This week I spent an hour explaining the lead generation process in detail to our new intern. He has already completed the HubSpot training on landing pages, CTAs and thank you pages, so I was trying to tie it all together. Unfortunately I was working at a whiteboard, and by the time I got done, my whiteboard looked like a bowl of spaghetti.
Well okay, maybe was a little more structured than spaghetti. But there’s a lot that goes on in the process of lead generation. In fact, there’s way more than I can cover in a single blog post, so let me share a few tips based on things I’ve seen lately that were not consistent with lead generation best practices.
#1: Avoid corporate gobbledygook
Sure, you want your landing pages and email nurturing campaigns to be professional, but avoid your corporate gobbledygook.
Gobbledygook (isn’t that a great word!) is jargon terms and phrases that have been over-used and abused rendering them meaningless (you’ll find them mostly in technology companies, but everyone is an offender at one point or another). These words are meant to add more emphasis of a particular subject but instead they make your eyes roll.
Particularly avoid these word when describing your offers:
- Next generation
- Flexible
- Robust
- Scalable
- Easy-to-use
- Cutting edge
- Ground breaking
- Best of breed
- Mission critical
- Market leading
#2: Add a call to action to the bottom of every blog post
If someone read or skims to the bottom of your blog post, they were at least somewhat interested in what you had to say. Why not follow that up with a related call to action at the bottom of your post so they can get more information about this topic?
Note how the CTA at the bottom of this post fits with the content of the post. This congruency leads your readers to click on the offer and — if they like the content on your landing page (and the content is congruent with the CTA) — download your ebook, or checklist, or whatever.
Clarity trumps persuasion. ~ Flint McGlaughlin, MecLabs
Make your CTA crystal clear. If you’re giving away and ebook, say “Download our FREE guide to…” This is much more effective than “Get your ebook!”
And finally, link your CTA to a dedicated landing page where your visitor can receive that specific offer.
#3: Follow best practices for an effective landing page
Landing pages are used to convert visitors to leads by collecting contact information from them in return for providing valuable content. Landing pages don’t have the website navigation, as you want your visitor to be focused on doing ONE thing: filling out the form.
Here are best practices for an effective landing page:
#4: Please, no Submit button!
One of the best ways to increase conversions is to simply NOT use the word “SUBMIT” on your form button. No one wants to submit to anything. But they would like to get something, and beacuse it’s the internet, they expect it now. So try “Get your free ebook”, or “Join our newsletter”, or even “Download Now!”
#5: Optimize landing pages for organic search
While promoting your offers in many channels is crucial for lead generation, it’s also equally important to make it easy for people to find your landing pages through search engines. To do this, you need to apply search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to your landing pages, such as:
- Pick a primary keyword for each landing page and focus on optimizing that page for that word. If you saturate a page with too many keywords, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about.
- Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These areas of content have greater weight to search engines.
- Include the keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context. Make sure they are relevant to the rest of your content.
- Include keywords in the file name of images (e.g. mykeyword.jpg) or use them in the ALT tag.
- Include the keywords in the page URL.
Generating leads online has the power to transform your marketing. Using great offers, calls-to-action, landing pages and forms – while promoting them in multi-channel environments – can reduce your cost-per-lead while delivering higher quality prospects to your sales team.
Want more great tips, tricks and ideas for lead generation, Get our FREE “30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks & Ideas.”
