How to Create an Offer that Generates More Leads

This is another in our series of tutorials for clients. We’re posting it here so all our readers can benefit.
Once you have visitors coming to your website, you want to convert these visitors into leads. The beginning of the process of generating more leads is to promote new offers. An offer is like a bright shiny object you dangle in front of your site visitors to tempt them. If the offer is attractive enough to them, they will give you their contact information in exchange for it.

Remember that you want to create offers that will appeal to your site visitors. Don’t make the mistake of using an offer that appeals to you. The nature of these offers might differ a little, depending on who you’re targeting, but the way the offer works is always the same.

How offers get you leads

For every offer you create, you should be setting up the following elements (we’ll cover how to do each of them in future tutorials):

Call to Action (CTA) – an image or link text on your website that teases what the offer is, and entices visitors to click through to a landing page
Landing Page – where you fully explain what the offer includes and the benefits it provides; a landing page always includes a form
Form – where you collect the visitor’s contact information in exchange for the promised offer
Email or lead nurturing campaign – where you link to an offer via email to prompt your new leads to reconvert on something else
Thank you page – after a user fills out the form they should be sent to a thank you page. This page includes the promised offer.

Here’s a schematic of the process:

What you should offer

Over time you’ll develop a wide range of offers where each appeals to a different segment of your audience, or to a different stage of your sales cycle. With multiple offers, there is a “bright shiny object” that would appeal to anyone who visits your site. Here are some ideas to get you started:

free guide
free checklist or tip sheet
free consultation, analysis or report
free whitepapers or reports
free videos
free kits (combinations of different content assets)
free sample or trials
contests

11 ways to create offers from your existing content

Whitepaper or eBook: Compile three (3) to five (5) blog posts that discussed similar topics and combine them into a whitepaper or eBook. You can also write a whitepaper or eBook from a previous research study or data set.
Tip Sheet: Create a tip sheet that outlines how people could use your product or service to help them with their problem or need. For example, if you’re a plumber you could create a Tips Sheet on “How to Troubleshoot a Clogged Drain.”
Top 10 Industry Trends: Document the ten latest trends impacting your industry this year. Write a short summary on ten new industry developments or write what you think will be the ten biggest changes to your industry during the next year.
How-To Guides: Create simple guides for your prospects to download and help them with a problem. For example, if you’re selling mortgages, create a guide to picking the right mortgage for you.
Checklist: Create a checklist of steps people could take to solve the problem that your product/service solves. For example, if you’re a moving service, create a packing checklist visitors can download.
Common Questions: Write down the ten or 20 questions you most commonly hear and create a tip sheet or guide that answers each question.
Product Demo Videos: Create a video that shows off all of your product’s features and benefits. At the end of the video, give the lead an option to download a product use case document.
LinkedIn Question and Answers: Go to LinkedIn Answers and find every question and answer that relates to your industry. Compile them together in an eBook format.
Kits of Material: Compile some of your related eBooks, guides, tip sheets and blog articles into a compelling Downloadable Kit offer.
Sales Team Materials: If you have a sales team, ask them what material they send to prospects that convince them to convert. Package this material into a toolkit visitors can download.
Case Studies: Show off your leading customers and share their success with future customer. Video record their testimonials for even more content and to build credibility. Offer the case studies as free downloads.(Hat tip to HubSpot for these 11 ways to create an offer.)

Now that you’ve created your offer, you can create a landing page to tell people about it, and a form on the landing page that your visitors will fill out to receive your offer. We’ve talked about landing page creation before, but in our next article we’ll dig into this process.

Photo credit: imagerymajestic