The Average Website Is Not Designed for Leads
To get someone to your website, you need good content. When the prospect gets to your website, it better do its job.
The average business website is not designed to generate leads. This may sound surprising, given that for most businesses, the website is one of their main sources of incoming new business.
The average website is designed like a brochure. There are many common components, and prospects spend a lot of time going from page to page. From our research, about 50% of visitors to a corporate website will visit 3 pages max. Other visitors visit less than that… So, you only have a few pages to get your information across and convince them to contact you.
Websites are usually designed by web design agencies. Agencies are steeped in the latest HTML5, CSS stylesheets, and other coding prerogatives. Agencies have an agenda in making sure all their work follows a visual standard that will get them more work and boost their portfolio. So, your website will look great—but it will be lacking in the area of lead generation.
The dynamics of lead generation are usually an afterthought, something to please the marketing department, but not a driving core design function.
Effective websites for content marketing are designed around driving every interaction towards the demo, appointment, and/or contact button. Not to sound like a broken record, but the purpose of your website is not to look like the competition or to collect email addresses but to get a scheduled demo or appointment with a qualified prospect.
Website design is beyond the scope of this book. Let it suffice to say that the team behind website design or redesign should have some knowledge of lead generation, appointment making, the importance of demos, and other business-generating functions. Move beyond having something that fits conventional standards of how a website should look (brochure) to having an opportunity-generating machine (convey value and get that appointment).
We’ve advised many companies on how to achieve this with their website. These best practices reduce clutter and the website conventions that get in the way of nudging prospects into taking action.
