Improve Lead Qualification With These Website Hacks

Quality lead generation is more than driving traffic to your website. As you begin to see more visitors hit your site, lead qualification becomes more important. High-quality leads mean that your sales reps spend time with the right prospects, and sales management can develop accurate forecasts. Customers also have a better experience as they progress through the buying process. With some attention, marketers can achieve higher lead quality by following a simple mantra: educate and qualify.

We know by now that website visitors are looking to solve a particular problem, and they have most likely landed on your site while conducting research to educate themselves on this problem and relevant solutions. Now that you have these visitors’ attention, you can optimize your website to be a resource for their education process and thereby improve the quality of leads you add to your funnel.

Think of it like any education program—except your students won’t receive a degree. Instead, they’ll become your customers. You should teach them the topics they care about, present the information in a compelling manner, and set expectations that will help them reach their goals.

What is Important to Them?

Some of the best ways to find out what is important to your audience involve asking existing customers directly. Identify a few ideal customers, and interview them to learn about their decision-making process. Ask thoughtful questions to understand why they chose your solution, and try to extract specific information or data that helped them come to this conclusion. Surveys can be a great way to ask customers directly about information they find helpful when conducting self-guided research. Also, use Google Search Console to find out which queries and terms your visitors used to find your site.

By implementing these methods, you will have a native understanding of your customers’ concerns, questions, and motivations. This will allow you to develop in-depth educational content for future customers.

Create Educational Content

Once you have a solid understanding of your customers’ interests and priorities, you can create valuable content.

Don’t be afraid to boldly share expertise. You are an expert on your customers’ specific problem, so you should confidently present your perspective in a helpful manner. When you provide thorough answers to your customers’ questions, they consider you an adviser with valuable insights instead of a vendor attempting to pitch or gratuitously position a product. This trust will grow over time and help you convert information-seekers into customers.

Content should be high quality and truly valuable. Is your content unique? Are you providing information that is not easily available elsewhere? Is the content created in a way that will help your customers take the next step? Is your content shareable?

Creating content in different formats increases the chances that the information will be consumed and shared. Make sure you are creating education opportunities for visual learners, auditory learners, those who prefer data and numbers, and even those who consider experiential learning material. This could require developing different forms of content such as video, infographics, and case studies.

Track Everything!

Tracking all content will help you create a feedback loop whereby you will know which content is performing well in order to create more content that is valuable and timely for your website visitors. Tracking your content will also allow you to act at important times during the customer journey.

For instance, if someone downloads white papers on implementation, this could be the appropriate time for a rep to reach out to schedule a call with technical team members. Perhaps a visitor is repeatedly viewing information on pricing. This could nudge a rep to follow up with an offer to create a customized quote.

Set Expectations

When a prospective customer researches topics that pertain to your solution, they understand their particular problem but may not have a full understanding of the future state of their business once the solution is in place. Your content should give them the path to success. After viewing information on your website, your audience should feel informed of any pitfalls associated with implementation, integrations, and user adoption once the solution has been procured. It is always beneficial to paint a positive picture of your solution, but adding the context of how your solution and expertise will help your customers mitigate future risk is especially powerful.

Qualify

Now that you have an education strategy in place and know how to deliver compelling content to your audience, the next step is to use this information to improve lead qualification.

Each piece of content is an opportunity to prompt your visitors to further qualify themselves. You can experiment with including qualifying criteria on content landing pages. For instance, try designing landing pages that are focused on specific customer roles or stages in the buying cycle. As site visitors self-select to view this specific content, your sales teams will be able engage them in a more customized manner.

Another way to improve lead qualification via landing page is with a quick survey. Before a visitor can download a white paper or view a video, you can prompt them with a one- or two-question survey to gather specific demographic data, such as company size or number of office locations. This type of information can be useful for lead-scoring purposes or to provide additional context for sales reps.

Improving lead qualification will be an ever-evolving exercise. The idea of educating and qualifying your website visitors is a great foundation to build on because it addresses core components of audience engagement and lead conversion. So use this as a chance to engage your audience in a manner that helps them learn, and you will see an improvement in the number of qualified leads.

Learn how Conversica can help elevate your qualified leads.