Lead Generation with your WordPress Website

I worked at a car dealership once.

If you want to become humbled, I advise you to work at a car dealership.

You become a hired gun (actually commission based) to go onto the parking lot hunting potential victim – I mean buyers.

There were a lot of problems with this model of employment that did not work for me.

I learned what I didn’t want to do, and I found out that for the very last time.

As a brand new sales person at this car dealership, I had nothing to work with than the poor soul who drives onto the parking lot. I had no real leads, nothing.

Of course, we were advised to contact family and friends to see if someone is looking to buy.

Good times   😀

So, we spent the better part of our day chasing people through the parking lot trying to get to the person before another sales person does.

It is a terrible way to do business, in my opinion, but some car dealerships keep doing it this way.

In fact, the trend was already starting to change. Often, when customers walked on the lot, they already knew what they wanted.

One day, as if to save my job, I agreed to take a list of “leads” and call people to see if they might be looking for a new car. They were former customers of the manufacturer (I think), so it wasn’t completely out of left field.

I was gone before I had a chance to bring one of those persons into the dealer for a new car.

Leads can be really hard to come by whether you are selling cars, selling websites, or selling the most easily sold item on the planet.

There are multiple ways to get leads.

Some usual ways to get leads include:

• Cold Calling
• Prospecting
• Networking
• Using a marketing company
• Traditional marketing methods like advertising

But what about your website?

It is easy for business owners to forget about their website.

Often improve are not set up well to convert traffic into leads. That’s where WordPress Entrepreneurs can come in handy.

We have the means to create magic for our customers.

We’re not going to go into the technicalities of business leads, but we are going to take a look at how we can build a lead pipeline for a WordPress website.

Tools for making a basic lead generation page

Traffic

You will need traffic to your website to get leads. Well, that seems pretty obvious, right? The one caveat about traffic is that it should be the right kind of traffic.

In other words, the users who are coming to your website need to be those who are looking for what you are selling. Otherwise, you are just attracting noise.

In the online marketing world, there are three common ways to bring traffic to a website: Earned, Paid, or Owned media.

Earned Media

Earned media is a traffic channel that is filled via organic mentions on other platforms. Examples include guest posting, public relations

Need ideas? Check out this article.

Paid Media

Paid media is the kind of media that brings traffic from paid resources such as pay for click, banner ads, native advertising or sponsored posts.

Additionally, some online companies also use traditional advertising (see GoDaddy).

Owned Media

Owned media is the avenue for attracting traffic by using your own online properties including your website (content marketing, blog posts) and interactive media such as videos, graphics, and infographics.

A Landing Page

A landing page is an ideal way to execute lead generation because you can focus on the one task you want the user to take. Further, you can eliminate unnecessary distractions from other areas such as the navigation and sidebars.

Creating a landing page can be accomplished by either building a template for your theme or using one the useful WordPress landing page plugins.

Landing pages can be built using a drag & drop builder (plugin), a third party tool such as LeadPages, a custom coded template for your theme, or some themes have very nice layout options in the administration interface.

(I will be going over this more specifically next week. Stay tuned!)

Good Copy

One of the most underappreciated areas of a website is the copywriting. Often, copy for a website is an afterthought.

When it comes to a landing page, you should consider the copywriting carefully.

Fortunately, a lot of help and resources are available for landing page copy.

A Contact Form

A contact form will be needed to submit information from the user. WordPress has several contact form plugins that can be used.

Other third party tools may also be used to create a contact form. Wufoo is another favorite contact form tool.

Some icons, graphics, or images

You will need access to icons, graphics and other images for your landing page. Graphics and images help tell the story and persuade users to take the intended action.

Icon libraries such as Font Awesome can significantly help your development be quick and efficient. There are several places to get good images including Unsplash as well as iStockPhoto.

Additionally, if you aren’t handy with Photoshop, you can take advantage of Canva to help quickly build graphic and image layouts.

CRM or database for customers

Finally, you will need an end point. Your endpoint may be a Client Relationship Manager or an Email Software program.

You will need build integration from your contact form to one of these places to keep track of your leads.

If you are a company that is generating leads for service calls or sales meetings, you probably already use a CRM to keep track of these leads.

Some of the more popular CRM’s usually have plugins to make this kind of connection.

Wrapping it up

Don’t let lead generation become an after-thought for you or your client’s website. It takes a little bit of planning, but you can implement a good lead generation machine.

Did you know there are more than one premium WordPress products that help with lead generation?

What you use is really up to you.

You can use a tool built to do this very thing or create your own solution.

What do you do generate leads?