We all know that the end goal of each business is to grow leads and increase sales. But in the modern digital world, many online marketers struggle with lead generation in WordPress.
WordPress is the most popular platform for building websites and for a good reason. It is a free, open-source platform with over 50,000 plugins that you can use to optimize your website. Starting a blog is relatively easy and the best WordPress hosting companies will in most cases pre-install WordPress during the creation of your account.
Lead generation is becoming more and more popular thanks to the Internet and online marketing development. That is precisely why you can’t afford not to optimize your WordPress website for lead generation.
It is essential that you convert your audience from mere readers to real leads. But converting visitors into leads is not a piece of cake. You need to take care of a number of different aspects ‒ from content marketing and search engine optimization to email marketing.
Lead generation is a process both for you and your leads. There are a number of mistakes that you can make and thus slow down your business and seriously hinder your progress. However, as you learn about it, you will be able to grow more and more leads, eventually converting them into sales.
Here are the nine methods you can use to avoid some common mistakes on your journey and master lead generation in WordPress.
Come up with a content marketing plan
The best things always happen unexpectedly. Okay, maybe this is true, but it doesn’t mean that you should have no clue about your steps and goals.
On your journey to generating more leads, the first step is content marketing. Creating a great content marketing plan will not take a lot of money, but it may drain your time and energy if you are unable to hire writers at the moment.
High-quality content is important not only for search engines but for readers as well. Therefore, you should always bear in mind that you are writing for humans. In other words, you should:
- create content that your visitors will actually read
- offer more value than your competitors in similar posts
- ensure that your content has a consistent quality
Your posts should help your readers by answering their questions and solving their problems, so make sure that you research your audience to get to know them better and find out what bothers them most.
A few places where your audience may talk about their problems are:
- Facebook groups
- LinkedIn groups
- niche-specific forums
Also, your content needs to take various forms. Of course, you will probably focus on blog posts, but make sure that you also create infographics and videos. Once you identify the key topics, it is important to think which form is the best for expressing your ideas about each of them.
To sum up, these are the necessary steps in creating your content marketing strategy:
- define your goal
- define your target audience
- focus on blog posts, but experiment with other forms
- choose your content management system
- always work on developing your content strategy
- Promote your content
High-quality content is essential to your lead generation campaign. When you offer engaging and helpful content on your website, you will attract more visitors.
But what good is creating great content if you don’t promote it? It is just like having the best product in the world that people have never heard of.
If you want to increase the number of your leads and conversions, you need to promote your content across various web channels. Promoting your content on social media platforms and trusted websites will help you build a community around your brand.
This is probably the best way to let your brand voice be heard by a large number of people. And the best thing is that you can do it at affordable prices.
However, you always need to make sure that your posts are customized to the platform, user-centric, engaging, fresh and relevant to your brand.
Use the best SEO practices
Even though WordPress is very SEO-friendly, you still need to constantly optimize your website to get the best results. Using the best SEO practices is one of the keys to generating more leads for your brand. When you use WordPress plugins built by trusted developers, you will have a solid basis for good rankings on search engines.
To make it simpler, we can divide SEO activities into two major categories:
- on-page optimization
- off-page optimization
On-page optimization
This is a more technical aspect of SEO. In a nutshell, on-page optimization is everything you do on your website, such as:
- meta tags, titles, and descriptions
- URL structures
- keyword placement
- website speed
- XML sitemap
- website responsiveness
These are some of the most important on-page SEO aspects to keep in mind. They will help search engines to crawl and analyze your website more easily and consequently rank it higher.
In addition, one of the great SEO strategies is to create cornerstone pages. These are extensive pages on your website with content that covers one of the main topics of your niche. For instance, if you teach different computer courses, one of your cornerstone pages could cover Microsoft Office Suite, the other would talk about Adobe Suite, and so on.
These pages provide highly relevant and valuable content to your readers, so Google will see them as authoritative and rank them higher. Great cornerstone pages cover the topic in detail, and they are sometimes 10,000 words long or even longer. Of course, your cornerstone content has to be well written and you need to include images.
Try to link to your cornerstone pages wherever you can: in your navigation menu, homepage and blog posts. Internal linking is very important for your SEO efforts.
Speak of the links…
Off-page optimization
Off-page optimization is all about link building, social media marketing and social bookmarking. In other words, it includes the SEO activities done beyond your website.
In other words, you should post high-quality articles, guest posts and press releases on other websites and web channels. This will drive more traffic to your website by showing your content as more relevant and important to the wider community.
Be innovative – use video marketing
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, then, how many words is a video worth?
Video marketing is a fantastic way to increase your brand awareness and attract visitors to your website. This form of marketing is among the best ones when it comes to generating a high number of leads.
One of the interesting ways to promote your brand is to create viral videos that explain or are related to your products and services. Then, you can promote them on various websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. This will build a strong web presence for your brand and send more visitors to your website.
To get the most out of your video marketing and reach more traffic, you can even start Facebook pay-per-click campaigns. Moreover, you can try adding a product video on your landing page, thus encouraging people to find out more about your website and brand.
If you do engage in video marketing, make sure to use good video editing software and create high-quality videos because quality is the key to attracting more audience.
Rock your email marketing
Email is probably the most personal communication channel for marketers. Apart from that, it is the most convenient way to grow leads for your website. When it comes to conveying a strong message to your audience, few things come close to an effective email campaign.
For an effective email marketing campaign, the first thing you need to do is to create inviting sign-up popups on your website. This will encourage your visitors to give you their email addresses where you can send them promotional emails and newsletters.
