Part One: Lead Generation Website Essentials
Creating Your Site
The main objective of B2B websites should be to help visitors find the information they’re looking for. But on top of that, they should also be helping their organization capture qualified leads for their product or service.
A lead generation website does exactly that. While it educates your visitors on your solutions as well as your industry, it gives them the opportunity to provide qualitative information to your sales team.
Many websites are not constructed for lead generation — they can be slow, thin on content, and unfriendly to mobile users. But these challenges can be countered by evolving them into lead generation websites. This involves improving website speed, adding valuable content, and optimizing for mobile users.
In Part One of our three-part website essentials series, we'll explore how to create a lead generation website, using our own tried and true tactics from the web services team. As someone who has worked with hundreds of clients over the 20 years (I know!) I've been with New Breed, I've seen it all.
At New Breed, we have a dedicated team of specialists to help your website strategy soar, whether you need a brand new website or to fine-tune and optimize.
We've got a lot to cover, so let's get started. First, the basics ...
How do you create a lead generation website?
The first step in building a lead generation website is to define your target audience. Having a strong understanding of who you’re selling to — whether that’s persona-specific or segment-specific — and understanding the pain points they experience is the best way to start this process. Then, layer everything else you do on top of that.
What should you consider when setting up the infrastructure and navigation of your website? The infrastructure and navigation should be tailored to the needs of your target visitors.
For example, if you have niche, industry-specific content that speaks directly to your personas’ pain points, you should make it easy to find. Even better is if you couple this with information about the solutions to those pain points.
Another essential element of lead generation websites is conversion points, which should be strategically placed throughout your site.
After building your personas, you need to come up with conversion paths for your personas. Ideally, you’ll start with at least one conversion point for each funnel stage so you have three conversion points per persona:
- Top of the funnel (ToFu), which will convert them from visitor to lead,
- Middle of the funnel (MoFu) to indicate they’re marketing-qualified, and
- Bottom of the funnel (BoFu), indicating they’re ready to start the sales process.
Having these conversion points developed in advance helps you ensure that, once you start identifying the specific pages of your website and their intended personas, you can leverage their appropriate conversion points. CTAs (calls-to-action) should be dispersed sitewide to convert your visitors into leads, using forms that collect the information your sales team needs to engage with them. A call-to-action could be a button, an in-line link, or a nicely-designed image (which can be easily uploaded in HubSpot's call-to-action features!).
For example, if one of your personas is beginning the discovery process and they’re just starting to learn about their challenges, you’d want to offer them a ToFu offer, like a gated introductory ebook.
The next step you offer to visitors needs to be intentional. You don’t want to present someone with a BoFu offer (such as a demo request) right off the bat because that can scare them away. The three-tiered ToFu, MoFu, BoFu approach helps prevent that from happening.
(Yes, we know exactly what we did here. But we do still hope you find the guide helpful!)
What are the essential elements of a lead generation website?
In addition to the foundation based upon your buyer personas and their conversion paths, there are a few more things a lead generation website needs to be successful and create a positive user experience. The basic requirements of a viable lead generation website include:
A BoFu CTA that isn’t “Contact Us”
Because “contact us” appears so frequently on websites, many B2B companies think it’s a good choice for their primary BoFu CTA. However, as a user, “contact us” is a very vague and general action to take; it’s unclear what exactly will occur after filling out that form.
Instead, you should try to use a more definitive copy for your CTAs. Even if “download a free trial” or “request a readiness assessment” aren’t appropriate for your company, “talk to sales” or “book a meeting” still gives the site visitor more context about the next step.
The bottom line: Providing more information about what to expect can help increase conversions overall.
CTA strategy and organization
We build a lot of our websites in HubSpot, and there are a couple of different ways you can generate CTAs in HubSpot. You can create unique CTAs on each webpage and have some of them lead to the same place and say the same things.
However, if you have a large site, your CTA strategy can get complicated, fast, which can lead to confusing reporting and trying to figure out what's really working.
Instead, you can create a single CTA and place it in multiple locations, leveraging Google Tag Manager to track the individual button clicks on pages. On top of minimizing the number of CTAs you're using, you can also make it easier to manage your CTAs by using a clear and consistent naming convention. That way, if you do need to make an update, you can locate the CTA easily.
Getting your CTAs set up in a way that’s easy to track and report on is vital for your website’s success. To continue to improve your strategy over time, you need to understand the analytics behind conversions just as much as you need to actually bring in leads.
Strategic conversion points
It’s OK if you only have two or three forms for users to convert on. Don’t feel like you need to have five or 10 content offers for each persona from the start. What’s important is that there’s intent in how you’re routing site visitors.
When determining which CTAs to place on a page, think about where visitors are in their discovery process. For blog posts, you typically only want to drive towards one offer in the text — blog posts are targeted at visitors who are earlier in the buying process and still learning about their problem and your credibility. Offering multiple next steps can make them feel pressured.
And yet, on a product page, it’s completely fine to have multiple CTAs. In this case, the best step would likely be for the visitor to jump on a call with sales, so including that is a logical next step. However, the visitor might still want more information about your product before speaking to sales, so guiding them to a case study is also appropriate.
