Here's an article I recently wrote as a guest post on the Hubspot Internet Marketing Blog.
Many businesses I come across truly intend to do the right thing as far as optimizing their websites for lead generation. However, even though they do their best to drive more traffic and execute Internet marketing campaigns that will capture and convert more leads, many of them end up in one of two buckets:
Bucket 1: "We have no idea where to start given the crushing amount of available tools, opinions and advice."
Bucket 2: "We have all the bells and whistles (we think, anyway) but we can't seem to tie them all together so they work for us."
Both scenarios are very different, but there's one common, critical component that is almost always missing from both buckets: the up-front planning and thinking needed to create an ideal marketing engine.
When funding or budget approvals are coupled with time and resource pressures, the businesses in Bucket 1 jump right in and start frenetically implementing whatever tools they can get their hands on. These tools are often a blend of CRM apps, email campaign tools, website CMS packages, analytics packages, lead intelligence apps, etc.
Meanwhile, businesses in Bucket 2 are busy buying up all the latest fancy tools as they come along because they can afford to at the time. The tools become immediately disparate because folks using them can't get what they need out of them and frustration ensues between marketing, sales and management.
If you happen to fall into one of these buckets, here's a 4-step planning approach that will put you back on the path to closed-loop marketing bliss and yield the long-term payback your business needs.
Step 1: "WHO'S IN?" - Pick a Team and Assign Roles
- Get a representative from each functional area to participate (sales, marketing, web support, IT, executive sponsor). Involving whoever you can in the decision-making process tends to make them care a lot more about the outcome.
- Define what success means: establish clear goals, metrics and responsibilities around web stats, campaigns, lead generation & nurturing, sales cycles and pipelines, what to track and report on, etc.
Step 2: "AS IS" - Assess What's Happening Right Now
Internal issues typically include:
- Lack of Automation. This mostly stems from disparate systems (such as your website, campaigns, conversion forms, CRM system, lead nurturing practices and analytics) not working in harmony.
- Mis-Aligned business processes. Is sales and marketing working in unison?
- Un-Standardized processes: Are you agreed on lead workflows, opportunity pipelines, lead follow up procedures?
- Dis-Integrated systems: do you have island solutions that don't talk to each other?
- Data, not Information: can you gather data intelligence (not just data) so you know what programs to do more or less of?
- Un-Informed business decisions: are you able to measure, track and report on the data that's important to all parties in your organization?
Step 3: "TO BE" - Determine What's Possible
- Build out your requirements for each stakeholder or business area in the organization (sales, marketing, management, etc.).
- Map out all of your current processes so you can start to uncover where some of the breakdowns occur.
- Investigate and decide on which tools you want to implement based on need-to-haves vs. have-to-haves, making sure that whatever you do pick is scalable to the needs of your organization.
Step 4: "GO"- Put the Plan in Motion
- Map out an implementation and roll-out timeline keeping things to short and focused projects with clear milestones so things don't drag on and get off course.
- Training: whatever you do, make sure that whoever is responsible for using a particular tool (CRM, Internet marketing, etc.) gets the appropriate training to maximize its usefulness. Otherwise, things can quickly get stale and people unmotivated.
- Test, test, test. It's a lot easier to fix things at the front end versus when things get seemingly too broken to bother fixing.
- Finally, stick to your plan! With the right amount of planning, the right tools in place, and the right data intelligence to pull from, you will be positioned to quickly make informed decisions and confidently know when your marketing efforts need to be fine-tuned, repeated or ended. Truly some closed-loop marketing euphoria.
If you have been paying attention to SEO principles, and your 
site's keywords, and your Google ranking - give yourself a pat on the back! A lot of the battle of marketing on the web is simply getting found. If you are at this point, you may well be asking, "okay, so what's next?" In order to realize a return on investment for your efforts, you need to actually convert those web clicks to sales leads. It's not magic, it's a combination of building the right landing page, and then measuring, testing again, and measuring.
The Obvious Offer is Key
Don't kid yourself, there is precious little time to catch the attention of a prospect. In a matter of a very few seconds, your visitor must determine whether they are going to take action or whether they will contribute to your bounce rate. Is your offer clearly visible? The entire approach of building your page must take this into account. As a result, the featured offer should be the most obvious item on the page, above the fold. Don't overuse graphics, or you can run into the over-stimulated "Las Vegas effect." Simply remember that you have a fleeting chance to get the focus of a short attention span, so use these images judiciously.
Highlight Value Points
We've already answered the question: "What do I get?" Next we need to make the short and sweet "value points." It is much shorter than even the proverbial elevator pitch, much shorter. Bullet points that clearly relate some clear message that your targeted audience will understand and value. Keeping things concise and understandable is, in fact, quite challenging. But if we were asking someone to download some new "Widget for Cleaning Windows," we might point out:
See clearly through your windows like never before
Allows window cleaning without usual streaks
Easy application
Keeps windows clearer longer, less work
This is really about enough! This is truly one of those times when less is more.
Effective Elements of Call to Action
Don't Distract: If you are linking from a landing page to a form, be sure and link both text and images, and of course they all need to point to the same offer. And while you may have a standard menu or navigation for your site, bear in mind that your offer page serves a very specialized purpose. Consider removing that standard navigation, sidebars and such, as you want to avoid extraneous links as much a possible. We want to feed the funnel, and if we present the visitor with a network of pathways, we are defeating our own business purposes.
Minimal Field Requirements: We've all seen it happen: An offer form designed by consensus with dozens of fields and drop-down lists from which to choose. This is definitely what we don't want. Figure out what you minimally need. The user experience is just as important as the business need and if that user feels hassled by multiple questions, your own results will suffer. The rule is simple: ask for the minimum information you need to fulfill the business objective. Pay special attention to see whether your required fields make sense. Hopefully you can get away with something like: name, email, and perhaps phone number --whatever you need to be able to contact them. Consider linking to a clear privacy policy, particularly if you must ask for phone number details.
Measure and Test
Well, hopefully you've been using some kind of web analytics tool to measure traffic. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool, so there's really no excuse. Plus, having web analytics in place is critical in getting to the next step: measuring and testing what works with Google Optimizer. Think of Google Optimizer as kind of a subset of Google Analytics, more specialized, but dependent upon it. The combination of these two products gives you the ability to see abandonment rates, what versions of a landing page work best, and even what other pages on your site are of interested to those key constituents who convert. Consider the A/B test: Say you have your standard version of your "Widget for Cleaning Windows" description (A), and another that includes a couple of customer testimonial quotes (B). Do the quotes truly add value to your offer? Run the A/B test, and Google optimizer will randomly present one or the other version of the form to your prospects. In addition, Google Optimizer will present you with a running tally of which version is the most successful at converting visitors.
Building landing pages is a combination of trying different approaches, testing the results and simply doing more of what is the most effective in feeding the funnel. The approaches that work require some common sense approaches and some real discipline around focused messaging and value propositions. With the kind of tools now available for measuring and reporting, you can substantially improve your marketing efforts.
photo credit John Smith's, UK