Why Your Website Isn't Driving Leads

Why Your Website Isn't Driving Leads
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Negotiating leads can be tricky. The nature of how information is used relates to the success of your leads, according to a post by LinkedIn. It’s even trickier when you’re trying to do it through a passive communications medium like a website, where more attention needs to be given to visual details and the placement of certain calls to actions and other pieces of important text.

Your marketing campaign is in shambles and you’ve identified that the source of it comes from a lack of market demand for what you’re selling. Is your product or service unmarketable or is there a more complex issue behind the failure of your online lead generation campaigns?

Lead Qualification

It’s back to basics with this one. The first question you’ll want to ask yourself is if you’ve been thorough enough with your lead qualification, and if you’ve put enough energy and resources into thinking about what a lead even means for your business. Obviously, leads will vary across companies, so the first step in figuring out why your website isn’t driving leads is to investigate the reasoning behind your approach.

There are various metrics that you can use for lead qualification, with some sites like Marketo specifying things such as demographics, budget, authority, timeline, and need as possible factors. The first reason that this article in The Huffington Post notes as the key reason for business failure is the fact that there is no strategic outline in place. In other words, most businesses have an attitude that does not put enough emphasis on anticipating risks and changes in the future.

Not having a codified set of ways in which you define lead and a lead generation strategy for your business is fatal. In fact, the Small Business Administration (SBA) estimates that one-third of small business fail within their first two years and that some of the primary reasons for that failure are a lack of market demand, a lack of foresight, and mismanagement of cash flow. It’s simple, do your homework on what counts as a lead for your business as the first step to diagnosing why your website isn’t driving leads.

Big Data and the Power of Information

Knowledge is power. There is no truer expression when it comes to an open marketplace with competitors that can be at each other’s necks at times. Just recently the SEC, a key regulatory agency for the market, found itself hacked for sensitive insider information which was then used to make illegal stock trades. Information is so key that people are developing means to penetrate even the most sophisticated security systems to have at it.

Therefore, big data and informatics should definitely be incorporated as part of your business’ lead generation strategy. What are the numbers and where is this business going? What do your customers usually buy and when do they buy it? What’s the average customer acquisition cost and how are you thinking about ways to lower that through leads?

These are all questions that can be partly answered by big data firms that can serve your local area and can identify patterns in customer behavior, needs, and wants to allow you to estimate the potential for leads based on different strategies. Companies such as SAS offer an arsenal of advanced analytics that can allow you insight through data mining, statistics analysis, forecasting, or even text analytics to allow you to best optimize your lead strategies. If you want to make any business decisions, make them by the numbers.

Furthermore, an increasingly popular form of this information brokerage and interpretation are based on geolocation services and analyses. Geolocation services on your phone can easily be mined and used by companies to identify trends and allow them to predict, for instance, where a good place to start up an apartment complex or retail store might be. When it falls to the topic of online lead generation, you can make customers feel a more personalized experience if you come up with tactics that use their location and tendencies to drive leads.

Website Design

The honest truth is that websites are just like people: there are attractive websites just as there are attractive people. The way that your website is designed, the flow of its information and the presentation all factor into whether or not a visiting customer becomes a lead. A lead is a potential sale for your business, and you need to be on your top game if you want to attract someone that’s initially uninterested in any purchases upon landing on your webpage.

However, there’s more to just initial impressions. Selz notes that some factors can really allow your site’s personality to shine such as a blog with creative content, a vibrant community, or exciting press releases about new products. If you want to master leads, make sure that both your website’s graphics and content are purposeful and weave together a coherent message that leaves an impression on the reader at one glance.

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