Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 How can you make your website visitors hungry for more? In my blog post the other day which included simple SEO advice for landscapers and home improvement companies, or any business that needs more traffic for lead generation, I discussed strategies and techniques for being found on the search engines for important keywords. The challenge is that if your website does a poor job of quickly communicating what you do, how it will solve a particular problem the visitor may have and what action they should take next to engage with your company, then the time, energy and potential money you invested in bringing them there in the first place is a complete waste. The goal of your website should be to fulfill the personal reason for a visitor coming to your site. The challenge is that there could be a variety of different people visiting for a variety of different reasons. How can you address them all? If you can successfully profile your visitors personas, clearly communicate that you have the answer or solution that they need at that particular moment, then you are on track to building a long lasting, loving relationship with people who will sooner or later become your customers. Steps to Converting Website Visitors into Qualified Sales Leads Step 1: Visitor Profiling Landscaping website with clearly defined visitor persona funnels Most businesses can identify 3 or more different types of customers who would normally hire them. For example, a landscaping company night typically work with home owners in need of landscaping for their front or backyard and they may have particular services such as pool and patio installation, garden design & construction, waterfalls or natural stonework, paving for walkways or driveways, general lawn and garden maintenance and snow removal. These are three very unique types of individuals who may be visiting your website. You can’t communicate the same with each one of them or you will lose their interest very quickly. Your website home page needs to clearly and visually call out to those three personas so that they will immediately recognize that they are in the right place and know instantly where they need to go to find more information pertinent to them. Yes, there is a menu on your website and yes, people can click and poke around until they find that information but did you know that about 65% of people are visual learners? That means that within less than one second of landing on your website visitors should see that they arrived in the right place and why they should stay, even before they read a single word. Step 2: Feed them well Here’s a surprise, not every visitor to your website will get there via the home page. In fact, if you are doing a good job of search engine optimization, many of your visitors will land on an internal page of your website. However they got to these inside pages, whether it’s via following the funnels from your home page or finding that page from a specific keyword search on Google, they need more than a few pretty pictures and some bullet points to earn their interest. The idea is to create rich, valuable content that will entice them to keep reading. If you just read that line of this article, then you should understand what I mean. You are some 700 words into this text and it has captured your interest enough to continue reading. You need to do the same with your visitors. Step 3: Spill some candy Many first time website visitors are searching for free information like “how to” whatever or “do it yourself” something, or perhaps “front yard landscaping ideas“. You need to fill these visitors up with information to satisfy their needs. It’s not unusual to think that giving away your ideas is counter-intuitive to getting more sales leads and growing your revenue. However, by giving some good ideas and painting a mental picture in the visitors’ psyche you are positioning yourself as a thought leader since you are the source of this information. Step 4: Give them some value Now you’ve got a targeted audience on your website reading your valuable content. What’s next? Chances are someone looking for “ideas” is not at the pinnacle of their buying cycle. In fact, they are probably at the beginning stages. What better time to introduce yourself and entice them with some value? This is where the inbound marketing process begins. First you need to create a white paper, e-book, 10 step guide or something of equal value that will entice the reader to opt-in to your lead nurturing/email marketing database. Perhaps it’s a 10 step guide to selecting a reputable landscaping service, or a white paper on How to avoid a landscaping contractor nightmare, or even an e-book about Planting a beautiful garden that will last a lifetime. I think you get my drift. (These valuable content pieces can be quite the task to create, so consider a professional copywriting service.) But don’t simply put the document PDF in open view for any visitor to download. It’s the bait! The hook is that when they click on the call to action that invites them to download the document they go to a landing page that gives them a list of all the features advantages and benefits that they will get by having the document. The catch is that in order to download it they have to provide you with their name and email address, maybe even their phone number and any other important information that would help you to categorize them based on their interest, budget, age group, needs, or any other type of valuable information you would like to have on a prospect. Step 5: Nurture them Once you have begun gathering a list of potential customers who have expressed an interest in your product or service and given you their contact information in exchange for something valuable, you need to build a trusting relationship with them. Using email marketing and other lead nurturing software you will be able to continue providing more valuable information to assist them in their buying process. If they decide to unsubscribe, that’s OK. They have disqualified themselves and saved you a lot of wasted time, energy and money trying to sell to them. One sure thing that has been proven time and time again however is that people buy from those they like and trust. And one sure way to build trust is to give valuable information when it is needed. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jason Gervais.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Jason Gervais Follow @jagervais Jason Gervais has been helping grow businesses in Southern Ontario since 2005 when he started the WSI Milton. Together with his wife Denise, they lead a team of 9 full time staff who work together providing Internet Marketing Solutions driving lead generation and more sales… View full profile ›More by this author:Tracking Your Success – How to Measure the ROI of Your Marketing5 Quick Internet Marketing Tips for Landscaping Business OwnersCase Study: Yellow Pages & Print Advertising vs. Internet Marketing