Designing a website for website lead generation is a tough business. Pulling together a great visual design with interesting content is relatively easy, but doing these things in a way that encourages people to fill out a contact form is a different story. The trick to creating great lead generating websites is designing a site flow that makes sense to a user and caters to the process they use to decide whether to contact a business. With a site that makes this process easy and that operates in the way website visitors are expecting, web lead generation becomes an inherent process of your website. If you’ve ever taken a marketing class, you’ve likely heard of the AIDA model – a purchase funnel with 4 stages:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
This model walks through a consumer’s journey to making a purchase. While the model has historically been used for modeling physical purchases, it just as aptly models a consumer’s journey in web lead generation. So, how do you design a website that works for web lead generation? Focus on the funnel.
The AIDA Decision Funnel
AWARENESS: The Importance of SEO
In the awareness stage, consumers are looking for initial information about a service. Today, this almost always starts with a Google search – most often on a mobile device. As a company interested in grabbing the awareness of consumers, SEO is the place to begin. Blogs are often one of the first ways that consumers find your website in Google’s SERP. Craft educational, relevant blog posts that will answer your visitors’ questions.
INTEREST: Providing Detailed Information
In the interest stage, site visitors are looking for more detailed information about how you could help them – often resulting on them landing on a service page on your site. This transition from a blog post to a detailed page happens most easily through a Call to Action. Strategic CTA placement is key to good web lead generation, including:
- Testing effectiveness of buttons versus text links
- Differentiating between primary and secondary CTA’s
- Including focused CTA’s on each page
DESIRE: Building Trust for a Lead Generating Website
So your site visitors have information about the service they were searching for – and after visiting a detailed page on your site, understand whether you’re a good fit for them. How do you build credibility and trust to ensure that the visitor picks YOUR brand over someone else? Your About page. The best way to do this – a genuine About page on your website. Only after you’ve established trust and credibility with the site visitor will you see them convert to a lead.
ACTION: Establishing your Web Lead Generation
While the first three stages of the AIDA funnel are based in a certain piece of content on your website, the fourth stage – Action – happens throughout your website. Taking action should be made as easy as possible for website visitors to increase web lead generation opportunities. Getting visitors to take action includes a number of techniques:
- Providing a straightforward Contact page that provides relevant contact information for that demographic and directs people straight to the information
- Including contact forms throughout your website – on any page where people may be ready to take their ‘action step’
- The shorter these contact forms are, the better. Only collect the information you need or people will be less likely to complete the form
Increasing Web Lead Generation Effectiveness
Designing a website and content for web lead generation is tricky. The best way to optimize lead generation websites is through testing. Try to vary the placement of CTA’s to see which has more click-throughs. Continue to create content around your user’s thought process and with fine-tuning, you’ll see an increase in your website lead generation effectiveness. OCG Creative is a Reno web design adn internet marketing agency that can help you to design a website or internet marketing content to move visitors through this decision process – and bring you more qualified leads! Explore our capabilities or call 775.324.1644 – we’d love to help you better your business!