Things Your Website Content Must Include to Convert Leads

Content on the internet is meant to inform, to educate, and to provide a sense of value to readers. More importantly, at the end of the day, it is about getting people to take action.

Whether it’s to buy a product, sign up for an account, or just leaving their contact details, content is key to making the process as efficient and smooth as possible. After all, without the right content, it is close to impossible to convince the reader to take action.

In order to turn interest into actual, actionable leads, your content must be optimized to push things forward. If you are interested to know just what goes into convincing content that can help convert leads, here are the things to take note of.

What is Lead Conversion?

Before we even begin, you need to understand what exactly is lead conversion. Basically, it is the process of taking leads and turning them into action. This can be in the form of payment or a certain behavior that is required. Lead conversion is all about motivating the consumer, ushering them towards making a decision that lines up with your goal.

The process is usually broken down into stages – Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action – for the consumer. There are many different ways in which you can help someone move through the stages, and content is the most important tool you have.

Effective lead conversion can be the result of good content marketing, the proper use of landing pages, or leveraging on social media. Email marketing is also a good method to procure and convert leads, while calls and chatbots can be the final push in lead generation. Of course, paid media and advertising are also essential methods in lead generation.

However, if your focus lies in your site, then it is time to optimize the pages that will help you convert your visitors into action takers.

Main Content Conversion Pages You Need

If conversion rate is something important to you, then you already know how important pages that convert are. Anyone interested in your services or business will likely seek more information via your site. It is important to show them that you are a legitimate business that has the expertise to serve them. This is where your website pages play a huge part.

As such, here are five of the most important pages on a site that can help you improve your lead conversion rate.

Home Page

There is no doubting the influence a home page has on a website visitor. It is likely the first thing you see when looking up a business. First impressions count for a lot, and if you are losing people right at the start, you can forget about any kind of leads. While a home page is unlikely to generate leads on its own, it is the gateway that helps consumers find what they are looking for.

By ensuring that the home page is set up to guide visitors to where they need to be and where you want them to be, the battle is already half won.

On your end, there are certain things to note. A good header image will catch the eye, while plenty of calls to action (CTAs) can give visitors impetus to take action. Customer reviews and even a chatbot can enhance the overall experience as well.

Landing Page

Every site is bound to have a landing page or two. Designed to help generate qualified leads, such pages are key to helping any business convert leads.

Landing pages can be in the form of event registration pages, links to sign up for courses or newsletters, or even a free product trial. Your landing page call to action need to lead somewhere, and such landing pages are perfect for that.

Blog

Not all websites need a blog, but if it fits, a blog can be a significant source of traffic and hopefully, conversions. By creating relevant and timely blog content for your website, you are making sure people want to stay on your website and keep engaging.

With quality blog content, mixed in with fresh visuals, you can easily establish a well of information that people would actually want to visit. This in turn provides plenty of conversion opportunities with product shoutouts, CTAs, and of course, blog content subscriptions.

FAQs

People are always searching for more information, and the FAQ page on your website is a perfect place to start. Questions with straightforward answers should not require hoops to jump through.

With a proper FAQ section in place on your website or landing page, visitors are less likely to leave your site. More importantly, it gives you a chance to educate and promote your content even further.

Contact Us

Obviously, this is one page on your website or landing page where website visitors actually want to give you details. By being able to contact you directly, this will help them save time and effort. Be sure to provide ample details and make the process easier.

Automation, a proper form with a variety of options, and clear information requirements will not only make your work easier but allow website visitors to address their concerns more effectively.

The more you know about your visitors’ concerns, the more you will be able to give them the right solution. Help them help you, and you will definitely be looking at more qualified leads.

Ways to Optimize Content for Lead Conversion

Here are the many ways to optimize websites and improve lead conversion rate.

Provide The Necessary Information Right Away

According to the marketing team of tech giant Microsoft, the average person’s attention span is only eight seconds long. If you don’t believe this, try to remember the last ad you’ve seen. Ads only take about five to thirty seconds long and yet, they still feel like forever. This incredibly quick attention span is a result of our generation’s access to so much stimuli and content at our fingertips.

To optimize your site for lead conversion, make sure to have all the necessary information right away – preferably in the very first paragraph of the page. This is to keep users and website visitors engaged with the content the website is providing.

However, providing all the necessary information right away may seem counterintuitive to some website owners because they want to keep visitors in their sites for as long as they can. Just to keep people in websites longer, some websites specifically withhold pertinent information as a way to keep visitors in their websites. Unfortunately, this has been found to be incorrect.

With the aforementioned short attention span, people will not be converted into qualified leads if it just takes them too long to find what they were looking for in the first place.

Finding information right away on your site might make people leave the site sooner, but it has been observed to be better at converting leads.

Use Emotion

While businesses sell products online over their websites, they can sometimes forget that the website itself is a product as well. It should not be seen as just a platform over which to conduct business. Websites have to be designed and written with emotion. This makes your site more relatable and more “human” to the average person.

