Website Lead Capture for Manufacturers, Complex Websites

People will find your website in many ways. They may find it through a blog that was found in a Google search. They may click on a pay-per-click (PPC) ad. Someone may have recommended your company, and they may have typed your exact URL into their search bar. Regardless, if you confuse your website visitors when they hit your homepage or a blog, they’ll leave your site. At best they will be frustrated while trying to track down information. If you own or work for a manufacturer, OEM, or company with multiple audiences, an easy-to-navigate website will give you the best possible chance of converting leads from your website and growing revenue.

Converting website visitors into customers means understanding your audiences’ various needs, earning their trust, and providing the right information at the right moment. From website copy, to blogs, to long-form pillar pages, to guides and downloads, it’s important that your website content engages your visitors.

Here are the key steps to mapping their needs to your website content so you can convert more leads for your sales team.

Before Setting Up Your Lead Capture System

Before you simply pepper your website with sales pitches and forms to capture leads, it’s important to always keep one question in mind: Can website visitors find what they need? Or do they randomly end up in one of your marketing workflows?

The best way to address this question starts with ensuring you have buyer personas mapped along a buyer’s journey. A persona represents your ideal customer, and it should be modeled on actual customers. The buyer’s journey is the path that a prospective customer takes in becoming an actual customer. This path, or journey, can be broken down into three stages – the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. At each stage of the buyer’s journey, your website should answer common issues and questions a prospect has at that point in their journey.

As a result, every piece of website content should help your prospects move through these stages. Before you begin blogging or drafting copy for your website, categorize your existing content by stage, and you’ll find gaps you can fill with new content. Since your sales team has a pulse on their customer’s challenges, lean on them to help with that process.

While you’re mapping your website copy and content to the buyer’s journey, you’ll also start shaping how that content can help drive new leads.

Creating Your Website’s Lead Capture System

If you’ve mapped your content to the buyer’s journey, then you have the first puzzle pieces to construct a lead capture system that drives new contacts.

A website's lead capture system consists of conversion paths–a series of trackable steps that turn a new website visitor into a new contact. The simplest conversion path is a call to action (CTA). These are simple graphics and buttons on your website that lead your website visitors to more detailed, helpful information.

There are four important steps to create a conversion path for your website visitors:

1. Develop content relevant to your audience

One engineer finds a long-form website page, also known as a pillar page, that is a valuable resource for prospects with possible solutions for important challenges.

2. Create a clear call-to-action

The engineer clicks the call-to-action (CTA) button that says “Save this as a PDF.”

3. Develop a “landing page” to collect an email address

The engineer reads the landing page which aligns with the CTA and fills out a form to get a copy of the PDF.

4. Close with a thank you page

On the thank you page, the engineer clicks on a link to the product line related to the solution on the pillar page.

These steps are important to create one conversion opportunity, but you may have identified several conversion opportunities from your content mapping process. How do you organize not just this offer, but the other offers you want to create on your website?

Call-to-Action Placement

If you don’t have your CTA’s in locations on your website that align with their stage in the buyer’s journey, people will most likely not “click through” on that CTA. For example, if you have a blog that is written for the awareness stage and the CTA says, “schedule a meeting” that website visitor will most likely not be ready for that step. Instead, we recommend using a CTA that sends that visitor to content appropriate for the “consideration stage” of the buyer’s journey. After all, most people wouldn’t ask someone to marry them after the first date! Make sure your calls-to-action align with the appropriate next step in the buyer’s journey. The wrong mix of content and CTA can confuse visitors

Testing Your Conversion Paths

Now that you’ve aligned your conversion opportunities with the website visitor’s journey, you can start measuring your results and make changes, as needed, on a regular basis. Here are some key analytics to watch:

Website Traffic: How much traffic are the pages on your website driving? Those pages or blog posts that you created might not be getting the traffic you had hoped for. This is when you review your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, pay-per-click plan, and even your email marketing strategy. Explore all areas that may impact how easily people can find your website while using search engines.

CTA Click Rate: Of the traffic going to a webpage, what percent of visitors click on that CTA? If you’re getting decent traffic, but low click rates, try changing the language of the CTA. If that doesn’t work, consider if the CTA is the right fit for that page.

Conversion rate on the landing page: For those who clicked on the CTA, how many filled out the form on the landing page? If the conversion rate is low, the landing page may not be delivering what the CTA promised. Check to make sure your messages are lining up. You may also want to review the landing page or the contact form on the landing page. Maybe the landing page itself could be too long. Could the form move from the bottom of the page to the top of the page? Or maybe the form asks too many questions.

Change one thing at a time: If you want to turn around an underperforming conversion path, change one thing at a time. For instance, shorten the form before you completely revise the landing page copy. If your performance improves, you want to know why it improved, not guess what did the trick.

Find conversion paths your website visitors are creating themselves: You can use Google Analytics to see how website visitors are actually navigating your website. After someone lands on a page of your website, you can see the pages they visit, in succession, after the initial visit. You might find high drop-off rates on one particular page or other gaps. You can also install tools like Hotjar on your website to get detailed views of how users scroll through specific web pages. 

Reviewing the overall flow of visitors on your website can help you optimize the conversion paths you created or help you create new ones.