The movie, “Field of Dreams” launched the meme, “Build it and they will come.” While that’s a hopeful sentiment, it doesn’t apply to your website. We talk to many business owners and marketers frustrated that no new business is coming to them from their website. Unfortunately, they come to a few, erroneous conclusions about the possibilities for inbound lead generation.

I often hear, “My customers aren’t online.” The truth is actually the opposite. In fact, we know that more that 81% of buyers do research online first before making a decision.

Sometimes I hear, “I've tried SEO (or social media) and it doesn’t work,” after dabbling in one or two of those marketing activities. I have observed that very often these activities were taken on without a strategy or specific target. Or, there was not enough effort to generate results.

Generating new business from your website and the internet is real and very possible - it’s called inbound marketing and sales. However, it doesn’t happen by accident or with wishful thinking. It takes work, strategy and pulling the right levers.

Three Levers (opportunities) to Increase Your Revenues with Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the business generation method of attracting a targeted audience to your website, capturing those visitors as leads and turning them into customers.

There are three opportunities to increase your revenue using Inbound marketing:

1. Get more traffic (number of visitors)
2. Capture more leads (higher conversion rate)
3. Nurture and follow up with leads to win their business (increase conversion rate)

Formula for Generating Business from Your Website:

[# of Visitors] X [Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate (%)] X [Lead to Customer Conversion Rate (%)] = [# Number customers]

 If any one of these [figures] equals zero the result is always … zero.

If you increase one of these figures, you will increase your results.

Inbound marketing is the means to pull the right levers and produce the numbers you're looking for.

 to learn what it takes to get a stream of business from your website.

The following is a checklist of all the areas we check on to assess the health of a business website, and it's readiness to generate leads before we make recommendations.

Inbound Lead Generation Readiness Checklist

1. What is your overall website grade? Use this website grader to check your website:

1. The website performance including load speed on desktop and mobile computers. Google shows that websites that load slowly often loose visitors.
2. Mobile readiness. Websites that are not mobile ready or “responsive” to the size of the device reading them are penalized by Google in search results.
3. SEO. How optimized are your website pages for your keywords?
4. Security. Google now flags every website without an SSL security certificate (HTTPS). “Not Secure” on your website is like a “Go Away!” sign.

2. How much traffic does your site get each month?

1. Hopefully, you have Google Analytics tracking code installed on your website and can easily access this information.
2. Another source to estimate traffic if you don’t have Google Analytics access is SEMRush.com
3. SEMRush will also estimate the number of “backlinks” ie the number of websites that link back to your site. Backlinks are important to Google when determining search results ranking. The more the better.

3. Do you have a blog?

1. Are you blogging at minimum monthly?
2. Articles informative, educational and focuses on thought leader topics of interest to your ideal clients?

4. Is the messaging on the front page clear about:

• Who the website is for?
• The problems you solve for your clients?
• Why they should care about what you do for them?

5. Is there a compelling lead capture opportunity?

Offering a generic newsletter sign up is, well, generic and not, well very compelling. Create something that your ideal client really wants and needs.

Is your offering visible near the top of the front page (above the fold?)

6. Are there clear and compelling Calls-to-Action?

Your website visitors come with a clear goal in mind to either get their questions answered or get information. Help them achieve their goal by telling them the next step.

Your Next Steps:

Assess and adjust these six factors of your website and you’ll be on your way to generating more traffic and leads. 

What happens next with your new leads is up to you and your sales team.

Selling to inbound leads is a whole new experience for some, and takes a new approach than traditional sales. Inbound is always buyer centric, not seller centric.

Stay tuned for our next article all about what we learned from the HubSpot sales course and how to sell in the inbound way.

 Want to know more about how to turn your website into a lead generation engine? Join Jayne Burch for the next Monsoon Inbound Academy webinar.

Marketing Monsoon is a growth agency specializing in lead generation, client acquisition and customer engagement. Since 2006, we have changed the marketing landscape of our clients in alternative energy, healthcare, and HR consulting industries.

Is your company looking to attract traffic, generate leads, increase sales, and delight customers? See how our team of experts can help.