Optimizing Website Lead Generation

Although your marketing programs drive people to your website with direct mail, advertising, email blasts, and search engine marketing, do you really know whether this traffic represents viable prospects for your products and services? It's time to start asking questions: Who are these people? What do they want? And how can you help them find what they're looking for?

How to Map Customer Objectives to Buying Cycles

Let's say you manufacture enterprise software. People visit your site, as well as competitors' sites (each with its own goals and objectives), in different stages of the buying cycle.

It's not enough anymore to provide content and simplistic product overviews, especially when you consider customers are only a click away from the competition. Today's websites should account for, plan and map objectives that match ter buying cycles and goals of key target audiences. And here's how to get started.

Objective One: Qualify Gatherers

Set up objective scenarios for "information gatherers". These are people who are early in the buying cycle and just beginning to investigate a purchase. They ask broader questions, such as: What do I really need? Will it meet my needs? Can we afford it?

Answer their questions. Educate visitors about the product category. Deliverables such as buyers' guides make it easier for information gatherers to quickly qualify themselves. Many of these folks are not good leads for your products. But they may be someday.

To measure your site's ability to satisfy information gatherers, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), including:

• How many visitors bookmark your site?
• Do they click through to more detailed product descriptions?
• Do they download a buying guide?
• Do first-time visitors sign up for your newsletter?

Objective Two: Persuade Prospects

Potential customers have likely identified and defined their needs. They may be comparing your solution with a competitor's. These prospects ask more complex questions: What makes your software different? Is this software a good value? Is it scalable? What training is available?

To persuade these prospects, you need to provide content that answers these questions. Checklists, comparison charts, glossaries, downloadable brochures, product demos...even testimonials, all help prospects. Propel them deeper into the site, while providing them with options along the way to take action.

You can measure your success by monitoring newsletter subscriptions, time spent on site, demo downloads, brochure downloads, comparison chart downloads, and so forth.

Objective Three: Turn Prospects Into Leads

Leads are prospects that have been persuaded your solution is viable. They want to contact your company to complete the transaction or simply gain further confidence that your solution is the right one.
Measure your site's ability to persuade and convert prospects into leads through visits to the contact page, dealer-locator page or through live-chat links if you have them.

A Step Further

Persona-based thinking takes these scenarios further still. It accounts not only for where someone may be in the sales process but also for that persona's preferences. That way, you can create even more specific scenarios, content, and objectives that can persuade each persona further into their own customized conversion flow.

A methodical persona who's early in the buying process, for example, may be more inclined to download a white paper, whereas a more humanistic persona would prefer to start a relationship by subscribing to a newsletter.

Think It Through

If you map content to customer objectives, your website has the potential to be the destination marketplace for all your target audiences, including prospects, employees, analysts, customers, partners, investors, and other stakeholders.