale your marketing to attract and
After this step, you’ll have improved your lead generation for your main service, a lead magnet ready to capture people not quite ready to buy, your CRM connected, and simple automation and tracking Google Analytics working on your site.
If any of this seems too complicated, or you would like us to advise you on improving your lead generation, automation, and tracking, book a free web audit, and we’ll be happy to review your site for you.
