Build It and They Will Come.
If you believe that, as they say, I got some swampland in Florida I’ll sell you!
Up Against Some Tough Competition
There are billions of web pages out there, and millions of blogs (and more blog articles being published daily) all hoping to exploit the search engines in their quest to attract Inbound Traffic. There are also a huge number of social media websites. There's an almost unlimited number of video options, both online and off; unless you take some very specific actions, you probably won’t get a lot of visitors to your own website when building your Inbound Marketing Website to support your sales process.
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You Can Hit It Out of the Park With the Right Website Design Approach
Website Designed to Support Your Inbound Marketing Strategies
If you already have a website, and want to improve its performance, then we highly recommend our ebook “10 STEPS TO TURN YOUR WEBSITE REDESIGN INTO AN INBOUND MARKETING MACHINE” which you can get by clicking the button at the end of this blog. By following its guidelines, you will be well on your way to building a website that supports your unique Inbound Marketing Strategy.
Lead Generation Machine
If you’re just starting out, like we were just a few years ago, we think you might want to know some of the lead generation secrets we have learned that have helped us turn our website into an Inbound Marketing fueled lead generation machine!
- Design your website skeleton around Long Tail Keywords.
Sounds simple enough, but when you first start out, you may struggle to think of even ten long tail keywords (we did:).
Today, we have 1,000 long tail keywords we target and have to drop some to add others to experiment with.
While each search engine continuously updates what it considers 'best practices' and shares those with the public, the core best practice remains the same, have a sound information architecture. - If you don’t have artistic skills or designers available and have a very limited budget for artwork, there are several online sites that cost very little and provide ‘good enough’ artwork for most every need.
Unsplash
Google Creative Commons
Hubspot (for subscribers - you get access to a large library of stock fotos)
Web design is an ever evolving art, however, keep in mind that your goal is to generate leads and close sales. We recommend the use of proven templates, which are available from a number of providers, such as:
Hubspot
LeadPages
and Unbounce. - If you plan on using video, and you MUST, iMovie or Movie Maker (Mac or Windows, respectively) can help with most basic editing chores, and if you have 300 bucks or so, Final Cut Pro is available from Apple and with a little practice, can yield broadcast quality video.
I did a complete course on it eventually and am working on my FCP certification! - It is best to learn about ‘storyboarding’ as in, lay out your site page design to tell a story.
If you can, print out your storyboard and hang it on the wall.
Step back, and walk-through what you expect each visitor to do when they visit your site.
You’ll quickly see holes in your design. These holes will keep you from finding your path-to-cash.
This is an especially useful exercise for ecommerce sites. Online shopping may be the goal of your site, but testing will tell you whether your customers actually understand what you're selling. - You already know you need to be on social media and that you will want to link your site to your social media presence.
What you may not know is that it takes a long time to develop and nurture your presence, regardless of the social media platform you focus on.
For instance, my LinkedIN profile has been out there since LinkedIN hit the internet, and it is one of the most visited profiles.
This takes a small amount of daily effort to continuously grow.
The bigger message is that you'll need to be on multiple sites, including but not limited to:
Facebook, xing, twitter, Google+, YouTube and will want to build your Klout score to boot! - Generating ‘valuable content’ is going to be one of the more challenging tasks you will encounter.
You may be lucky and have quite a bit available from previous work, but to really ‘nail it’, you will need to create a lot of new content.
To do that, you will need to combine analytics from your site, some imagination, templates available from hubspot and other sources and perhaps, make your own if you have the design skills.
Fiverr is also a possibility for template development.
However, the development of the ‘meat’ of your content is on your shoulders and you can expect it to take a while to generate content that is ‘valuable enough’ to attract visitors and ultimately prospects.
Planning it out is the secret here, but 'just doing it' will get it done.
Content marketing success is a long game. It also requires a great deal of skill and developmental budget. However, above all other considerations, having an overall content plan executing against it is the number one secret to success we have observed with all of our Hubspot Inbound Marketing customers, no matter the industry.
While there are many, many different types of content which you could develop, you'll generally find yourself building one or more of each of these types of content:
Case Studies
Whitepapers
Calculators
Webinars
eBooks
Pricing Tools
All of these will require a well designed, SEO optimized landing page for you to use as a delivery vehicle and with which to collect leads and close deals with. - Developing Calls to Action or CTAs goes along with both your storyboard and your content.
If not already skilled in it, PowerPoint offers more than enough functionality to develop some fairly slick CTA buttons.
Beyond that, lies Adobe (several tools) or my favorite, Apple Motion, simply because it is cheap.
Tumult Hype is a nice little HTML5 tool, but inserting any HTML5 item into your website requires some more advanced technical skills until you get it figured out.
An inbound marketing website is, first of all, focused on providing a delightful experience for users, but you also want the site to help you meet business objectives. Incorporating offers and call-to-actions are part of the inbound marketing website design process.
Use effective CTAs to communicate the next steps you want visitors to take – do you want them to fill a form? Perhaps just call you or book a meeting with you using your online calendaring system - HTML, if you don’t know any, that is ok, if limiting.
If you’re curious, have time to burn, and any sort of coding background at all, one nice resource is CodeAcademy.
