What's in this article?
You might think of WordPress as simply a blogging platform. If that’s how you view it, then you’re missing a huge part of what WordPress is.
Did you know that WordPress holds about 60.6% of the Content Management System market? What about how a whopping 27% of the Internet is powered by WordPress sites?
Knowing those statistics, you might realize (as we have) that WordPress’ reach is strong and powerful in the world of digital marketing for a huge amount of businesses using WordPress.
But how exactly can you turn your WordPress site into a lead generation machine? How can you make your site stand out from the millions of others and use it correctly to generate leads instead of just taking up digital space?
Keep reading to find out.
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Why Should WordPress Designers or Developers Care?
Are you a designer, developer, or freelancer that designs WordPress sites wondering why you should even care about this? Maybe you’re not a marketer or even claiming to know about marketing. But the fact is you should factor in lead generation ideas and designs into your work.
Why? Let’s say a client hires you to design their site. They could spend thousands of dollars and not get any leads.
Now, you didn’t promise them that a new site would generate leads, but many clients have in their mind that a new site will automatically do this. They’ll likely be upset with you, the designer, or generally feel they lost money on this investment (even though they haven’t).
So imagine how great it would be If you can offer them a site that already sets them up to start generating leads just with your product. It would create an awesome customer-client relationship and, you can charge more.
A site with lead generation in mind is going to be worth more to a client, which means you can make more money without having to do too much work (or even be a marketer by trade).
A second bonus is that once you learn how to incorporate lead generation marketing features into your WordPress sites, you can potentially market yourself as offering those types of services.
If you learn how to turn WordPress sites into efficient lead generating sites that you’d already be designing/developing anyway, why not market yourself (and, thus earn more money) as someone that can design things with lead generation in mind?
The best part is that the changes you make to the site are small, easy to do, won’t take you much time at all, but it will improve lead generation and your overall client satisfaction (or if this is your own website, you own satisfaction) by far.
WordPress Site to Lead Generation Machine: A Simple Checklist
Now that we’ve (hopefully) convinced you of why it’s so beneficial for developers and businesses to have lead generation in mind with their wordpress site, let’s get into a step-by-step checklist that you can follow to boost lead generation quickly and easily.
1. Change Your Thinking
We understand: looks are important. 38% of people on a website will leave if they feel the design is unattractive.
However, don’t let design and aesthetics rule all. Push the “pretty is paramount” idea out of your mind.
This doesn’t mean create websites that are ugly or not user friendly on purpose, especially since that won’t make for a very attractive portfolio if you’re a designer (not to mention it might make your site look elementary or cheap).
However, there are changes you can make to a website that don’t make it pretty, and could even make it look less aesthetically pleasing, but still be hugely important for lead generation. You’ll see some examples as we detail other parts of this lead generation checklist.
The bottom line is don’t let looks or a certain design aesthetic limit the lead generation features you put on your site. Think about it like this: you could have the prettiest website in the world. But is it going to do you any good if people just stare at it and then leave without converting?
2. Build a Strong Foundation
Now that you’ve switch up your philosophy on the site design a bit, let’s start from the ground up.
Hosting
You could have the most beautiful, perfectly optimized, and well-oiled lead generation site/machine out there, but it won’t mean anything if your hosting is, well, bad.
That foundation of having solid and reliable site hosting is key for keeping your awesome machine working how you need it to work. Performance issues, bad servers, overloaded shared hosting, bad hosting platforms, etc, will all lead to bad ranking and overall poor lead generation.
How can you avoid this? Go premium. It’s going to be worth the investment (it’s already not that expensive) going premium on WP Engine, for example, to give you the solid and reliable performance you need from that host.
Themes/Designs
Make sure the theme you choose (whether that’s a purchased premium theme, one you’ve designed, or one you’re paying to have designed) is optimized for SEO, has user experience in mind, it works fast, is mobile optimized, etc.
A good theme plus good hosting is going to improve your ranking, your performance, your traffic, etc. Go for pre-made themes that follow general website trends. It’s OK, and preferable, to follow common designs on your website. They’re common for a reason: they work, and they work well.
When picking out a theme, check for reviews, if it’s purchased a lot, whether it’s update regularly, and whether it’s going to work for your specific business/client. Great reviews plus a lot of purchases usually equals a great theme. Simple.
If you don’t keep these fundamentals in mind, then your starting off in a hole for lead conversion instead of with an advantage.
3. Let People Convert Any and All Times They’re Ready
It’s easy to sit in your office and come up with a natural “pathway” that people will follow before they convert to a lead. For example, in a perfect world, they’ll come onto your site via a blog post, read to the bottom, see a CTA to contact you, and voila! Lead generated.
But oftentimes things don’t happen like this.
What if they were ready to convert mid-article but didn’t see anywhere to get them to that next step where they give information/contact you, so they stop reading and leave? What if you leave fill forms off of certain pages where customers end up? What if your contact info is only on one page in order to give a site a more minimal look (remember the last point we made)?
Our point here is to incorporate lead generation features throughout the site so potential leads can convert easier.
