Top WordPress Lead Generation Tips
Lead generation is a business-critical process that can command vast amounts of your time and money. But if you have a WordPress website, you’ll never be too far away from the right tool for the job at hand. All the help you can ever need is there, between perfect business themes, practical lead generation plugins that expand your website’s functionalities, or custom code you can add to your site.
But it’s one thing to have access to an immense collection of tools, and it’s another thing to know how to use them well. Even if you have some general knowledge that can help you get some leads, you can still quickly become stuck — even with the power of WordPress behind you. Being successful at lead generation is hard work. It’s also work that never ends.
Because learning is an integral part of the lead generation process, we’ve gathered some of the best tips you could implement into your lead generation strategies. We’ve divided them into sections based on the major elements of lead generation they address:
Content – From Blog Posts to Lead Magnets
Content has a prominent place in lead generation strategies for a good reason. Whether you use it to engage potential leads on social media, to increase visibility in search engine results, to generate leads, or qualify them, you’ll never stop being amazed by how much mileage you can get from a good piece of content. Here are some tips that can help you make sure that you’re using content in the best way possible.
Your leads and you will have drastically different views on the value of lead generation content you create. For you, the value is in how effective the content is in generating leads. For them, the value lies in how useful your content is for solving their problems, addressing pain-points, and giving them something that they need.
You shouldn’t be surprised that the two overlap – the content that performs best for lead generation is likely to be the content with a value proposition that resonates the most with your potential leads. So find out what are the specific needs of the people you’d like to become your customers.
Next, decide what’s the best format to deliver the content that addresses those needs. eBooks are a staple of lead generation content, but your audiences might engage more with videos, for example. They might be more likely to download shorter content, like a cheat sheet or a handy checklist. Give them what they want.
Sticking with the theme of giving the people what they want, one of the keys to successful lead generation is in matching the right kind of lead magnet with the right segment of your audience. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all, universal lead magnet.
Lead magnets need to be highly targeted. If you’ve developed different audience personas, you should have at least a rough idea of what content to use to target which. You should align the content as closely as possible with what you know the audience personas’ needs and desires.
You’ll notice that this theme of aligning your content and messaging to appeal to specific parts of your audience persists throughout the whole process. One of the implications you’ll soon become aware of is that you have to make several versions of everything — lead magnets included. You’ll also need to do lots of testing before your WordPress website becomes the lead generating monster you want it to be.
How can you make content even more appealing and exciting after you’ve gone through all that trouble of making it highly targeted? One simple way would be to have it include some of the hot topics that attract people’s attention.
You might practice newsjacking, for example, and use the trending news to propel the interest in your content. Finding a way to use a hot news topic as an example in your content is a good idea. Going all the way to create your content around a newsworthy topic might be even better.
The downside with this type of content is that you don’t have a lot of time to create it, and its peak effectiveness won’t last for too long. But if you do it right and avoid using the newsworthy item purely as a gimmick, this type of content can prove to be useful even further down the road.
If you have a knack for creating high-value, lead-magnet-grade content, using it with a content upgrade strategy can help you get the most out of it right then and there, on the same page where you’ve posted it.
The logic is simple – after creating a particularly juicy piece of content, you only make a part of it available to the reader. That morsel should be enough to prove the value proposition of your content. To get the whole thing, all they need to do is provide you with their email address.
It would help if you kept in mind that content upgrades require fantastic content with a clear and loud value proposition. You might not have a lot of opportunities to sell the material the way you would with a landing page, so it needs to be fetching.
The lead stage is only a part of a journey that begins with a stranger stumbling upon your WordPress website and ends with them becoming a repeat customer. Each stage is important, and most of them will also require you to engage your website visitors — or leads, prospects, customers — and help them move further along the way.
Good content can help you every step of the way. The blog posts, articles, and infographics you shared on social media helped attract visitors. eBooks and guides can help them convert to leads. Product demonstrations and case studies might affect the decision to become your customer.
You don’t have to create all that content in one sitting. But you should be aware of the role each piece of content plays in the overall strategy. Every article, eBook, report, or case study you create should have a place in the sequence of content that matches the steps in the customer journey.
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The Call to Action
The call-to-action is yet another valuable member in the star-studded lineup of elements you have at your disposal for lead generation. CTAs are a rare chance to tell the people visiting your WordPress website precisely what you want from them — but that’s not always the best choice you can make.
Calls-to-action have been around for a while now. We have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Experimentation is encouraged, but only if you know the basics of CTAs like the back of your hand. Some of the things you should always keep in mind include:
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CTAs work best when placed where people can easily see them.
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Use clear and straightforward language when writing them.
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Use contrasting colors to make CTAs stand out.
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You can add a sense of urgency to CTAs.
There is plenty more good advice out there that will help you increase the visibility of your CTAs and nudge visitors to click on them. It would help if you made it your mission to learn as many of those “rules” as possible — at the very least, they’ll help you consistently create decent CTAs.
