Long gone are the days of brochure websites where you just needed a digital presence to validate that your business exists. Not only do customers expect more from your website, but your bottom line requires it to provide more. If your website is not meeting the needs of your ideal buyers and it is not generating potential sales leads, it is probably time to redesign your website. Let’s look at what makes a website an effective digital marketing tool.
Is Your Website Optimized For Lead Conversion
You do your job every day, right? So your website should be doing its job too. As your most important marketing tool, a good website should be doing its job to convert website visitors into leads. One of the most important things to consider when designing your website is if it is optimized for conversion.
Simply put, a conversion is getting someone to respond to your Call-to-Action (CTA) on your website. This is important because after engaging with your Call-to-Action, that person is moving further down the buyer’s journey and one step closer to a sale.
Not sure how to optimize your website for lead conversion? Start by understanding inbound marketing.
Design Your Website for Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing delivers a powerful and useful methodology; Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.
The Inbound methodology is a system that will help you increase your conversion rate, and lead generation by enticing the right kind of traffic to your website, turning them into customers, and promoters of your business.
Attract Your Ideal Buyers
For your website to be effective in providing ROI, you want people coming to your site who are most likely to become leads. To attract the right people, you need to first define your target audience and your ideal customers by establishing buyer personas.
Once you’ve defined your ideal buyers, you’ll want to make sure the content on your website is speaking to them and answering their common questions. This will help attract the right visitors and automatically filter out the people your sales team considers unqualified. Here are some of the inbound marketing tactics that, if used correctly, can attract the right people to your site.
Establish a Blog
A blog is a great way to create educational content that answers questions and eases the pain points of your specific buyer personas. By doing this you establish your business as an industry expert and attract visitors to your website that are actually interested in what your business provides.
Search Engine Optimization
Researching and using the right keywords on your website will help you attract your buyer personas. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may be a difficult concept to grasp right away, but if done properly it can help your website rank higher in search results. One tip: focus on very specific long-tail keywords that your buyer persona might be searching on Google.
Need help with this one? Our team at Uncle Jake Media provides SEO services and consultation.
Convert Your Website Visitors
Once you have attracted the right people to your website, the next step is to convert them into a lead by collecting their contact information One of the most likely pieces of information your ideal buyers are willing to share is their email addresses. If you can get that, then your website is starting to do its job.
Here are important components that your website needs to convert your visitors to leads:
Forms
Create forms for your website visitors to fill out and submit their information. Providing forms on your website or landing pages allows you to get the information that you need in order to build your contact list and interact with your visitors as leads. The most important conversion point for a website to have is a Contact Us form.
When using forms, make sure you think about where you’ll be storing your visitor’s contact information. Consider investing in a CRM like HubSpot. If interested, Chat with Brady - as a HubSpot partner, the UJM team can help you get started.
Calls-To-Action (CTA)
A CTA can be a button, a link, or even an image that encourages your visitor to make an action. Usually, this action is to click in order to get a content offer. These CTAs should link to a page where you can request the visitor’s information through a form. For example, Here is one of ours: 
Close the Deal & Delight Your Customers
If you have designed a website that can attract the right people and convert them into leads then your website has done an awesome job. But the inbound methodology still has two more important stages, Close and Delight. Now, this is where your sales team starts doin’ their thing.
In these stages, your sales and marketing team can use other important marketing tactics to nurture your new website leads, close their deal, and turn them into your biggest fans. Some of these tactics include email marketing, social media marketing, and marketing automation.
Define Your Marketing Goals and Get Started
Now after reading all that, do you look at your website differently? Don’t get discouraged if you find your website isn’t as effective as you thought it was. The best next step is to outline your marketing goals. If generating new leads is on that list of goals, consider your website a priority. Start looking at how your website is performing so you can discover what your website lacks to be a marketing tool.
Use our free website grader to see how your website is performing right now. Or chat with our marketing and sales expert, Brady to see how we can help make your website an effective marketing tool.