There are many ways to use emotion when designing your website or landing page. One of the easiest ways to express emotions in a website is through the words they use. Ask any author and they would agree that word choice is a very powerful tool.

In the industry of lead conversion, there is a concept of “power words.” Simply put, power words are simply compelling words that evoke emotion in the readers.

For example, imagine yourself as a person currently in the market for a new office chair. You happen to narrow down your search between two websites selling office chairs. One site simply describes their chairs with technical jargon: “this chair is equipped with lumbar support.”

Compare this with the other website that uses power words: “this comfortable chair comes equipped with impressive lumbar support.” Without access to any other piece of information, people would typically gravitate more towards a website or landing page that uses power words because not only do they convey a message, but they also express emotion.

While not everyone is equipped with a comprehensive vocabulary list of power words, many online resources are available for power words people can use.

Use Visuals

Adding to the use of emotion in websites, using visuals is another surefire way of increasing lead conversion rates for your website or landing page. Using visuals is a very psychological move on the part of the website because seeing images activate different parts of the brain compared to just text. Compared to text that is often black and white, visuals and images can use any color imaginable. Plus, websites can effectively use color to convey feelings as well.

Research has shown that color can make people feel a certain way. A safe color to use for websites is blue because it’s a very neutral color that typically makes people feel calm and relaxed. However, you can use pops of red if you want to induce some form of excitement.

Furthermore, images can also give more information that text will have difficulty describing. Using the example of chairs again, people interested in getting office chairs can be very particular about the dimensions of the chair because they want to make sure that a certain chair can fit underneath the table when not in use. Comprehensive text can eventually describe the exact dimensions of the chair, but an image of the chair with the measurements will be an easier way to convey that type of information.

Simple Words

Despite the suggestion to use power words, don’t confuse this with using complicated words. As much as possible, it is best to use simple words. As a good rule of thumb, written text can be considered simple when children can comprehend it.

Using simple words achieves multiple things. For one, it is easier for people to comprehend. This lessens the risk of misunderstandings between the text and the reader. Furthermore, simple text avoids alienating people with words they do not understand. This is one reason why people would rather get their information from a website or even social media than an academic journal article. This is because the information has already been stripped down and packaged into a more understandable form.

With the purpose of optimizing websites for lead conversion, the last thing a website would want is to deter potential leads simply because they used complicated words.

However, using simple words doesn’t mean to avoid technical jargon. Especially if the website deals with technical specifications, then by all means you should go ahead and use the appropriate jargon. Using the appropriate jargon helps build a relationship of trust between the website and the readers because the readers would then have a sense that the website knows what they’re talking about when they use the right words.

Target Your Content

When considering the website as a part of the business, it has to be emphasized that everything has to count – especially content. Think of words as a resource that has to be used carefully because every piece of content in the website has to be targeted for efficiency.

For lead conversion, imagine content as a funnel that has to specifically guide readers through three different stages: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. First, readers at the top of the funnel (TOFU) are first facilitated towards awareness. This section lets readers know about a certain situation or a product that they aren’t familiar with yet. For example, a page discussing office chairs will talk about chairs in general at TOFU.

Going further down, the reader is guided towards the middle of the funnel (MOFU). The page then begins to discuss the importance of having a good chair when work involves long periods of static sitting. At this point, the reader is allowed to evaluate whether they have a need for a proper chair. Lastly, the reader is guided to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). This section then aims to convert the user to an actual purchase decision.

The TOFU, MOFU, BOFU sections can look very differently across different websites and platforms. Generally speaking, the TOFU section can consist of a wide variety of content such as blogs, social media updates, photographs, infographics, books, podcasts, audiobooks, newsletters, and more. As long as the TOFU section aims to inform and raise awareness, the MOFU section allows readers to assess the situation with educational resources, discounts, quizzes, surveys, and software downloads. Finally, the BOFU section can be in the form of demos, free trials, events, classes, and the like.

While it may seem like a lot of work to carefully structure content this way, it’s well worth the effort as it is a proven marketing strategy that successfully converts leads.

Reference Authority

Referencing authority is an easy way for lead conversion because this appeals to one of the most popular forms of fallacies: appealing to authority. People are more likely to believe information when citing authorities because of the associated power dynamics.

Referencing authority is also very effective in persuasion because it adds to the illusion of credibility. Integrating references from credible sources can be seen as piggybacking to their reliability as well.

Conclusion

To maximize online success, websites have to be optimized for ways to nudge visitors towards purchase decisions, also known as lead conversion. It’s not effective to just put in the effort to generate leads but not look into increasing your conversion rate. In this information age where all information is highly accessible, websites have to work smart to stand out from the crowd and be entrepreneurially successful. If you are unsure about how to best optimize your website, consult our web design company in Orlando for help.