The most basic of basic HTML coding is also available from a couple of Hubspot links here and here. - Blogging, you may not be a blogger, or more specifically, used to writing to hit the parameters of an effective lead generating blog.
If you use Hubspot’s blogging tool, and make all the warnings it provides go away, you’ll be well on your way.
The bigger message is that your blogging, like your website, will be targeting Long Tail Keywords.
Practice makes perfect here, and there is a definite method to pumping out the blogs on a regular basis until you hit that magic number of 200 or so blogs, at which point you might see some exponential growth in viewership.
If you, like me, get used to doing it, you will start to keep track of blogging ideas as you wonder around during the day.
They come in handy. - One tricky area of blogging is creating effective Tags.
I recommend you match up your content mapping and landing page design to your blogging tags.
It may seem insignificant at first, but in order for a search bar to work effectively and not return too many result sets, then this is a key item.
When you are designing your ecommerce sales funnel, tags take on a whole new level of importance. They can be linked internally and often receive external links.
While you can't or don't need to do as much work with them on a blogging platform like Hubspot, for platforms like Wordpress, you can provide much more detail about your tags and your categories. You should make these a center piece of your SEO optimization efforts. - Mobile Website Design, while 'taken care of' by the Hubspot COS, still requires a slightly different approach, though the basics of Long Tail Keyword targeting are the same.
One of the major differences here is that your 'content' is consumed while 'on-the-go' versus at a desktop.
So you have to make it a little more bite sized, consumable on a smaller screen, and in general, 'short form'. You still, however, have to tell a story.
Go Mobile to Reach More of Your Audience Where They Live
Tying Landing Pages Together With Email Marketing
If you have developed a content plan supports your SEO strategy, with offerings at the different levels of your sales funnel, you should have one or pieces of content at the following levels:
- TOFU - Top of the Funnel
- MOFU - Middle of the Funnel
- BOFU - Bottom of the Funnel
In order to move leads through your well designed Inbound Marketing Website, from Visitor->Contact->Lead->MQL->SQL->Opportunity->Deal, you need a way to 'nurture' them.
Enter Email Lead Nurturing
To move people through your lead generation website, we use email. Email has many uses, but used effectively, as part of a well designed series of educational emails, it can be used to present your content offers in the sequence you planned out.
Part of a Broader Digital Strategy
Email lead nurturing should be part of a much broader, more holistic approach to alleviating pain points that your audience may be experiencing in their lives.
Behavioral Email Works Even on Social Media Platforms
While ALL social media platforms have an overriding goal to keep your leads on their site, they all emit digital signals that allow to send emails when they take actions on most of the social platforms, especially, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. When you have done all of this, you have your lead generation machine.
Right Time Email Delivery
Email based lead nurturing depends upon many elements. UI Design is one element. Simpler is usually better - but not always. But of all the different elements to a successful email lead nurturing campaign, the one with the most influence is delivering it at the right time.
Marketing Automation Platforms Help - A Lot!
Marketing automation platforms, such as the Hubspot marketing automation platform, make 'listening' to user signals both easy and dynamic. They can use these lead signals to populate various types of lists which in-turn, can trigger email sequences.
Email Lead Nurturing Sequences Can Run For Years!
For many types of sales, especially (but not only) complex sales, a well designed contextually aware, email sequence can run for a long time, perhaps years in the case of something like SAP.
Exploit All Marketing Channels
Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that is designed to draw visitors and potential customers in, rather than outwardly pushing a brand, product or service onto prospects in the hope of lead generation or customers.
Combining Marketing Channels
In terms of digital marketing, this means using a combination of marketing channels – most commonly content marketing, search engine optimization ( SEO) , and social media – in creative ways to attract people's attention.
Modern Buyer's Journey Takes Many Paths
A buyer's journey may involve many digital touchpoints, blogs, online chats, messaging apps, in-game ads, and numerous offline or what one would call traditional outbound marketing touchpoints:
- Print Media
- Television (especially smart TVs)
- Direct Mail
- Billboards
- Events
and many more. However, while it may be tough to track and provide proper attribution of these outbound methods to the buyer's journey, through the use of tracking codes and other types of well known tracking approaches, you can, indeed, track most everything.
Importance of Identifying the Right Target Audience
If there's one thing you remember about inbound marketing, it's the importance of tracking performance and refining your approach accordingly.
Continuous Testing is Critical to Success
Testing helps you discover which messaging, types of valuable content, imagery, calls to action, etc., work best for your target audience and ensure you implement these on a permanent basis, or in your next campaign.
Brings New Customers to You
Over time, your marketing flywheel allows you to grow without continually investing in customer acquisition.
Ultimately, You Want to Build Trust With Your Leads
By creating relevant, helpful content customers find valuable, and which help them solve their problems, you build trust and credibility for your brand, which is the cornerstone for building thriving businesses.
Building Inbound Lead Generation Machine
Of course, it takes more than this to develop an effective Inbound Lead Generation Machine, and as promised here is a button to download our guide to redesigning an existing website to step up your game.
People who read this also read:
Discover 12 Secrets to Building an Inbound Marketing Website
A 10 Step Checklist for Your Website Design
Your 25 Website Must Haves for Driving Traffic, Sales and Leads
11 Ways to Use Hubspot CRM as a Sales Force Multiplier
Free Online Sales and Inbound Marketing Calculator
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