You’ve published your website and created business pages across all the social media platforms. You’re waiting for the leads to roll in, but they’re stalled. Now what? Current trends are pointing to inbound marketing, which moves away from traditional disruptive sales tactics (cold calls) and instead seeks to empower potential customers by providing content that encourages them to seek out more information about your business. They key word here is “content,” and in order to generate qualified leads, you’ll need a searchable website with content targeted to your ideal customers and a plan to distribute that content. Easy, right? Let’s break it down and get started on your journey to generating more qualified leads for your website.

1. Utilize Strong SEO on Your Website

The first step to generating more qualified leads is to make sure potential customers can actually find your website. Just because you’ve clicked publish and sent your website off into the World Wide Web doesn’t mean that people are finding their way to it. To remedy this, you’ll want to optimize your site using SEO best practices. So what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the practice of increasing traffic to your website through organic search engine results. It can get a little technical, but the basics include:

Keywords: Your website should be filled with relevant keywords that speak to what your business or industry offers. Include them in titles, descriptions, headings, content, alt-text in images, URLs and your site’s meta data.

Ease of navigation: Make sure your website isn’t clunky. Attention spans are short and no one wants to wade through tons of pages, wait on slow load times, scroll through mountains of text or deal with annoying pop-ups.

Content: We’ll expound on this later, but generating relevant content about what your potential customers are searching for will increase your chance of landing in their search results. But relevancy isn’t the only thing that’s important, you also need to consistently publish content to make an impact.

Links to internal and external sources: Link to outside sources throughout your posts, as well as to internal pages on your site. And once you create content, promote it as much as you can so other industry authorities can find it and link back to you.

2. Create Valuable Content Through Blogging

Blogging is one of the best tools businesses have at their disposal to attract new customers. Not only does creating valuable content on topics related to your industry help you stand out as an authoritative voice, it also increases your visibility. Each blog post creates a new indexed page that search engines are able to crawl, which increases the likelihood people will find your website. Once they’re there, the goal is to offer them a wealth of information that will encourage them to seek out more information about what your business offers. So how do you capture those leads?

Does your business offer premium content such as an e-book, free assessment, guides or other “gated content”? If so, place a call to action on your blog posts that links to a form customers can fill out to obtain that gated content. For example, if you own a travel agency and just published a blog about traveling with children and you have an offer that is related to this topic, add a button to your blog post that links to the offer using language such as “Download a Free E-Book for the Best Family Travel Destinations.” The content should entice readers to want to fill out the form to receive more content, and by getting them to fill out that form, you’ve just generated a lead.

3. Promote Yourself Through Social Media

Once you’ve optimized your website through SEO and created valuable content, the next step is to promote your business and content through social media. It’s an important step in the overall goal of visibility. After you’ve published a blog post, share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google Plus. This will get that content out to your network with the goal that others will “like” or share it, which will make it visible to their network, increasing your reach and ultimately attracting new leads. But it’s important to understand each of the networks in order to use them effectively. While LinkedIn is used more to reach out to professionals in your field, Facebook and Instagram are more casual and very visual-focused. So you’d want to be sure to create visually appealing posts using graphics and images.

And don’t forget to share often. Posting every once in awhile won’t be enough to increase your reach and generate new leads. Create a social media content plan that outlines the type and frequency of posts specific to each platform. If you don’t feel you have the time or tools to create and implement this type of plan, maybe it’s time to consider hiring a Social Media Manager. After all, Social Media Examiner’s 2017 report, 88% of marketers indicated their social media efforts increased exposure for their businesses.

These days, creating a website for your business isn’t enough to generate qualified leads. You need an SEO-friendly website that utilizes both blog content and social media promotion. Once people are able to find your website and read through the great content you’ve created, they’re more likely to opt-in to one of your offers, which will generate a new lead for your business.

To find out if you need to update your site’s social media strategy, schedule a free 30 minute, no-strings-attached marketing consultation with our team.