So you’ve tried everything: website optimization, content maximization, noise minimization; but your website still won’t generate leads. Why is my website not generating leads, you ask? We think we might know exactly why.
Leads are the lifeblood of a business. An upward trajectory of lead generation implies that you’ve understood and captured your desired market well. Conversely, a lack of leads should send alarm bells ringing. It means your business is starving and may, eventually, die out.
So what’s the solution? How can you reverse the trend of falling lead generation? Let’s discover the seven reasons why your website might be failing to generate leads and how you can salvage the situation.
Website Lead Generation: Seven Deadly Sins
A website’s ability to generate leads depends on several factors. We’ve studied them all for you and found the seven points that can make or break your website’s ability to generate leads. Let’s look at them one by one.
1. Market for All = Market for None
Generating leads is like fishing. You can’t catch saltwater fish in a pond. You can’t catch salmon in the ocean. And you can definitely not catch a merlin with a simple rod.
So, when trying to diagnose your website’s failure to generate leads, this is the first thing to look for. What fish are you trying to catch? Remember, trying to catch different types of fish with the same bait is a fool’s errand.
Thus, not gearing your website for a specific audience is the first step to failure when trying to generate leads. Irrespective of your intention, your website tells a story: even the absence of a story becomes a story, a scattered narrative.
For instance, the homepage of your website can:
- Try to educate prospects about your product or service,
- Call on leads to purchase your product or avail of your services,
- Advertise a limited-time sale or an exclusive offer,
- Launch a new and attractive line of products or services,
- Introduce customers to a new ad campaign with a community-based message.
So, if your website will tell a story whether you like it or not, is it not better to consciously create a narrative that appeals to a specific audience?
Remember, you can always have different landing pages with diverse messages that appeal to specific audiences. However, you must choose which audience to prioritize.
Ask yourself: among which section of the prospects that visit your website can you generate the most leads? Based on the answer, curate a website with a message that can capture the optimum market.
2. Strategy vs. Tactics: Plan for Success
One way to fail to generate leads is to not have a plan to succeed. And planning doesn‘t mean employing a tactical approach to lead generation. For instance, say you’ve been using account-based marketing or go-to-market tactics, but the leads remain elusive.
What are you doing wrong? Well, tactics aren’t the same as strategy. Remember, you can lose out on a tactical front but win strategically.
Consider omnichannel marketing. It involves using all available channels to increase your brand’s online presence to generate leads. On its own, omnichannel marketing is an incomplete tactic. But when deployed with account-based marketing and tailored to your target audience, it can generate prominent, sustainable leads.
Once you devise a strategy, assign it a timeline. Don’t lose faith midway through an iteration of your marketing campaign. You may face setbacks, but they’ll tell you what doesn’t work. When it comes to constructing a lead generation strategy, you must not only learn what works but also what doesn’t.
3. Error: Lack of Coordination Detected
So, you already have a lead generation strategy. You have identified your audience and know how to attract it to your website. But still, the lead well remains dry. Why?
If your plan is to market your website through different channels and construct a sales funnel that leads prospects to your website, how can you fail?
It means that part of your funnel is leaking. There is a point at which the message is getting lost in the void: it speaks to a lack of coordination between the tactics that make up your larger lead generation strategy.
Coordination is more important than you might think. Without proper implementation of your strategy directed at your target audience, you’re not likely to understand one way or the other whether your strategy can be successful.
It’ll leave you in the lead generation limbo: the worst place to be. To escape the rut:
- Create a step-wise strategy for lead generation,
- Break down the strategy into tactics,
- Divide the tactics into steps that different teams must take,
- Arrange the steps into a timeline that different teams must stick to,
- Devise the goals you want to achieve through the strategy and tactics,
- Come up with Key Performance Indicators that can determine the success or failure of your strategy.
Remember: one way to fail is to not have a strategy. Another is to not implement it properly. Solving either of these problems independently will only lead to incomplete success, which means suboptimal lead generation. To avoid this, follow the steps listed above.
4. SEO and CRO: Lack of the O’s
There can be two ways of failing to generate leads.
