We often have new clients ask us what they should focus on when building a business online, so in this post we’re going to focus on providing some perspective on this.
If the goal of your Website is to generate leads, as an Internet marketing company, we typically recommend starting off by building a Website that is designed properly to generate leads. This means that you need a Web form above the fold and you want to minimize the number of fields that you are asking your prospects to complete. The reason for this is that you want to minimize the amount of anxiety that your prospects are experiencing when considering completing your Web form.
As a matter of fact, you will notice that we only ask for the first name and email address on our Web forms. We even recommend dropping the first name and simply using the email address alone. The key here is that you want to maximize your lead volume and conversion from unique visitors to leads.
By asking for just the email address, you are giving yourself the best chance to maximize your conversion. We also recommend having your Web form on all of your key pages as a single step. This means that you should try to enable prospects to complete your Web form right on the page that they arrive on, whether they arrive on your home page or product line pages. Try not to have them click through to a landing page to complete a Web form, as your some of your prospects will abandon the process at every step. The bottom line is the less steps the better.
Now that we have the, all important, Web form out of the way, let’s turn to the next logical element – your offer. You have to give away something that your audience values to get their email address, but what do you give away?
There are three key initial offers that you can use. The first is an eBook. An eBook is an easy way to move to market quickly and start collecting leads, but you want to think about the big picture. If your leads are simply going to be sent to a sales team to follow up on, an eBook may be fine. If you want to develop more of an automated marketing and sales campaign you may want to consider a Webinar as your initial opt-in or perhaps a sequence of videos that lead to a Webinar in the future. It’s important to think about both the short and long-term when building your marketing campaign so that you can scale it up and automate it.
Now that we have done some thinking about the offer, let’s take a look at the rest of the content on your site. In the past, many people said that the purpose of a home page is to clearly communicate your value proposition. I’d take it a step further and say that while your value proposition does need to be clearly communicated, focusing on your initial opt-in is fundamental. This means that the content on your home page should, in addition to communicating your value proposition, compel prospects to complete your Web form. As a matter of fact, almost all of the content should be built around your offer.
To achieve this, start with a strong hook in your headline that communicates the value that you provide. Ideally, you want to balance your value proposition with your offer. If you can’t achieve this in your headline, support your heading with a subheading.
The next thing you want to develop is a strong sales letter. Your sales letter can be communicated through video or text. We recommend using both. Use video above the fold so that prospects can connect with you. And use text below the fold so that your content can be optimized for SEO.
Once you have your Website in place, it’s then a matter of developing the rest of your foundation, including your social media sites and an automated email campaign to develop and warm up your leads for your sales team.
Stay tuned for more information on automated email campaigns. Please let us know if you have any questions by commenting.