Top tips to create a lead generating website

Your website is an exceptionally powerful tool for generating and converting leads into paying clients.

So how do you create a website that’s able to attract and convert the people you want to bring aboard?

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 who you are seeking to attract and the process that leads to them becoming signed-up customers.

From there, you can develop core page plans for each page of the website.

Customer personas 

Before you start deciding which pages you need on your website, it’s imperative that you know your target audience and what makes them tick. 

You can do this by drawing up one or more customer personas - semi-fictional representations of the type of person you want to attract, based on client data and market research.

You can then consider your target audience’s needs, circumstances and challenges, and think about how you and your business can help them.

Read more: What is a customer persona?

Map out the buyer journey

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 should I include to make sure it’s useful to visitors?
• What content will help my business and will support its goals?

Content

The next step is to consider your content. Review what you learned through mapping out your clients’ buyer journey and consult this as you begin to build your content.

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.

Read more: Brokers - Engaging Content Ideas

Content offers

This is a piece of downloadable content that is valuable enough for someone to provide you with their details. 

For example, you could publish 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

You need to be able to attract visitors to your site before you can start moving them along the sales funnel.

That means it’s really important to make your site visible on all your marketing communications, literature and digital platforms.

At the same time, create your content strategy in a way that means it can organically include popular keywords, so there’s a good chance that your site will rank highly in search engine results pages.

You could also harness the power of social media platforms to bring people to your website, perhaps by sharing links to original content such as blog posts. 

Many businesses make the mistakes of thinking of the likes of Facebook and Twitter as a replacement to their websites. But that’s the wrong approach, as social media can be used as a platform to draw visitors to your site and explore your proposition more deeply.

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.

Good luck!

Read more: What social media channel is best for your firm?

Read more: 4 ways to generate more business for your brokerage