A website has two purposes: to provide relevant information to the online audience and to put money in the site owner’s pockets. A huge step that will help you do both is to develop a lead generation strategy. Keep in mind that building a great website alone is not enough to drive sustainable profits. You need a way to stay in touch with your audience, maintain brand awareness through regular content, and nurture leads down the sales funnel until they buy from you.
Below are the essential steps that will help you establish an effective lead capture strategy with your WordPress website:
Improve Your Content
It may sound like a generic first step, but you absolutely need great content in your site. After all, your content will be the primary building blocks of your online marketing. That said, you need to develop a solid content development strategy that prioritizes the creation of in-demand content.
One of the best tools you can use for this step is BuzzSumo. It is a content researching tool that aggregates the most popular posts in a specific niche as well as the top sites that share them. With this simple tool, you can “borrow” content ideas or repurpose them into a new format.
To start, simply go to BuzzSumo’s website and fill in a particular topic or domain name you want to research. Make sure you use the filters on the left panel to find the latest in-demand content. You can also adjust the search parameters if you want to specifically look for infographics, videos, and plain text articles.
Tip: BuzzSumo can also help you perform the skyscraper technique, wherein you look for old content, refine it into something better, and reach out to the authoritative site that shared the original post. In exchange to providing fresh and updated content, you’ll receive instant exposure to a targeted audience and a good link for SEO.
Create Landing Pages
If you want your audience to convert, then you definitely need landing pages. These are the pages where visitors are brought to when they click an organic listing, a link from external content, or a paid advertisement. That said, landing pages must be tailored specifically to the needs of a particular type of audience. For example, if a search user made a query for “HIIT exercises”, they should not be presented with a landing page on weight loss diet; regardless if these two topics are related or not.
At this point, it is a good idea to review your keyword strategy and make adjustments as you see fit. For example, if you’re getting a high bounce rate for a specific PPC campaign, then you may need to start anew with a fresh set of keywords or perform a complete makeover for your landing page.
Remember that a landing page must contain certain elements such as a call-to-action, a list of key takeaways, and a clutter-free design. Fortunately, you can take advantage of landing page builders that offer a drag-and-drop editor. For this, you have several landing page plugins to choose from.
Tip: A good way to pick a landing page builder is to check out the themes and templates available for each. Use your own discretion and go for the one that best fits your website’s design seamlessly.
Build Beautiful Forms
A landing page isn’t complete without the forms to handle user input. A form is where a user can supply the necessary information for conversion such as an email address, full name, subscription preferences, and so on. This time, you need specialized tools for building WordPress forms without writing a single line of code.
Remember that forms must not feel like a chore to users. Only ask for the information that you absolutely need to complete a conversion. For example, if you’re building a mailing list, an email address is pretty much the only thing that you need. You may also ask for a name, but that should be as far as you go.
Additionally, you should make sure that forms are easy to find. You may also implement strategies such as presenting forms as popups, creating a form that follows users as they scroll, and so on.
Tip: As a rule of thumb, always understand your objectives before choosing a form builder. Start by identifying the information you need to make sure you choose a plugin that supports the appropriate kind of input.
Establish a Lead Scoring System
Next comes the finer points of managing and monetizing the leads for your website. Keep in mind that in online marketing, you need to treat your leads differently and roll out strategies that are specifically formulated for a particular audience segment. This, however, is a complex process that cover other areas of your website—from your mailing list to your paid ad strategy.
Just remember that an effective lead scoring system employs a point-based approach. For example, a customer that abandons a cart must be scored highly while a user who downloads an eBook may not be scored as much. From there, you can use different tactics when communicating with each lead such as showing remarketing ads for cart abandoners and sending a series of newsletters to the other.
Tip: An easy way to start scoring leads is to integrate a plugin like Site Spy with the forms you already have. This plugin works by capturing important information such as their behavior, form submissions, and where they came from.
