How Can Computer Consulting Business Websites Generate Leads?

Can I be brutally honest with you? Most computer consulting business websites totally freaking suck at generating high-quality leads.

I’m not exaggerating. When I speak with new prospective clients and run their website URLs through a few basic evaluation tools, usually the biggest gaping obvious hole: there is pretty much no traffic coming to their websites.

And if you can’t generate website traffic, how in the world can you possibly generate leads from that website traffic?

Address Website Traffic Generation

So the reality is that you can’t even think about solving your website lead generation problems until you’ve addressed your website traffic problems. But let’s assume for a minute that you found a dependable, sustainable solution for generating highly targeted website traffic.

How do you get people to trade their contact information for your lead generation offer, so they become a lead for you?

Think about this for a moment: What is it going to take for someone to basically hand over the contents of their business card to your marketing database? If this question is on your mind, as it should be, you’re in the right place. And if you haven’t given much thought to this question, it’s high time you did!

Convert Website Visitors into Leads

To convert website visitors into leads, think about “what’s in it for them?” Because, you’ve got to realize, it’s not about you. It’s all about them!

Unless someone is very far along in the buyer’s journey, no one wants to talk to a sales person. (Except maybe his/her mom!)

So, what do you do before then? How can you appeal to the 50% of leads that are qualified, but not yet ready to buy?

Bait Visitors with Irresistible Offers

The answer: Bait visitors with an offer that’s so amazingly irresistible, they can’t help but take you up on it. Let me repeat that. To generate more leads on your website, you need to bait visitors with an offer that’s so amazingly irresistible, they can’t help but take you up on it.

How do you know what’s irresistible? Persona research!

But what is persona research? We talked about the importance of developing ideal buyer personas in our previous webinar on 11 Ways Computer Consulting Businesses Attract the Right Website Visitors.

Create Ideal Buyer Personas

Developing personas is really all about gathering information on clients and potential clients…and summing it up together to draw some meaningful conclusions on the kinds of people that you’re developing your content, products, and services for...and their needs.

Personas are usually developed through surveys and one-on-one interviews.

After setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound), personas are the very first part of any inbound marketing campaign that we undertake here at SP Home Run.

If you skip them or mess up persona research, it can really hurt the effectiveness of everything you do with marketing and sales going forward. We’ve seen a lot of low-cost marketing solutions out there that skip this step. And wow does that doom your campaigns for failure!

What those companies are basically saying: either

1. They don’t know how to do persona research

2. They’re willing to cut corners and hope no one notices, or

3. They think every client’s ideal buyers are identical.

Either way, it’s your results that will suffer if you don’t develop ideal buyer personas. Don’t skip this step.

Ask the Right Questions

You want to ask:

• What is their day like?

• What problems do they have?

• What are their goals?

Find out:

• How do they research IT products and services?

• Where do they hang out online? Offline?

• What do they search for?

And then develop buyer personas that identify behaviors, pain points, and goals.

Next, create lead generation offers that address exactly what’s craved most by those described in your personas. This is the secret sauce for how you know (not guess) exactly what kinds of premium content offers will cause a given ideal buyer to convert from website visitor into a qualified lead on your landing pages and forms.

What have you found to be the most effective and cost-effective way (long-term) for computer consulting businesses to generate highly-qualified leads from their websites? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments area below.

And to figure out what needs to happen before and after your website lead generation, be sure to download your free copy of the IT Channel Inbound Marketing Planning Guide.

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr FindYourSearch