While a call-to-action surely is a way to let the people know what’s expected from them, you can turn it around and offer them something else with a CTA. Instead of giving them an explicit action to perform, wrap your instructions with the benefits they’ll get.
So let’s say your call to action leads to a page where the visitor might download an eBook about gardening that helps them handle difficult-to-grow types of orchids. Instead of using a “Download the eBook now!” CTA or something as obvious, maybe use “Download now for free and start growing beautiful orchids.”
If you mix the CTA with your lead magnet’s unique selling point, you can create copy that works on a couple of levels. It tells them what they should do, why they should do it, and what they’ll get. Little room left for doubt there.
When you create CTAs in combination with lead magnet content, you should always ensure that the call-to-action matches the lead magnet. Having a disparity between the call and the resource will confuse the visitors — some might even think themselves defrauded — and make you look like an amateur.
Each lead magnet you create should have its own CTA. If you’re looking to try out a couple of different ways to “sell” your content, you might even need to produce a couple of versions of CTAs to see which ones work the best.
The good news is that CTAs are short and can’t be so widely different. You’ll spend more time developing all the lead magnets than CTAs, but don’t let that fool you. It takes skill to pack a lot of persuasive power in just a couple of words. Just make sure that it has a destination that’s equally well-crafted — avoid having CTAs lead to general pages such as the home page.
If you want to create a CTA that targets someone who’s visiting your website for the first time, it makes perfect sense to place the CTA somewhere above the fold. You’re not sure how long they’ll stick around, so best make sure they see the CTA while they can.
But if the person you’re targeting is somewhere in the middle of your funnel, you can easily place the CTA down in the middle of a page. You don’t have to chase after them too aggressively with the CTA, as you’ve already got their attention.
It’s even possible to place the call-to-action further down your WordPress webpage, near the footer. It will only work for visitors who are thoroughly engaged with your offering. But if they’re at the correct stage, your website visitors will see the CTA as the logical conclusion of the journey you’ve arranged for them on that page.
There is such a thing as having too many CTAs. Having several versions of CTAs to go with each lead magnet or offer is excellent. Placing more than one of them on a single page isn’t.
If you think your CTA is in trouble and needs help, you can do a lot to help it stand out and be more powerful. From the color selection and leaving a blank, white space near it, to using a font that’s slightly bigger than the surrounding, you can give your CTA a boost it needs.
You can even use additional content somewhere near the CTA if you think it needs it. But what you can’t do is backup your CTA with another CTA. You’d be better off ensuring that every page has a single CTA than engineering multiple CTAs on select pages.
Landing Pages
Different parts of your WordPress websites can be devoted to different things, but the landing page does one thing and one thing alone – it converts. That’s what a landing page is — a place where people come as strangers and mere website visitors, and leave as leads. Some of them do, anyway, and if it’s your job to increase the percentage of visitors that convert, here are some tips that should help you.
Every landing page you create should be tailor-made for the specific purpose you have for it and the means you want to use to achieve it — the offer you propose in exchange for lead information. But even though every landing page is a thing for itself, most of them are built using a handful of elements.
A landing page should, at the very least, have:
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Copy that shows benefits
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An image that ties the page together
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A catchy headline
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A lead-capturing form
A definitive list of landing page elements would be much longer, and it would include things like social proof, video content, and a reinforcing statement, to name just a few. But if you find yourself with a lead capturing landing page that lacks even one of these four elements, promptly return to the drawing board.
This tip echoes a similar one we’ve had for calls-to-action. You can be tempted to use your landing page to tell the people how great your eBook or seminar is, and how it changed the lives of everyone who used it and generally make it all about the offer.
The trick is, however, to avoid making it about the offer and make it about the person viewing the page. More precisely, the landing page should be about how they could benefit from accepting your offer.
To put it bluntly, a person who lands on your landing page should never struggle to figure out what’s in it for them. That’s the first thing they should pick up. The second is what hoops they have to jump through to get what you’re offering.
You should avoid putting unnecessary elements on your landing page at all costs. Everything on the page that doesn’t contribute to its performance directly, even measurable, should be cut. Clutter is one of the worst enemies of successful landing pages.
But that doesn’t mean that you should keep the number of elements you have on your page to a minimum. Instead of trying to fit everything into a short page, it is sometimes a good strategy to create a more extended page, leaving every element with plenty of breathing room.
You’ll find a lot of pros and cons for creating long landing pages. You’ll find the same type of lists for short pages, too. Seeing how we’re talking about using WordPress for lead generation here, it’s likely that your pages will end up being on the shorter side. But if you have the elements you think will work and you want to make the page longer to fit them in, don’t skip on doing it in the name of avoiding clutter.
There is no way to trap someone on your landing page until they see the light and understand how great of an offer you’re extending their way, and how little they need to give you in return. If nothing else, they can always close the browser tab where your landing page is open.
