These days searching over the internet is one of the primary methods for new prospects finding your business. This means that your website is an exceptionally powerful tool in converting visitors and generating leads. Take a look at our tips on how to create a robust, dynamic website and boost your incoming leads.
Read more: The 9 things every mortgage broker needs on their website
Planning
Once you have decided to start working on a new website, the most important step is the planning process. A website that is designed to generate leads needs to be well thought out and built with lead generation in mind. To do that, you will need to understand your buyer personas as well as the buyer journey. From there, you can develop core page plans for each page of the website.
Buyer personas and buyer journey
Before you start deciding which pages you need on your website, it’s imperative that you know your target audience and that you take them into consideration. The easiest way to think about this is by mapping out your Buyer Personas (look here for a handy template) and your Buyer Journey.
A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your target audience. Using the template above, or similar, note down the information you know about your audience. Take the time to really think about what their pain points are and how you and your business can help them.
A Buyer Journey is a path that your audience takes to go from stranger to visitor to lead and, eventually, to client. The path looks like this: awareness, consideration, decision.
The awareness stage is when the prospect knows that they have a problem that needs solving (e.g. ‘I want to buy a house, but don’t know where to start’). Consideration is the stage in which the client knows what the options for solving that problem are (e.g. ‘Ah, now I see that I can speak to a broker. But which one?’). And, finally, the decision stage is when the prospect makes the decision about which option they will choose.
Core page plans
A core page plan is your guide to what content needs to go into a page. This will help you understand how to build your website pages and what content will help them be effective. The rule here is that one page should have one goal, so keep that in mind.
Taking each page individually, you must consider a few things:
- What do I want visitors to this page to do?
- What are visitors to this page looking for?
- How do people end up on this page?
- Where do visitors go when they leave this page?
- What content do I need to include to make sure visitors do what my business wants and to give them what they came to this page for?
Now that you’ve done the strategic thinking, the website will have a strong foundation for lead generation. It will reflect your thinking and will feel like a highly tailored experience for your visitors.
Content
The next step to creating a website that brings in leads is to consider your content. Review what you learned through mapping out your clients’ buyer journey and begin to build your content based on that.
Web content
When writing the content of your pages, it is important to bear in mind both the buyer journey and the core page plans that you have created. Refer to these heavily to make sure that your pages are aligned to the goals you set out during that process. Remember: one page, one goal.
Blogs
As you begin to develop a content plan for your business and your website, you will need to ensure that you are writing content that appeals to your audience. Your future clients all have questions that need answering and problems that need solving. By providing the solutions to these issues, you will begin to attract the right visitors.
For instance, if you know that your clients tend to have questions about the mortgage process, you may want to consider writing blogs that explain it like this. Anything that you feel adds genuine value to your clients will be a good blog topic.
Content offers
The most important content that you will write is a content offer. This is a piece of downloadable content that is valuable enough for someone to provide you with their details. This can be a guide on how to navigate the different types of mortgages or a checklist of what they will need to complete a mortgage application.
If you create a substantial piece of content that will be useful to prospective clients, you can use that to generate new leads and support your business.
Promotion
In order for your website to turn visitors into leads, you will need to ensure that you are attracting visitors to your site. In addition to making sure your site is visible on all of your marketing communications and using your content strategy to ensure it is showing up in search results, you will need to harness the power of social media to bring people to your website.
Social media
Social media is a powerful tool that works best as an enhancement of a good website. Right now, less than two-thirds of small businesses have a website, many citing social media as a reason not to have one built.
Instead of thinking of social media as a replacement for websites, it is important to use it as a platform to boost visitors to your site and, therefore, your proposition. You can use this guide here to find out the best ways for brokers to use social media.
With these tips in mind, you now have the tools you need to create a website that works for you and increases your lead generation capabilities.