Turn your website into a powerful sales tool
Is your website working as hard as it should be? Nik Rawlinson mines the minds of marketing experts to discover common mistakes and find out how to increase customer engagement
Nik Rawlinson mines the minds of experts to find out how you can turn visitors into leads.
Websites can be many things: a placeholder, a way for clients to get in touch, somewhere to sell your products and services, or a means of generating leads. If you’re not doing the latter, you’re wasting a good domain.
Probably the only part of your business that’s open 24/7, your site can carry on working when you go home, potentially generating new business around the clock. That’s just as well because it’s not much easier drumming up custom online than it is cold calling.
“Your whole website should be geared up for generating leads,” said Leadfeeder’s Jaakko Paalanen in a blog post ( pcpro.link/319lead).
Paalanen believes that “‘brochure’ websites are a thing of the past” and points out the “typically only 2% of visitors leave their contact details”.
So, if you’re going to achieve even this conservative bar – or improve on it – you need to optimise your website by building a sales funnel that will guide visitors to the course of action you want them to take. Whether that’s buying something directly or signing up for more information depends on your sales strategy, your customer profile and what you’re selling.
Ultimately, though, it’s whatever will most grow your bottom line.
A content-driven sales tool
Not everything lends itself to being directly sold on-site. Think generators for power stations, consultancy or fleet leasing, for example. Often, the most profitable transactions don’t involve a financial exchange at all, but build towards a larger sale at a future point. These take place at the mouth of the sales funnel.
“The truth is that most prospects won’t buy from your website at first glance, especially if they’re only just becoming aware of you today. It takes time,” wrote Entrepreneur’s RL Adams ( pcpro.link/319funnel).
“Thus, the funnel is a multi-modality process, as there are a variety of relationship-building experiences and ‘touches’ that occur through several stages.”
Every contact – or touch – between you and your visitor helps you convert them to a prospective buyer and, eventually, a qualified customer. A website, as the first touch point, is the wide-open end of a funnel, scooping up a range of potential buyers, who are guided through a sales process that gets narrower and narrower until the sale is made. Along the way, a lot of unqualified leads will be squeezed out, allowing you to focus your energies where they’re more likely to deliver a return.
But how do you position the funnel to catch potential leads?
Think like a search engine
While existing customers might understand your offering, not everyone falling into the funnel will be so well acquainted. Produce content that sits around your key offering, drawing in casual traffic for conversion to leads. This doesn’t necessarily mean throwing out all that you have and starting again, but the usual advice about using descriptive crossheads that include relevant keywords (but not over-saturating the content), and producing a minimum of 300 words per page still applies. Crucially, formulate content so that its logical conclusion is an effective call to action.
It could be as simple as a regular blog post that highlights an issue within your field that your product or service addresses, or that allows you to demonstrate expertise.
Blogging is “one of the most powerful inbound marketing tools to increase traffic to your website and raise brand awareness,” according to Cogo & Co ( pcpro.link/319cogo). “It can also be the best way to keep your website relevant, fresh and active.”
One of your most important jobs at this early stage is to overcome visitor
objections. We’re all happy to explore once our interest has been piqued but, as we all know from a front-loading of one-star reviews on an otherwise fivestar product, if doubts are raised early in the process, it takes a lot of work to overcome them.
Visitors encountering your brand for the first time won’t be aware of your values, may not understand your offering and won’t know where it sits among your rivals. The simplest – and safest – thing they can do is go back to the search results and look elsewhere. By focusing on upsides early in the process, you’ll give visitors an excuse to explore further and – in a best-case scenario – heed your call to action. Talk to them in a language they understand, even if they’re unfamiliar with your product or your market.
Leadfeeder’s Paalanen visualises an online business as though it was a regular enterprise somewhere out in the wilderness and asks: “How will people find you if you don’t have any roads leading to your showroom, signs or lights guiding the way? And when potential customers find you and walk in, then what? Imagine they spend considerable time looking at stuff and leave without speaking to you.”
The parallels are apt. Visitors need a reason to get in touch, and few will make an approach unless their worries have already been allayed. Your job, in crafting supporting content, is to anticipate those concerns and address them directly, so the only logical course of action is to move deeper into the funnel.
Marketing vs sales
Be merciless in removing content from within your funnel: drop anything that doesn’t drive the visitor in the direction you want to take them. Define your overall goal of your sales funnel and “build each page of the website around the one objective, omitting any content that isn’t leading to your goal,” recommends Web Friendly ( pcpro.link/319friendly). “[If] you want the reader to buy a ticket to your event, build a website with multiple tabs of information… but on each page, have only one clear call to action: ‘click to buy your ticket’. From the user’s perspective, they are on an informative website, but you are providing them with only one outcome to their visit.”
This can be particularly important when selling business-to-business, or when selling a high-value product that will require some thought.