In the first, people don’t notice your website: it’s as if it were covered in a cloak of invisibility. Here, you’ve failed to show your website to prospects. In the second, people notice and even visit your website but quickly bounce off your landing pages. Here, prospects see you but fall through the cracks before you’re able to convert them into leads.
What could be the problem? Our diagnosis: you’re O-negative, missing in optimization. Search Engine Optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization help increase your website’s visibility and ability to convert prospects into leads.
To optimize, you need:
- Faster website loading speed,
- Optimum use of keywords,
- Cleaner copy and creative content,
- Design that captures attention.
Without these four pillars of optimization, your website will remain in the dark. Worse, even if a user discovers it by a stroke of luck, they’ll be put off by a clunky website masking a dull message.
This is why websites struggle to generate leads: virtually every business has a virtual address. If you want users to visit yours, it must have elegant architecture and an attractive design.
Also Read: SEO or CRO? Choose Both, Get the Best of Both Worlds
5. CTA: Are You Calling Your Customers?
Calls to Action (CTAs) play a major role in generating leads. It is not enough for your websites to tell great stories. You must also convey their morals. And that moral is the CTA. It is a directly indirect way of leading customers to take a desirable action:
- Purchase a product,
- Download an ebook,
- Ask for a free quote,
- Sign up for a newsletter, or
- Reach out for a free consultation.
Now, using CTAs is one thing. Using the right ones is quite another.
You must aim for the latter. If your customers are on a page designed to educate, the CTA can’t ask them to purchase your product. Instead, you must ask them to either sign up for a newsletter or download a free ebook.
Similarly, if the prospect is on a page that advertises different versions of your product or service, you must ask them to either purchase it or request a quote so they can find out how much it costs.
Thus, your CTAs should match the tone and the content of each given page. Remember, an out-of-place CTA can arrest your lead’s momentum in their journey to buying your product.
6. Too Much Information Confuses
If information is currency, too much information is inflation. And no one buys in an inflated market: prospects are either confused or hesitant to pay the price of your products.
The only prospect who wants more information about your product is the one who has already decided to buy it or consider it as an option. Thus, an explorer is already a lead.
To convert every other prospect into a lead, give them limited information. Don’t distract them with unwanted information; only present them with the best features of your products or services and highlight them.
Sometimes, too much information may lead the prospect to compare it with another product or service. For instance, say you’re marketing a smartphone: if its strengths are its durability, battery life and sturdy build, don’t include information about its cameras on the home page.
Tell prospects only why they should buy it, not why they shouldn’t.
7. Is Content Your King?
So you’ve got a website with a dashing design and clean copy. But what about the content? Is it comprehensive? Concise? Does it convey the desired message? Does it answer prospects’ most burning questions?
Content is a great way to attract prospects and generate leads. After all, products and services solve problems. But how do you convey the solution? Through content!
Thus, if you’re looking for long-term growth in lead generation through your website, carefully curated content catering to customers’ needs is king. Remember, leads through content may not be visible in a day or two. They may not even be visible in a month or two.
However, comprehensive content is key to bolstering your website’s credentials and SEO. Your lead generation strategy will be incomplete if your website doesn’t convey your understanding of customer problems and provide satisfactory answers.
Lead Generation: The Path to Heaven
Now that you’re familiar with the seven deadly sins that result in a degeneration of leads, how should you reverse them?
With the above-mentioned suggestions, we’ve armed you with more than prayers. The suggestions involving SEO, CRO, content curation, CTAs and the construction of a comprehensive strategy are all useful in website-based lead generation.
However, creating a unified approach to lead generation can be difficult, especially when companies in your industry will do anything to gain a competitive advantage in generating leads. After all, prospects are limited, leads finite and customers loyal.
So, carve out an advantage for yourself instead of letting your competitors get ahead: contact us at LeanSummits. We help our clients devise a website-driven lead-generation strategy that can help them achieve sustained success.
Don’t hesitate; schedule a free consultation, and let’s start plotting a lead generation strategy that will take you to the peak of your industry’s summit.
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