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It's no secret that consumers nowadays want to do their own research before making a purchase decision. In the awareness and consideration stage, you want to lead prospects to find your unique value proposition in an engaging way allowing you to better nurture your leads and convert more sales.
How frustrating is getting an enquiry or business lead through social media, and having limited ways to give the person more information other than replying to their DM. You send a reply, but the lead goes cold.
Consumers nowadays like to do their own research, and having a social media-only presence certainly limits the amount they can find out about a business.
Picture the above situation again, but in your reply you had this amazing tool you could direct the person too where they could learn more about your services, read helpful information, and consume the engaging content you put in front of them.
That amazing tool, is a website.
"Websites offer a tremendous amount of value to any business or personal brand." - Gary Vaynerchuk
What better way to nail your first impression with a visitor than an interactive, informative, engaging website. If what you put on your website is efficient in giving your visitors the information they're looking for, your leads will not only grow in number, but in quality.
Lets take a look at those two growth aspects:
Lead Volume
I touch on call to actions in my blog here, and this is why a website is so valuable; through the many pages, content blocks or pieces of copy your site has, you can leave CTAs in a huge number of places. This gives people who visit your site many (many) opportunities to be triggered by a phrase such as "join now", "get started" or "discover more", which leads to more clicks to contact forms or conversion pages. Directing traffic to a website where every page has a call to action means more visitors will become leads and be converted to customers.
Lead Qualification
Although visitors to your website care about your product or service enough to view your website, filling in a web form means something; it means the visitor trusts you and is genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Rather than hitting up your DMs after viewing your social media page, a prospect who has filled out a form has likely absorbed much more content and has built trust in you, meaning they are more likely to be a hotter lead for you to convert.
In the end, it's about the journey you want prospects to take before they make an enquiry, or better yet a purchase.
This journey is literally a funnel. You may have heard of it? You use your social media and outbound marketing strategies to generate awareness and a need for your offering. You direct people to your website so they can do their own research and leave their details for you to contact them a.k.a become a qualified lead, and then the salesperson inside takes care of the rest.
In most funnels you buy from Bunnings, there is a small filter in the about half-way through. This is to ensure only the best stuff gets through. This is the same for the lead funnel. This is where the most prospects find what they are looking for and carry on down the funnel, through the filter to the next stage; becoming a qualified lead and then, a customer.