Clear labels
Let’s talk about having clear labels. Your users will want to know what they’re clicking on, right? Whatever your button text says should match the page the button takes visitors to.
It seems really simple, but it's something I see done poorly in so many sites we've taken on board.
If someone isn’t actually requesting a demo, don’t use that text on the button. Describe — in text that's large, legible, and brief — what users will actually be getting themselves into when they press the button.
In other words, never try to 'trick' your visitor. It'll just lead to disengagement and a higher bounce rate (when a visitor exits your page without any other activity), which overall will negatively affect your site.
The recommended approach for button text on a lead-generating website is to use the first-person perspective. Instead of using generic text like 'your' or 'submit', make the button text more personal and action-oriented. For example, you can use phrases like 'get my free trial' or 'claim my offer.' This approach creates a sense of ownership and encourages users to take the desired action.
Visitor-centric navigation
The specifics of your navigation layout depend on what industry you’re in, what you’re selling, and who your site visitors are, but there are a couple of best practices that hold, regardless of those details:
- You should always have a BoFu CTA button on the top right-hand corner of your nav. Folks could be anywhere on their journey when they come to your site, so always providing that opportunity to convert will reduce friction for people looking to convert right away. Using fixed navigation reduces friction even further so that BoFu CTA stays accessible while visitors are scrolling through your site.
- Additionally, your navigation labels should align with the pages they lead to. People will subconsciously recognize the terms you use as they move around your site. If what a page is called in the navigation doesn’t match the page visitors arrive at, users might think they’ve been brought to the wrong place.
A balance of aesthetics and usability
At the end of the day, people are vain. So if your website doesn’t look good, the likelihood that people are going to convert or purchase your product decreases. That’s just the way the human brain works.
There are design principles that people are just drawn to, and when users see a website that’s aesthetically pleasing, they’re more likely to be interested in that product or organization. But there’s a balance to achieve as well.
Remember that one of the primary purposes of a B2B website is to be helpful to users — and that doesn’t come from a pretty design.
Legibility is key, so two of the biggest things to consider are spacing and contrast. Contrasting colors can be used strategically to attract user attention to specific elements. By choosing colors that stand out from the rest of the design, you can draw the user's eye and make those elements more noticeable.
This helps guide users toward taking the desired actions, such as pressing a button, filling out a form, or clicking on a specific link.
Additionally, your website design should align with your company’s overall brand. It’s better to have a website that’s consistent with your brand than something new and flashy that’s unrelated to how your company presents itself elsewhere.
Strategies to increase website Conversion Rate.
Whether you’re building a new website from scratch or giving your old one a facelift, these best practices for making your website attractive to users will help bring home conversions.
Identify your target audiences
Identifying your target audiences ensures you have an effective foundation to build from. When you have a clear idea of who your ideal customers are, you can create focused campaigns and messaging that are tailored specifically to them. Utilizing data such as demographics and psychographics – this includes age, gender, interests and more – will help you segment audiences correctly and provide the right content to the right people at the right time.
Create buyer personas for each of your target audiences
Buyer personas serve to help you give your target audience a face and a name, becoming more than just segments or chunks of data. This persona should include all the information about that particular type of customer, including lifestyle, cultural influences, needs, and wants. Use this to personalize your messaging with triggers and topics that appeal to different buyers. Acting on these insights will help you create effective campaigns with laser-focused content tailored specifically to each buyer persona.
Design a user-friendly website
When people browse your website or visit a single landing page, you want their experience to be as smooth and intuitive as possible. That’s why having a user-friendly website is essential for lead generation.
Good navigation, the right amount of content, visuals that draw the eye, and an easy-to-find contact form will help guide customers through your site and lead them to the place they need to go. Having a strategy in mind when designing your website will also help you create an effective call-to-action that triggers customers to act quickly and ultimately convert into leads.
How much does a B2B website cost?
Finally, let’s talk about price. The standard website redesign ranges from $15,000 to $35,000. Why such a difference in cost? Well, a good lead generation website requires thorough research, analysis, and an in-depth content plan. Every lead-generating element on your website needs to be based on data-backed insights. Once you outline and determine your goals, you can move on to adding a cool layout and lines of code.
Ultimately, setting out on the path to creating an effective lead generation website starts with defining your target audience.
Having a really strong understanding of whom you’re selling to, whether that’s persona-specific or segment specific, and understanding the pain points they’re experiencing is the best way to start this process. Then, layer everything else you do on top of that.
Next Steps for Lead Generation Websites
Following the best practices shared here, a website can develop from an early concept into a valuable resource that informs visitors, entices them with a positive user experience, and encourages interaction to seek additional details about the services and products offered.
But don't just take our word for it - our next blog in the lead generation series provides real-world examples, highlighting companies that have successfully implemented proven strategies to expand their reach.
And yes, we can help you with your website!
If you're starting to consider your website might not be where it needs to be to hit your revenue goals, my team and I are here to help. We've worked on hundreds of sites from start to finish, whether you need to migrate from a different platform, get an audit for better optimization techniques, or start a website from scratch. Just get in touch with us to get started.
This post was originally published in March 2022 and has been updated for clarity and relevance.
