A great website does a lot of things for your business: it establishes your brand credibility, it attracts prospects who are interested in your offerings and it lubricates the sales flywheel.
Effective lead generation-focused web design isn’t just important for the overall customer experience, though. It can transform a floundering site into a powerful lead generation machine, cultivating interest and propelling potential customers towards your solution. In our work redesigning countless websites, we’ve seen this same success story play out time and time again.
From search engine optimization to marketing automation, the list of improvements to a website that will help maximize lead generation can seem endless. We’ll dig into the most important elements that strike a balance between appealing to users and search engines for the best possible lead generation outcomes.
Every top performing website looks different. That’s part of the magic of being tailored to a specific audience and representing your unique brand, value proposition and solution. But when you dig a little deeper, many of the best websites have several elements in common that make them such powerful lead generators.
Some of these elements, as we’ll get into, are website design trends that matter regardless of industry. At their essence, these key elements are timeless best practices that underpin inbound marketing and lead generation.
Then layered on top of that is great content to tell your brand story and drive home the value of what you're offering, while optimizing both your website and content to be found by search engines.
The best way to bring all these elements together to improve lead generation is something Jim Van Hise, Brand and Digital Experience Director at Kuno Creative, spends a lot of time thinking about.
“I come at it from a user experience standpoint – I really care about the human emotions and motivations behind how a user interacts with the website,” Van Hise said.
“[Others] really care about making sure the site is optimized for search engines. It can seem like a contradiction – computers versus people – but web design that brings the two together is incredibly powerful."
And that’s exactly what a website that’s designed for demand generation does: it creates an exceptional human experience that is optimized for search engines, so those humans can find it.
The way you structure your website’s menus and overall navigation play a big role in how easily visitors can move through their journey with your site. It should be easy and intuitive for them to find what they are looking for.
A website that’s confusing or challenging to use can kill leads faster than anything. All that work attracting a prospect to your website to learn more – whether through SEO, ads or other avenues for demand generation — should be matched with equal effort streamlining your website experience.
Designing for mobile is crucial for a number of reasons. It’s a significant part of creating a great user experience as the number of people browsing – and making purchasing decisions – on smart phones is on the rise year after year.
Part of effective lead generation is meeting your audience where they are at and, in this case, that means on mobile devices.
Additionally, mobile-first website design matters from an SEO perspective toward lead generation. As of 2019, Google uses mobile-first indexing for all new websites meaning that the search engine looks at the mobile version instead of the desktop version.
An effective call-to-action (CTA) is well-placed and thoughtfully crafted, enticing your visitor to click through and share invaluable information about themselves. This is at the heart of website lead generation – the visitor provides their contact information and, in some cases, information that can indicate their buying intentions, in exchange for a content offer.
Think about how you are designing and placing your CTAs. At the bottom of the page is the most common place, for example, but it won’t help if your visitors aren’t scrolling through that far. Take a good look at your web traffic data to decide the optimal places to put a CTA and don’t be afraid to experiment with placement, look and copy.
On that note, “Learn More” isn’t the only way to solicit a click. Be specific – what exactly are you offering and what value does it provide? What does the visitor need to do and what will they get in return?
Designing your website to be accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities like visual or hearing impairments, means that you’re creating a customer experience that includes people of all abilities.
That includes everything from creating enough contrast between darks and lights for someone who might be visually impaired to providing transcripts for videos to using alt text on images for a screen reader.
Not only is this important from a DEI perspective, but it also plays a role in lead generation by allowing you to cast a wider net and create a customer experience that nurtures relationships with people of all abilities.
Content marketing and website design may seem like different ends of the spectrum, but they both work best when combined with the other. The best content can’t stand alone without a website. A slick website won’t convey your message without effective content.
One is not more important than the other when it comes to conversions, they have to work together alongside an SEO strategy to drive organic traffic to the website and its content.
"Website design is like a storefront; SEO ensures it's on the main street, increasing visibility and driving lead generation," said Dee Salvador, SEO Manager at Kuno Creative.
"Designing a website without considering SEO is like building a luxurious hotel in the middle of nowhere; it may look stunning, but without proper exposure, leads will never find it.”
There are countless ways to leverage search engine optimized content marketing with a great web design to generate leads and increase conversions.
Van Hise shared one example of what this can look like in practice.
“A tactic that I would do for lead conversion is making sure that you have SEO content driving organic leads – like pillar pages, cluster pages or case studies,” he said.
“Attract people with intent, but then make sure that you have a journey for those users after the intent. You're creating that demand coming to your website, so then it's also important to make sure that there are next steps within the funnel.”
Once someone lands on a piece of well written, optimized content, direct them towards a compelling CTA. Entice them to share their contact information in exchange for a valuable content offer like a downloadable e-book or guide. The relationship with that marketing qualified lead can then be further nurtured, coaxing them along toward a business relationship and a deal.
A well executed web design that successfully creates demand and generates interest lends itself to effective marketing automation and relationship nurturing which, in turn, keeps the flywheel spinning freely.
Take a look, for instance, at how you can leverage HubSpot’s marketing automation tools to further fuel your demand generation. As a HubSpot Diamond Partner with years of experience helping businesses leverage the power of HubSpot – and three HubSpot accreditations – we’ve known the difference smart marketing strategy, powerful automation and thoughtful web design have when combined. What does that look like in practice?
For example, set up workflows to automate tasks such as lead nurturing, email marketing and social media posting. Pull from detailed analytics and reporting on your website's performance, including traffic, conversions and lead generation to know where to optimize. Identify and prioritize your most valuable leads with lead scoring and nurturing tools.
Then, there’s the personalization and segmentation aspect. Segment your leads based on their interests, behavior and preferences. From there, personalize your website content and messaging based on visitor behavior and demographic information for a more tailored experience.
These are just some examples of how you can bring together your website design and automation tools for better lead generation.
Many different elements come together to design a website that maximizes lead generation and conversions. Our team at Kuno Creative includes expertise in each of these areas, from design to development to content to HubSpot implementation.
As a full-service digital marketing team with more than two decades of experience, we design websites that create demand and make a difference. Schedule a consultation with us today to learn more about what we can do for your website.
