Why You’re Not Generating Leads With Your Website
The biggest pleasure I get out of the work that my team and I do is helping businesses realize their marketing potential without a huge marketing budget. Getting more leads is crucial for service businesses, yet many businesses fail to do it right. That’s why so many businesses fail every year as the time goes on. These businesses follow the old logic, we offer services people need – so they will contact us when they need them.
Occasionally, if budget permits, they’ll run outbound advertising campaigns (billboards, bus ads, newspaper ads, TV commercials, etc.). Yet, they still fail. That’s because it does not work anymore, not that it worked well in the past anyways. Today, we need to leverage inbound marketing to generate leads through your business website.
In this video, I explain one CRITICAL item your lead generation efforts can’t work without.
Video Transcript
Hi, my name is Viktor Nagornyy, and I’m the CEO and the Business Guardian at ProjectArmy. I want to welcome you to another episode of Captain’s Log. In this video, I want to talk about why many small businesses that we work with don’t generate leads with their website.
Many businesses get a website because either someone told them to or they know they need one. That’s good, but in many cases, they simply get another brochure for their website. Then they expect that brochure to generate leads. Well that’s not really the way it works.
In many cases of small businesses that we work with, I would say a huge majority, about 90 percent, when we see their website for the first time, it’s really clear why they can’t generate any leads with that website. That’s because they don’t have any offer on their website.
What I mean by that is usually, many small business websites, they will have one thing, a contact form to get the leads. It’s either they have a phone number that leads can call, or the majority case is just a contact us page, and they expect people to submit the form. Well, let me be very frank with you. Nobody cares about your business but you, especially the leads.
There are competitors out there who are competing for the leads for your customers. They probably might have something on their website to get those leads, and you probably don’t.
The first thing is you have to get an offer. What I mean by an offer, it’s something of value that you can offer to your prospective clients. For example, an e-book, a white paper, a webinar, a video, an audio podcast, something that they can download or get for free. Even a free trial, even a consultation can be a really good offer if properly positioned. You need to figure out what your offer is to be able to give it to your leads.
What I like to use as a metaphor for lead generation is a barter exchange system. When you have something of value that your visitors on a website need, you make an exchange or you barter exchange. You give them that valuable asset so they can get whatever value they want to get out of it, and then they exchange, they give you their contact information.
That’s how you generate leads. In order to figure out what your offer is, that’s really where the content strategy comes into play. I’m not going to discuss the content strategy in this video because that’s a whole other video, or even a few videos.
Having a content strategy in place will allow you to figure out who you’re talking to and what type of content resources you need to produce to get those people to your website and convert. One of the things that you do in the content strategy is that you try to figure out buyer personas, different segments of your target market, very specific about your personalities, interests, pain points. Once you figure those out, you are able to figure out what type of offers, what type of content resources you will create. These offers, they need to be aligned with your prospects, your leads’ pain points in mind, not yours. They really don’t care about your business.
It’s for your customers, so they have to align with their pain points. You probably know what their pain points are if you’ve already been in business for some time and sold your services or products. You need to align it with your customers’ pain points in mind. If you create a PDF, like an e-book, whatever the e-book has, whatever it talks about, it has to offer some sort of a solution to a problem that your customers have. Otherwise, they’re not going to get it. They have a pain point. They’re looking for a vendor or a service provider, and you might offer some of those services that they’re looking for. To convert them, you have to offer them something of value.
Once you do that, you’ll be able to generate leads a lot better than what you’re doing right now. In many cases, many small businesses, as I said earlier, they don’t generate any leads with their website. They create a really nice, beautiful website. They might win an award for graphic design for their website, but they just collect dust because there’s just a contact us form. There’s nothing more. That’s not how lead generation works. Your competitors are probably beating you head over heels because they have something of value to offer and you’re not.
Figure out what that offer is. PDF, even a free consultation as I said, can be positioned very well as an offer. Once you do that, you’ll be able to generate leads a lot easier with your website. You’re not going to blame online marketing that it’s not working because it will work once you have that. If you have any questions about creating your offer, feel free to leave a comment for this video, and I’ll be more than happy to answer. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment for this video or for others. Shoot me an email, and I’ll be more than happy to cover another question in another video.
That’s it for this video. Thank you so much.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or schedule your free consultation.