One of the most underrated aspects of an online marketing campaign is the conversion aspect.

If you are lucky enough to be getting a decent volume of targeted traffic to your site, here are some basics that will help you outdo your competitors (I will dedicate the next several posts on some specifics on how you can go about and implement these things):

To be effective, each page on the site has to have a purpose for existing. Once it is clear what the one and only objective of that page is, then the elements for that page can be put together.

Each page can be seen as a combination of elements – a system – that fulfills the goal of that page. This goal should be tired to systematically to the overall sales funnel of your business.

In this case, I will assume the goal is to generate enquiries (via email or phone) from the site by qualified prospects.

So how do you turn a visitor into a prospect?

There are a few steps that are necessary to increase the probability of visitors turning into enquiries. All of the expertise, experience and uniqueness of your company has to be communicated in a coherent way to help this goal. After extensive testing, we have found these broad elements on the page to be crucial in online lead generation:

• Attention: The page must have something to grab the attention of the visitor. This could be a strong headline associated to the keyword that visitor has come from, or a picture to grab their attention. This will then lead into the next step.

• Desire: The next step is to build the desire of the customer to take action. This is done by clearly describing the quality, exclusivity and uniqueness of your company with regard to content of that page. This can be achieved by having some clear, concise bullet points to describe why the prospect, who doesn’t know better, should call your company compared to another company.

These bullet points should set out the benefit or the advantage of engaging your service, rather that the fee.

• Action: Finally the visitor should be left in no doubt what to do next if they are interested – be very clear as to what action you want them to take. For example, if they should ring you, then that should be literally communicated, with the phone number right there so its easy for them to take that action. Have a phone number of every page!

Finally all of the these things should fit in the screen so they don’t have to scroll down. Most people don’t like scrolling, they decided straight away if they can use your site or not. Therefore it’s imperative to have the key elements above the fold (so they don’t have to scroll to find all of your details and benefits of your company).