Why Some Websites Don’t Generate Very Many Leads

You have a sharp looking new website and the best product in the market, but leads are not pouring into your inbox.

You’ve experienced this frustration. You plan, you optimize, and you invest.

And then nothing.

Maybe your assumption is that the quality of your product should speak for itself and your 5-star reviews should be enough proof to convert more leads.

Shouldn’t your audience just be able to feel what makes you different?

Unfortunately, it rarely works like that.

As a marketer, your job is to understand your audience, remove barriers to conversion and optimize the customer journey.

There is no place that audience and conversion come together more than on your website.

If you’re not generating online leads, then you need to find where the sticking points are. Identify those bottlenecks, and you’ll open up a free flowing channel where visitors smoothly and consistently convert into leads.

Here are some of the most common marketing mistakes that lead to a disappointing result.

1. Your website is all about YOU rather than demonstrating that you understand your customers.

YOU are the greatest barrier to a website that converts leads.

Wait…what?

The number one reason that website visitors don’t turn into leads is that your website is talking all about YOU.

You focus on your business instead of demonstrating that you deeply understand your visitors’ pain points, goals, and values.

This is a difficult point because most marketing professionals want to jump to the more tangible tactics and skip over the ideological process of understanding (and writing to) your audience.

Neglecting to prioritize this step will lead to deflated results and a misalignment between your website and your audience.

Understanding your audience takes time to research your ideal customers and build a profile that summarizes their beliefs, goals, values, and pain points.

When you understand your audience at a deeper level and know why they’re visiting you to begin with, you can use your website to build a customer experience that seamlessly connects their goals to the solution that you offer.

NOTE: We wrote a step-by-step guide to Doubling Your Leads in 30 Days. If you’re serious about generating leads online, this is the place to start. It’s the exact process we use to convert a massive number of leads for our clients.

2. You’re not providing valuable content that meets your audience’s goals.

Free value with no strings attached builds audience loyalty.

This one is similar to point #1 because, once again, having a successful website conversion strategy is all about putting your audience (and their goals) first.

Content marketing should be one of your top priorities in 2019. Delivering resources, tools, insights, lessons, and case studies through a customer-centric blog will help your audience see your expertise and generosity.

When you consistently deliver valuable content, it will drive visitors to keep coming back and draw them into a closer relationship with you.

Give away your secrets, and ask for nothing in return.

After you’ve grown a warm audience that is familiar with you and looks to you for expertise, you can remarket to them on Facebook and Google and invite them to give you their contact information in exchange for a piece of premium content that they can’t get anywhere else.

If you’re driving a lot of traffic to your website, but your audience isn’t converting into leads, there is a good chance that you’re not providing enough value to visitors up front.

After you provide free and valuable content, you establish your expertise and your visitors are more likely to subscribe to more content that brings them even further on their customer journey.

Open up your content marketing strategy and you’ll likely open up a stream of online leads.

3. You’re not investing in paid traffic.

Marketing is expensive and paying for clicks can feel like writing a blank check to Mark Zuckerberg.

Do you really need to be paying for clicks?

Strong organic Google traffic is great and earning ‘likes’ on Facebook are both signs that things are working, but if you’re not sending paid traffic to your website…

…you aren’t scaling to the level of success you could be having.

If you’ve optimized your customer website journey and set up retargeting pixels, you’re ready to send paid traffic to your website.

This step builds on the previous steps and will maximize the size of your warm audience that will then be ready to be retargeted on Facebook and Google.

The best part?

After you’ve built a warm audience, paying for retargeting clicks to a lead magnet or other landing page is much cheaper.

You’ve already identified who is interested in your website and you’re at a place in your customer relationship where many of your followers are ready to raise their hand by opting in and becoming leads.

When you optimize your paid traffic channels and dial in your click-through-rates are happy with the cost of traffic, you have a nearly endless stream of coin-operated lead generation.

Clicks are a commodity.

Get your cost per conversions below your value-of-a-lead and you have a nearly endless ability to scale your business by buying leads at a profit.

4. You haven’t optimized your website’s design for generating leads.

For your website to maximize lead generation it needs to do one main thing:

…enable the user to find what they desire easily.

Website Design Elements

How is this done? Focus on providing sections that don’t over stimulate and give clear calls-to-action.

Displaying brief content sections with great type hierarchy allows the user to read with ease.

Pages with long word counts and minimal type sizes can cause the user to feel overwhelmed. Be concise and use different font weights and sizes to help to distinguish title language vs body content.

Color can also be your friend.

Use color to exemplify certain things you want the user to interact with. For example, use a different button color for the main interaction you want to drive to.

This allows it to stand out from the rest of the page, subliminally telling the user, “Click me!”.

If your main calls-to-action can stand out and clearly state what’s going to occur the user will be inclined to interact more often.

If you can create scannable content and use color to highlight actions, your website can see an increase in lead generation.

It simplifies the user’s experience.

They won’t have to overextend themselves to sift through massive amounts of info and they’ll know exactly where they’re headed. Using these two tactics gives your website the power to do its ultimate goal, helping the user find what they desire simply.

Lead Generating Content

Sending visitors to the Contact Us page or giving opportunities to sign-up for a newsletter will generate SOME leads.

But if you don’t have lead generating content, you’re leaving a pile of leads on the table.

Lead generating content is typically a piece of content that has more value than a blog post such a Free Guide, Whitepaper, Checklist, or Cheat Sheet that provides specific and instant value to visitors.

Similar to the banner ads we have in this blog post, these pieces of lead generating content relate directly to the other content that visitors are reading and provide a natural path for visitors to ascend.

They get a nifty piece of content, and you get a lead for your sales or marketing team to nurture.

Stop Losing Visitors; Start Converting Leads

Luckily for marketers, lead generation is a game of incremental growth.

You don’t have to implement all four strategies discussed in this blog in order to increase your lead generation.

Pick one area, such as turning your website into an audience-centric one.

Learn about your customers, and use website messaging to show how deeply you understand their goals and challenges.

Inspire them to see what they can become when they take their next step of ascension.

Be their guide and show them what success looks like.

Who knows, when they find the free solution they’re looking for on your website, they just might look to you when they’re ready to commit at a higher level.

NOTE: We wrote a step-by-step guide to Doubling Your Leads in 30 Days. If you’re serious about generating leads online, this is the place to start. It’s the exact process we use to convert a massive number of leads for our clients.