But still, you can make a strong case against giving people who land on your landing page a clear way out. Any way out marked as such will send a wrong message, add to the clutter, and interfere with the sole purpose of the landing page.
So while you might not be inclined to include a big flashing button that says “press here to run away from this page,” you might think about removing the navigation menu from the landing page, too. Even if it doesn’t attract too much attention, it can still be counterproductive to what you’re trying to do.
Here’s a fundamental principle of landing page design you should adopt early on: everything gets tested. Whatever advice about landing pages you come across, no matter how reasonable and insightful it might seem, you should always check to see how it performs.
That goes for every advice you’ve read so far. Every one of them is only useful if it makes your landing page perform better. And how do you know it performs better? You test it, of course.
Some landing page plugins come with integrated A/B testing capabilities. When you want to try things out and experiment with different layouts and elements, this type of testing can show you how the changes you’ve made perform compared to a version of the landing page without them. The insight you get by testing is invaluable and crucial to the success of your landing pages.
The Lead Capturing Form
You’ve created the best content you could, and you’ve used it to attract people to your website and to create an enticing offer. You’ve written the heck out of your CTAs, and you tested your landing pages until there were no more tests you could do. And now, we’ve come to the moment of truth, where the lead capturing form does its job. Here’s what you should keep in mind if you want to have a favorable outcome in that crucial stage of lead generation.
Your desires and the desires of your website visitors don’t always match. You need their information, so you create the lead magnet to offer something in return. They want the lead magnet, but they can’t be bothered to give you their information. You adapt by asking for the basic information.
Turns out, people don’t want to spend too much time giving personal information to unfamiliar websites. If they’re going to share the data at all, that is. It’s a real shame because you need at least some necessary contact information such as an email address. If you can manage to get more information, that’s even better.
The length of your form is inversely correlated with the likelihood that people will fill it out. Shorter forms are preferable. But don’t forget to use elements such as spacing between the form fields to make your forms appear shorter even with an extra field in them. It might be worth your while.
Some forms can’t be short. If a form really needs people to make choices or provide plenty of information, the only thing you can do is separate it into steps and hope for the best. That, and be transparent about the length of the form.
It wouldn’t be fair to separate the form into several chunks that appear manageable and easy to fill out and forget to tell the visitors that you’ve done this. You should never make your website visitors feel as if you’re hiding something from them, especially when that something concerns their time and information.
A quick and easy way to let people know they’re about to embark on a multistep form-filling adventure is by adding a progress bar to it. That way, they’ll always have a sense of where they are in the process, and how much there’s still left to do.
One of the remarkable things about WordPress is that you can use conditional logic to make items appear and disappear based on certain conditions. An application of conditional logic to forms would bring you a dynamic form that adjusts its field to the answers provided in previous fields.
One way you can try to use conditional logic would be to add an extra form field for leads that meet specific criteria. This way, you can start qualifying your leads while you’re still in the process of capturing them.
What you shouldn’t ever do is use conditional logic to keep adding form fields as the person is filling it. Don’t doubt for a second that people will stop filling out the form and forget about your lead magnet altogether if they sense a whiff of dishonesty.
The form will not be the only element you’ll have on the landing page. As we’ve seen before, the list of ingredients on a landing page can vary greatly, giving you different choices when it comes to arranging them on the page.
Your lead capture form usually follows some tried and tested rules when it comes to placement. It shouldn’t be far away from the lead magnet, and it would be best if you put it under the headline. Above all, make your lead capture clearly visible.
But just like a CTA can work well further down the page, so can a lead capturing form. If the content you’re placing above the fold is engaging enough, and if you need to use more of it to pitch your offer effectively, try placing the form somewhere under the fold. Test it and see how it works.
Lead capturing forms can require visitors to supply the information they wouldn’t want to appear online. People might not want their name tied to every email address they use. They just might not be comfortable with the information being spread around or easily stolen.
You should take reasonable measures to keep your leads’ information safe and ensure the safety and security of the whole lead-capturing process. That goes without saying. But you should also tell your future leads that you’re doing it.
Doing the capturing over a secure connection is standard. But if you want the whole process to be extra safe, you should place any security seals and certifications you have near the field. That might go a long way in putting the visitors’ minds at ease about giving you their info.
In Conclusion
WordPress might make lead generation easier with all the tools it lets you use with it, but those tools are only as good as the hand that guides them. Lead generation is too important to be left to chance, and even the best tool can only create a good starting point for the adjustments you alone can make.
And you should always be making adjustments. Your content, landing pages, calls-to-action, and forms are in a constant process of becoming a leaner, meaner, more effective version of themselves — if that’s the way you approach them. At the very least, you should develop a nagging voice in your mind that tells you always to test. If there’s one tip that should stick with you from this article, it should be that one.
