Is your website helping or hindering your firm’s marketing efforts?

If you’re like most consultancies, the answer is probably the latter.

Your website is the first place your target clients will go to learn more about you and your offerings, and if it’s not giving your prospective clients what they want to know, then you’re likely to be missing out on potential BD conversations and the projects that could come from them.

But don’t worry, in this blog we take a look at some simple and effective ways to transform your website and how you can utilise social proof, combined with well-placed lead generation to show your prospective clients why you’re the best option for them and then encourage them to get in touch. Turning unknown web traffic into tangible leads for your business.

1. Demonstrating Your Expertise And Your Experience

At its core, marketing for consultancies is very simple. You need to demonstrate two things:

Your Expertise – You know what you’re doing and can help your clients solve their challenges.

Your Experience – You’ve done it before for firms like them and can be trusted to do what you say you’re going to do.

Two simple yet effective ways to do that through your website are case studies and testimonials.

Case Studies

This may sound like marketing 101 but case studies are a great way to demonstrate your expertise and experience.

They help to build trust in your brand, highlight your expertise and show potential customers the results you can deliver. After all, no-one wants to be the first person to try out your services – everyone wants to follow in the footsteps of those who have already had success working with you!

But to get results from your case studies, you need to make sure that they’re written in a way that engages your prospective clients and placed someone easy to find on your website. Hiding them five pages into a menu of lots of other thigs isn’t going to help.

By putting them front and centre of your homepage, and ensuring they’re written in a clear and engaging way, you’ll take your prospects on the journey you want them to go on and give them what they need to know whether your firm could be the right fit for them.

Client Testimonials

Case studies are a good starting point, but what will set you apart from the pack is testimonials. Real clients, talking about real results you’ve delivered for them.

And we say talking because we always recommend video testimonials over text wherever possible. These act as true social proof for prospective clients, showing them that you’ve really done this with other people like them, you haven’t just made it up. Something that sadly can happen with written case studies.

If you want to learn more about how you can do this for your consultancy, you can read all about it in our blog here.

2. Turning These Visitors Into Leads

You’ve got the case studies and you’ve recorded the testimonials, but how do you turn that into leads for you to follow up with.

That’s where call-to-actions and gated content come in.

The Mighty Call-To-Action

Without boring you with the data, when it comes to digital marketing, you want to give your website visitors as many opportunities to take action as you can (Within reason! You don’t want to bombard them with pop ups. It’s not 1995.)

A great way to do this is with a call-to-action (CTA) button.

This is simply a button on your website that invites people to do just that, by telling them to “download now”, “subscribe now” or “get in touch”. These are just examples though and CTAs can be used for everything from signing up for an email newsletter to requesting an intro coffee.

Many consultancy’s websites have CTA’s, but they’re usually located right at the bottom of the page and just say ‘Contact us today’ or something similar.

The problem with this is that it’s a passive request and puts the onus on the visitor to think about whether they want to do that before taking action, and with more and more consulting buyers spending longer making their buying decision before making contact, this approach is becoming swiftly outdated.

It’s a small tweak, but by placing CTAs throughout your webpages (top, middle and bottom) and using action phrases such as “Sign up”, “Get started”, or “Download now” you guide your reader to the action you want them to take. Making it more likely for them to take it and ultimately generating more leads for you.

eBooks

eBooks can be a great way to convert your website visitors and get them into your marketing funnel.

If you’re new to the idea of eBooks, don’t worry: They’re simply digital resources that readers can download from your website. eBooks are in-depth pieces of pillar content which look at a particular industry topic, address client challenges and show how your consultancy can help solve that particular problem.

But, you may be thinking ‘Well, this is a big piece of content. I don’t want to just give this away for the sake of brand credibility’

And you’re right. You shouldn’t!

That’s why you should always ‘gate’ your eBooks behind a lead capture form. Making the price of the resource the visitors name and email address.

This will help you put off the people who aren’t really interested in working with you, and leave you with a list of people who potentially are. Letting you then follow up and find out who on that list is a hot prospect from a BD perspective.

But that’s not all, once you’ve got someone’s contact information, you can continue the conversation by adding them to your email list, keeping your firm front of mind for the coming months.

If you want to see an example of this, take a look at our ‘No Meetings? No Problem.’ eBook.

While there are many other ways to generate more leads or boost your credibility through your website, these four small changes will make a big difference to your marketing pipeline.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your website, try implementing some of these suggestions, and if you want to find out more about how to boost the leads your getting from your website we’d love to chat, so please get in touch.