“Unless you are selling a really inexpensive impulse item, people generally want to proceed slowly when buying and not feel rushed,” advised BusinessTown’s Bob Adams ( pcpro.link/319town). “They typically want to review your offerings several times, on several different occasions. But this creates a huge problem for you because they are almost always going to visit your competitors’ websites, and maybe a lot of them.”
An incentive, even if it doesn’t generate an immediate return, may be required as an inducement to get their contact details, a newsletter sign up or an agreement to take your call. Unless you form a connection on the first visit – however tenuous – you leave them in control of the relationship, and if they choose not to return you have no way of reminding them of your offering or why they visited in the first place.
Content vs calls to action
While every piece of content should “sell” your call to action, it’s important not to over-egg the pudding.
Microsoft’s website is diverse, with plenty of knowledge-building content, technique, advice and forums, but it remains a sales tool. Whether it’s Surface, Azure or Office, its primary goal remains to drive sales by promoting new releases, showing potential customers how Microsoft
“Visitors need a reason to get in touch, and few will make an approach unless their worries have already been allayed”
products can enhance their personal or working lives, and retaining existing customers by helping them do more with the product they’ve bought. Yet the balance between direct selling and valuable content is such that large parts of the site feel like a destination in their own right. You might read through them in your downtime in the way you would a news or sport site, but the sales element on these pages is still there; it’s just more subtle, and often relegated to a sidebar or footer. Much of the bulk of these pages is what we would consider marketing content, rather than out-and-out sales content.
What’s the difference? Marketing content is focused on your company and brand, whereas sales content concerns itself directly with what you’re selling. Marketing content will, therefore, often be best used early on in your sales funnel.
John Ritchie, at Column Five Media ( pcpro.link/319market), describes marketing content as “charm”, and believes that “good marketing content will charm people to the point where convincing them to buy is easy”. Yet he stresses that the goal of marketing content is to make a good impression so that customers will feel an affinity with your brand. “Marketing content is about attracting people to whatever you’re selling and the kind of company you’re building… that speaks to your customer’s pain points and speaks to your ‘why’ or your values.” Where a consumer product like a TV or tablet are concerned, a customer’s “pain points” might be not having as large a screen as they’d like, or that their existing device doesn’t do everything the upgraded version does. In the business field, the pain points can be more abstract, such as an inability to increase production without a particular tool, or to maximise tax savings without the advice of a topline accountancy service.
Where the TV is concerned, marketing content may not be as important – especially if the consumer is interested in buying the most pixels they can at the lowest price. When a business is shopping around for a new tax advisor, though, the associated marketing content will need to do some heavy lifting, with a focus on the fundamentals of the agency, its trustworthiness, and the benefits that a partnership between it and the customer could deliver. Often, these benefits will go beyond just the savings that could be made, and champion the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’re legally compliant and timely in your filing.
Demodia breaks down the sales funnel into stages ( pcpro.
link/319demodia), and recommends biasing the earlier stages of the funnel towards marketing content, which will build your brand and transition in the latter pages. “The time to deploy sales content comes afterwards when the lead gets closer to the bottom of the funnel, approaching the evaluation stage. Aimed at impacting the prospect’s final decision towards reaching the purchase stage, sales content can also be described as sales reps’ strongest weapon.”
Beyond the website
A website should be just part of your sales mix, and you need to tailor your offering depending on your intended customer. While you might always want to push a prospect towards a particular page, induce them to fill out a form or to start a live chat, the journey they take won’t always start at your homepage.
Age alone can be a determining factor, with different generations sourcing information in different ways. The oldest millennials are now turning 40 and, according to Hallam Internet ( pcpro.link/319hallam),
“80% of them are in management roles in their careers”. There are few brands for which they shouldn’t be a target demographic, which may require you to find a way to initiate the journey far away from your own domain. “Most millennials are more likely to purchase something if a friend or someone they admire on social media recommends or uses it,” explains Hallam Internet, which suggests, among other things, investing more in social media. “Millennials see through all the marketing guff we see in typical ads.”
Gen X consumers, the millennials’ predecessors, are between their early-40s and mid-50s. “Given some of this generation is close to the baby boomer age, you shouldn’t forget traditional media,” advises Big Commerce ( pcpro.link/319genx). “48% listen to the radio, 62% still read newspapers and 85% watch traditional television.”
There will be many overlaps between these two groups – and members of either may come across your site from a search engine. But focusing on SEO alone would be a mistake. Their interests, and the routes by which they’ll discover your site, will be diverse, so assuming that the same strategy will work for both would be a mistake.
The key is therefore not to aim so much for blanket coverage, or to draw in the widest possible range of visitors, but to aim for engagement. A low-traffic website converting half of its customers is doing better – comparatively – than a site with ten times the visitors that retains just a handful of them.
Engagement, leading to leads, is the best way to gauge how effectively your website is performing as a sales tool. Where you take those leads once you’ve got them is up to you.
“A website should be just part of your sales mix, and you need to tailor your offering depending on your intended customer”