When you spend money to increase your online presence as a way to generate sales, you need to create ways for those website visitors who are not yet ready to make a purchase to give you some information that identifies who they are.
The best way to do this is to create a lead generation funnel for your business that presents your website visitors with compelling offers that are relevant to their current purchasing phase.
Defining a Compelling Offer
A compelling offer is anything of value that you can provide to your website visitors in exchange for their contact information. The types of offers that you make available depend on the length of your sales cycle and where a website visitor is in their purchasing process.
A fairly standard purchase process consists of 5 phases:
- Recognizing a problem
- Researching the problem
- Identifying solution providers
- Comparing solution providers
- Choosing the solution provider that bests fit your needs
Along each step of the way, you can make offers to your website visitors that will help to educate them, differentiate your business, and establish trust and credibility for your prospects.
Different Types of Compelling Offers
Regardless of where your website visitors are in their purchase process, you can present them with compelling offers to provide them with information that will help them understand their problem better and provide guidance on how to solve it.
You can design your offers by asking yourself three specific questions:
- Who do you sell to?
- What problem do you specifically solve?
- How do you solve that problem better than anyone else?
The answer to these three questions is your compelling offer. Turn these answers into a summary statement that goes:
“How [insert target clients] can [insert verb] [insert problem] by [insert solution]“
For an IT services firm that provides desktop support for small accounting firms, an example statement would be:
“How small accounting firms can mitigate data loss by creating and implementing a comprehensive data backup plan.”
The way you deliver the offer is up to you and is worth testing several methods. The most common methods are:
- Ebooks
- Videos
- Webinars
Your primary objective is to provide something of value to a website visitor so they have an incentive to provide you with their contact information. You can then keep them updated as you produce additional content that can help solve their specific business problem. Implement these offers on relevant pages on your website and blog, and you will be on your way to creating a solid lead generation machine.
