The Top 4 Lead Generation Services for Your Business Website

Gone are the days where just having a website for your business is good enough. It used to be sort of a badge of honor to say "Yeah, we're online. Go and check out our website!"

Today, the badge of honor isn't having a site, it's having a website that transforms visitors into customers. That's the practice of lead generation - to transform people who visit your website into leads, prospects and customers.

It really shouldn't be a badge of honor though. Every business needs to have a website that plays a positive role in the success of the actual business - increasing sales, growing revenue and cutting costs.

But the marketing tactic of lead generation can be a bit vague and cause you to wonder questions like:

• How do we even start with lead generation?
• What do we look for in a marketing agency to help us with this?
• What makes sense for our business?

There are at least a few different services that could be offered to you, or you could ask for, when seeking help externally or even inside your own company when it comes to lead generation and your website.

1. Strategy & planning

To get started with lead generation activities, you may look to hire a consultant or agency that can help you to develop a plan that makes sense for your business.

There are a number of factors to consider:

• What resources does your company have to offer (e.g. money, time)?
• What are your near- and long-term goals?
• What type of products or services do you offer?
• Who are your customers, your target audience?

Every digital marketing tactic requires some sort of investment. It's important that you take the time to understand what sort of investment you can make consistently to fully support a successful new strategy such as growing your customers by way of website lead generation.

Once you've done that, you can then look ahead to finding and establishing a solid plan.

Depending on your answers to the above questions, a consultant may be able to help you identify various lead magnet solutions that may help you to capture more conversions.

For example, if you identify that your company has some funds that can be used for this project, and you have a new, intuitive product that you'd like to start capturing new customers for ASAP, one solution might be to create some sort of online calculator. The user can input their data into the calculator and their email address. In turn, you'll show them how much they can expect to improve their current situation by leveraging your new product.

You'll also now have their email address (and any other information you requested such as company name, phone number, etc.) and can have your sales team follow up with this potentially-interested prospect.

Or maybe you're looking for a more long-term solution and aren't in any rush, necessarily, and you're able to offer valuable, industry knowledge in a sort of newsletter or monthly report. You might be able to promote that in relevant places to get users to sign up to receive that newsletter.

You can then develop a strategy to kindly try to sell them your paid products or services.

A successful lead generation strategy service should help you to understand what's required to execute a successful, customer-generating program, give you the guidance and tools needed to move forward with confidence, and track your performance.

2. Development

Lead generation will, often times, require some form of website development. Depending on what sort of tactic of lead magnet you're going to use to capture prospects, you may need to create a new gateway of sorts on your website.

For example, let's say that you'd like to create some sort of interactive element that will entice website visitors to use. Perhaps you allow some level of interaction but, at a certain point, you want to require the inputting of an email address so that you can capture and follow up with the user as it's likely they are at least a minimally-interested lead.

You would likely need a developer to help you to create that interactive content, create the "paywall" of sorts where you require the email address, and handle any sending of emails automatically.

Maybe you're thinking more simply, and you've put together a high-quality report containing industry data and interesting graphs. Instead of just posting that to the website, you might be able to capture contact information of leads by requiring some sort of contact information (email, phone, company name, company website, etc.) in order to download.

You would probably need a developer to help you create an eye-popping message about this valuable report. This might come in the form of an exit-intent popup (when a website visitor's mouse leaves the window, the promotion pops up and covers the window). A developer could help you to build functionality like that as well as store any valuable prospect information in a database.

A next-level developer could even build your sales team an efficient way to interact with all of your prospect's data, add notes, identify prospects as being in different steps of the sales process, etc. This would be a sort of customer relations management tool - don't think that your only option for this is to pay for heavy solution such as Salesforce!

A successful lead generation website development service should help you to build out solutions to your determined plan, and make it easy for you to use and leverage the prospect data that you collect.

3. Design

It's likely that you don't have a polished report, ebook or other resource ready to be downloaded by users. Perhaps you have at least some data and an idea for how you're going to produce the rest of the necessary content, but you'll need someone to help you turn that into a professional-looking document with beautiful charts.

Or you have an idea for a tool or page you'd like to add to your website, but realize it's important to make sure that it's user-friendly. After all, just having clever functionality isn't enough to generate new prospects if it doesn't work well. It might actually hurt your business more than help it!

There's a good chance you'll need a designer to take your rough draft, improve it and put it in ready state to be seen and used by the general public. A designer might even have some original ideas that could help take your content to the next level so that it really makes a splash with potential customers.

A successful lead generation design service should help to make your resource, content or interactive tool polished and accessible for a good user experience and better promotion to your potential prospects.

4. A/B testing & analysis

A proper lead generation website strategy wouldn't be complete without some sort of analysis and reporting. If you find yourself attempting any of the steps above, but don't have a clear understanding and path to reviewing and reacting to the data that shows your performance, then you are simply wasting your time.

Perhaps you're still getting new customers - great! But it's likely that you're getting a small percentage of the customers that you could be getting.

A/B testing is the process of making adjustments over time and then seeing which solution works best. For example, maybe you're featuring a newsletter signup for your lead generation tactic. Let's say that it's a sidebar ad, of sorts, on your blog page with a solid yellow background.

It seems to be working well, but, it's likely not performing as good as it could be - especially if it hasn't changed from its original design. So, an A/B approach would be to change the yellow background to a blue background. Make just that one change, wait 2-4 weeks (depending on how much web traffic your site gets), and review the performance increase or decrease.

Then try making one other change and see what happens. Keep doing this until, well, your newsletter ad is perfect (basically, do it constantly and continually).

Analysis and reviewing metrics would simply provide you with the information to know if your lead generation tactic is working, or how well it's working. Maybe the time you're spending on it isn't worth the amount of actual customers that it's bringing in. You wouldn't know that if you weren't reviewing real data.

A successful lead generation A/B testing and analysis service would provide you with the valuable information necessary to know how to improve your performance, what's working and what strategies to abandon.