For example, have fill forms on the side of the page, at the bottom, and in a separate tab to cover all your bases. Have a “comment or question” bar hover along with a reader as they scroll down a longform blog post. Put contact information on a separate tab, at the bottom of the page, on the side, in a CTA in a blog post, etc, etc.
Remember, people’s attention spans are low. Don’t think to yourself, “I don’t need a fill form there, they’ll find it at the top of the page.” Well, chances are they won’t find it or will click away from the site rather than have to go search for that form that would convert them to a real lead.
4. Gravity Forms
Fill forms are one of the best lead generation features that you can have on your WordPress site, and the WordPress plugin “Gravity Forms” gives you everything you could possibly need to take tip #3 into account and create forms for any and all occasions where you could potentially convert.
Gravity forms lets you can create all kinds of forms very quickly. For example, if you want to do multi-step forms, which is awesome for certain industries, this plugin makes it easy and quick to create ones perfectly tailored for your site.
This plugin also integrates with other platforms and WordPress features very easily. You can integrate them with CRMs, you can drop it to Google sheets, you can line it up with MailChimp, appointment schedulers, PayPal, signature add-ons, FreshBooks, and more.
These forms can follow step #3 in that they can go virtually all over your website while also letting you push your leads wherever you want them to go.
The best part? This plugin is super easy to use. You don’t need to hire someone to integrate all of this into your WordPress site, and it doesn’t require a development team.
If you’re the developer, this is an easy addition that will boost lead generation for your clients without you putting in much extra work (but it will add to the price of your services). If you’re the business owner yourself, it’s just as easy to incorporate it yourself to generate and convert leads with any form you can think of for a very small investment.
5. Mobile Adaptive Features
People don’t use desktop websites and mobile websites the same way, so you want to adjust your lead generation tactics depending on the platform someone is using your WordPress site on.
Think about it this way: a large clickable phone number isn’t going to mean much to someone on their laptop, is it? The same way that a long fillable form isn’t great for someone on mobile.
Incorporate features that’s going to make it as easy as possible for the user to convert to a lead with mobile adaptive features. Instead of having a long fill-form, have it change to a clickable “ask a question” feature that takes them to a new, large parge to make it easy for them to fill out instead of the tiny pop-up that shows up on the desktop.
Another example is a clickable phone number. Instead of plain text you’d have on a desktop page, make it clickable so mobile users can call with a touch of a button instead of having to memorize the number and punch it in (and trust us, they won’t do that).
This is also important for the layout as well. Move the phone number or contact information to the top of a mobile page, and space it out more so you don’t accidentally click the wrong thing when you’re trying to hit a phone number or a “contact us” page (you know how frustrating it is when you click the wrong thing and you go to the wrong page…).
Make adjustments so it’s as easy as possible for your users to give you their information when they’re ready.
6. Use Categories
One of the best and most defining features of WordPress sites are the tabs and categories, so use them to your advantage. Use categories to segment your users and push them into the sales funnel that will best convert them. This could be by:
- Product
- Service
- Section of the website
- Business concepts
- etc
And don’t just create these categories as guesses. Talk with your sales team or your marketing team about what questions are asked most often, what areas are visited most, your most popular landing pages, customer demographics per each category, etc. Don’t neglect the sales team as part of this entire process, either, since they’re the ones that know which lead generation techniques are working best!
This will reorganize the site to the most logical path for your visitors that will push them more easily and quickly towards lead conversion.
On this topic, don’t overload with categories or information. This will take visitors and potential leads all over the place instead of to the pages that are going to push them towards lead conversion and the information that they’re actually looking for. Limited choices also makes that first click easy, which makes it much easier for visitor to become converted leads.
We’ve said it a few times, but the main goal with all of this is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to enter your site, give their info, and become a successfully converted lead.
7. The Homepage Header
On the topic of keeping it easy, put contact information, a fill form, etc, right at the top of the page, preferably in the homepage header. Any lower down on the page will have you losing leads right away. Putting it front and center prompts quicker and more efficient lead generation.
That would also be a great spot for some video marketing.
- Don’t Be Afraid of Templates
Templates, especially landing page templates, are going to keep your site consistent and usable no matter what page the visitor is on. This will keep all of your plugins, your designs, and your lead generating features implemented consistently and it will provide a uniformity to your site as well.
9. Don’t Forget Tip #1
It’s at this point where we lose a lot of people. These tips seems simple and obvious, but you’ll be amazed at how few people actually implement these ideas.
The main reasoning? “It’s ugly.” “It doesn’t look as good that way.” “The design isn’t as good with [X feature].”
Don’t forget tip #1: pretty isn’t paramount. Your site isn’t beautiful just because it looks nice: it needs to work beautifully too.
Maybe adding extra forms around other areas of your site isn’t the minimal look you were going for. Or maybe changing the order of where the contact info is doesn’t flow like you envisioned.
But if making those changes is going to generate leads, don’t let small aesthetic reasons stop you.
Ready to Build Your Machine?
Hopefully this simple and easy checklist on WordPress site lead generation tips can help businesses and developers alike in an age where digital lead generation is crucial for businesses to thrive.
If you have any questions or want more info about any of the steps we’ve gone over, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or contact us. You can also learn more about all things marketing by keeping up with our podcast.
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