If you want to get the most out of your email marketing, follow these tips:
- Craft attractive and professional newsletters which will invite people to visit your website.
- Make sure to write an attractive subject line.
- Include high-quality content which is valuable to your audience and relevant to your products and services.
- Add high-quality images to make your emails engaging and attractive.
- Embed social media icons (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and so on).
- Use a call to action such as read, register, download in order to increase your sales funnel conversion rate.
- Segment your audience based on website behavior, demographics, buyer’s stage, etc.
Email marketing requires precision and personalization, but it is impossible to do all this manually. For some of these steps, you will need to use an email automation tool such as MailChimp or AWeber, but you can always browse the web to check more options.
Create converting forms
The user engagement on your website is not only important for SEO but for lead generation as well. To improve user engagement, you should add the contact form and subscribers form to your web pages.
A converting form will:
- be mobile responsive
- have a great call to action
- stand out
- offer a content upgrade (We will mention lead magnets later in the article.)
- have a beautiful design
Luckily, WordPress is widely known for its user-friendliness, so there are a number of ways to create forms that boost conversions.
WordPress offers a high number of plugins that you can use to make attractive forms on your website in a very simple way. Forms will turn your visitors into subscribers and instantly increase your leads.
Besides contact forms, subscription forms, sign-up forms, and opt-in forms, you can also create exit intent popup forms. These forms appear when a visitor is about to leave your website and give them another chance to subscribe to your email list.
Make beautiful landing pages
A landing page is one of the most important pages your visitors will see on your website. Therefore, your landing pages need to beautifully designed, user-friendly and converting.
Before you create a landing page, you need to ask yourself these four questions:
- What is the goal of this landing page?
- Who are my competitors?
- Who is my audience?
- How did they get to my landing page?
Once you know the answers to all these questions, you will have a good idea of what your landing page should look like.
It is essential that you cover all aspects of a high-converting landing page. A good landing page will have:
- a captivating headline
- a short and memorable URL
- visible and inviting CTAs
- bullet points
- images
- social media share icons
- high-quality images
When you manage to create a landing page that successfully includes all these elements, you will see your leads and sales grow considerably. Creating a high-converting landing page might take time, but it is definitely worth it.
Use lead magnets
As promised, now we come to lead magnets. In a nutshell, they are special offers like a discount coupon, e-book download or any other free offer that encourages your visitors to subscribe to your email list.
Who doesn’t like free stuff? That is exactly the logic behind the concept of lead magnets and the reason why it is one of the most effective lead generation strategies. This method allows you to draw your visitors’ attention by giving them special deals and offers.
Using lead magnets is very simple. Once you create a great post aimed at people who are at the beginning or middle of the buyer’s journey, you also create a companion resource that they can download. This resource could be a worksheet or a PDF checklist ‒ anything that could be truly useful to your readers.
Thrive Themes offers some of the best conversion focused WordPress themes and plugins including Thrive Leads which allows you to easily create beautiful effective high converting lead magnets.
Here are some of the best lead magnet ideas you can use on your website:
E-book
A free e-book allows you to expand on a topic that you have already covered in a blog post. In it, you can combine a few existing posts or create new content. Either way, make sure it is considerably longer than the blog posts you typically publish.
Email course
Teach new visitors how they can achieve something in a series of emails.
Mini-course
Similar to email courses, you can use mini-courses to teach your visitors how to do something specific. You can host free courses on Teachable, LearnPress or on your website.
Resource
Turn your posts into PDF files and offer them as a lead magnet. This works best with the posts that cover a list of things such as:
- shopping lists
- recipe cards
- step-by-step guides
- cheatsheets
For example, if you are writing a post about on-page SEO, you could make a checklist version of it. Then, while your readers are mindfully reading your content, you offer the content upgrade to them in exchange for their email address.
Sounds pretty simple, right? That’s because it is. And it works marvelously.
Redirect your visitors
If your readers comment on your posts, it means that they are highly engaged and they care about your content and website. The comment section is vital for building high user engagement and it can do wonders for your website.
When visitors submit a comment on your website, they are directed to the same page again by default.
But you can change this today. Direct your readers to a thank you page or another lead generation page when they post a comment.
When you show your readers that you are grateful for something they did, you immediately create a more personal relationship with them. This is a rather simple and effective way to generate leads on your WordPress website, which is exactly the reason why you should try it today.
Conclusion
Now you know all the necessary steps to generating more leads for your WordPress website.
High-quality content lies at the core of every high-authority website, so the first thing you should do is create a great content marketing plan. Your content needs to offer high value and outshine your competitors’ content.
A high performing website on one of the best WordPress hosting providers will go a long way to ensure your website ranks well and loads fast for your visitors. A fast loading website is a fundamental part of technical SEO and should not be overlooked.
Then, you have to make sure that you promote your content across various web channels such as social media and other websites. Also, optimize your website for search engines and build links to attract more visitors to your website.
Next, video marketing will make you stand out, especially if you include high-value content in your videos. And if you want to build personal communication with your visitors, email marketing is the way to go.
Landing pages and forms are very useful when it comes to converting the readers who are already on your website into sales. When you put some effort into creating them, you will certainly see an increase in leads and sales.
Finally, using lead magnets and redirecting your visitors to a thank you page have proved to be extremely effective in growing leads for countless websites built in WordPress.
It is important to follow the steps that we listed and avoid the most common lead generation mistakes. When you manage to do that, you will be amazed at the number of your leads and you will no longer need articles like this one.