Get Leads Make Sales

Back in the day, many dotcom companies burned through cash like crazy when they advertised (typically offline) to drive visitors to their website. This tended to generate a short-lived “sugar rush” of visitors who never came back or bought anything. The thinking was, “you need to keep content fresh to keep visitors interested and coming back for more”.

While for certain types of websites this is absolutely true (e.g. a news portal), many people still think that fresh content is essential for ongoing website success. That ain’t necessarily so

A lot of the lead generation work we do on behalf of our clients involves building websites geared towards getting new clients for the business. Once a prospect becomes a paying customer, the need to have fresh content to net repeat visits is dramatically less; the website has already performed its function.

While the old saying in marketing is that it takes 7 contacts (or visits in the case of a website) for a prospect to convert, this all depends. Generally speaking, the more expensive or complex the product or service you have to offer, the more visits will be needed to convert a prospect.

The best way to drive these initial “pre-conversion” repeat visits is to incorporate a “lead capture” mechanism into your site. This might be as simple as a newsletter signup form, or it could be an invitation to download more comprehensive materials (e.g. a free report or eGuide).

This allows you to educate prospects about the value that you offer as well as stay in touch. Your followup contacts will keep prospects coming back to your site to dip back into your content.

This is a strategy we use often; not only on client’s websites but on our own as well. Whether a lead capture strategy is needed or not depends largely on how difficult it is for your website to convert visitors to customers.

However, don’t think that adding new content to your website doesn’t matter; it’s just not the ONLY thing that matters.

New content can in fact be a great thing for your site, especially if your site is niche focused. In this case, frequently updated content can establish you as an authority; having a section of your site devoted to articles can be a good way to bring prospective clients in for a visit.

That’s a fantastic position to be in, but it does require work. You need to write the articles (or have someone write them for you) and update them on a regular basis. And there’s no guaranteed payoff.

Many business owners we talk to are eager to include a “latest news” section on their sites in order to bring in repeat traffic. There are two reasons why I don’t generally recommend this.

1. Unless you are a genuine authority in your field, these sections tend not to be all that informative or interesting to prospective customers.

2. This section will involve posting regular updates; something which is often neglected. I’m guessing you run across “latest news” pages all the time which haven’t been updated in years.

I guess the moral of the story is to plan in advance. If your long-term website strategy demands weekly article updates, then you need to arrange the resources in advance to make sure it happens. If you don’t feel you can commit to regular updates, then perhaps the “low maintenance” option is better.

Tags: direct response, internet marketing, Lead Generation, sales leads

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 2:53 am and is filed under Lead Generation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.