Inbound web design is about designing your website strategically so that when people visit, they can be nurtured down your sales funnel and become a new lead for your business.
When combined with an effective digital marketing strategy, many businesses begin to see how a website can be their most powerful lead generation tool.
In this post, we will discuss how you can use inbound web design to increase the ROI of your website and allow it to become your number one sales tool.
Create Content to Increase Website Traffic
In order for your website to be able to generate leads, you must first attract new visitors to your site. The best way to do this is to use the principles of inbound marketing to increase the amount of traffic generated by your website.
Inbound marketing is all about creating helpful content that is relevant to your target audience. By content, we mean blog posts, videos, ebooks, case studies, and podcasts. This content will be found when people interested in your products or services search online for terms related to your business.
Consistently producing content will allow you to establish trust and authority with people previously unfamiliar with your business. It will also help you be discovered by people that are in the market for the services offered by your company. In short, inbound marketing is all about helping your audience by providing them free value upfront. Your audience will appreciate this, and you will have a much easier time bringing in new businesses compared to traditional outbound based marketing tactics that consumers tend to tune out.
To discover more ways inbound marketing can help your business, check out our post: 7 Benefits of Using Inbound Marketing To Grow Your Business
Ensure Your Website is SEO Friendly
The content you create as part of your inbound marketing strategy will likely be found on everyone’s search engine of choice: Google. Understanding that the majority of your traffic will likely come from search is key to utilizing inbound web design. Ensuring your website and the content you produce is optimized for SEO will allow your content to rank higher –bringing in more traffic. This also gives you a bigger pool of people that you can access for generating leads.
SEO is a huge success factor when it comes to inbound web design. You can produce the greatest content in the world and have a killer website. But if people can't find either, it won’t matter. Consistently producing high-quality content is the best way for you to increase your SEO authority and begin to rank higher on Google. But the overall quality of your website matters significantly as well. Your website must be fast, mobile-friendly, and have the correct schema markup to be fully optimized for inbound web design.
Place Forms in Strategic Places on Your Website
Forms are an essential component of inbound web design. They allow your visitors to quickly get in touch with your business instead of having to send an email manually. The less work visitors on your site have to do to contact your business, the more leads you will end up having. It can be tempting to place a form on every page on your website. Don’t.
In our experience, inbound web design is best at generating leads when forms are on pages of your website that make sense and encourage user action. We recommend placing forms on your homepage, service pages, and contact page to start. From there, examine your website and think about what pages a person would be on if they were heavily interested in your services and may be close to reaching out. We would put them on those pages to encourage more contacts and impulse submissions.
Forms are great, but they aren’t the only way to gather contact information from prospective customers. In the next two sections, we’re going to cover two new inbound web design tactics that can help your website generate leads.
Install a Chatbot
Chatbots have continued to become more and more popular recently. Consumers are so used to instant messaging friends and family that certain segments now would rather communicate with your business this way. In a few years, they may even come to replace forms.
Chatbots allow consumers to get in touch with your business instantly. You can have the messages sent to you or your team members directly, or set up automated responses that can be used for qualifying leads and booking appointments. Chatbots can allow you to provide great customer service by answering prospective customer’s questions fast. This can be a big competitive advantage if someone is comparing your company to other local businesses. Unlike forms, you can have them on every page of your website, giving you more opportunities to generate leads.
Overall, we believe chatbots can work for practically any business website. Chatbots aren’t difficult to install on your website. If you're new to them, we recommend starting with either Drift or Hubspot.
Utilize Exit Intent Pop-Ups
Exit-intent pop-ups are triggered when a user attempts to leave your website. They can help your inbound web design efforts by allowing you to convert traffic that would have left your website anyway into leads. Exit-intent pop-ups convert at a rate of about 5%. Sometimes, not everyone is going to view a page on your website with a form or see your chatbot icon. That’s what makes exit intent pop-ups a valuable addition to your website. They give you a chance to convert every visitor on your website into a lead.
Typically, we recommend some sort of offer to encourage people to give you their contact information. For example, a restaurant here in New Jersey may want to give people that are about to exit 10% off their first visit in exchange for their email address. This would allow the restaurant to bring in a new customer that would likely not have visited and keep in contact with them through an email marketing campaign.
Exit-intent pop-ups have become a popular component of inbound web design and can be easily created with a service like HubSpot or Summo.
Conclusion
Inbound web design will help your website attract new visitors and funnel segments of your target audience to certain areas of your site based on where they are in the buyer's journey and what segment of your customer base they represent.
While we did cover many tactics in this post that can help you optimize your website for inbound web design, you’re always best off hiring a professional freelance web designer. Understanding user experience concepts and human psychology are essential for designing a website that delivers a strong return on investment for your company.
