Here’s what I mean by that, by lead generation starts at home.
And by the way, this only applies to complex B2B services that create high-value outcomes.
The kind of services that are sold (and partially designed) through an intelligent, two-way conversations between agency and client.
When you invite your clients to have a conversation like this, they come to your home. In fact, they often visit your home before they even agree to the conversation.
And by home, I don’t mean your actual personal residence, or even your office, such as it may be.
In fact, unless you’re a very large agency located in one of a handful of large cities around the world, they’ll never come to your office until you have a formal client-provider relationship.
Your website’s homepage is your home
But they come to your home and they do so right away, often they do so before they even agree to a conversation, let alone respond to your invitation to one.
And your home is your web presence, which is anchored by, wait for it, the homepage of your website.
Paradoxically, the website homepage has become a fractional percentage of your digital presence yet more important than ever before.
Your social media stamps and your content marketing has increased your digital footprint every year.
Your name is flung accross two dozen platforms and review sites, and so on. (Though by the way, is there a single Google doc that indexes your name and positioning in all of those places? There should be).
Making the website homepage a lead generation tool
Most of us think of digital lead generation as happening on a landing page, on some kind of cheesy tool like ClickFunnels, or cooler tool like Lead Pages (or if you know what you’re doing on your own CMS-driven website, but that’s another story).
And the landing page is where the beloved lead capture form happens, that grabs name, email, etc.
But for most B2B firms, certainly ones that do high-value business, most effective place to capture leads is right on your homepage, right above the fold.
To make this happen, we need to use the upside down strategy, which means taking the complex header and banishing it, or simplifying it way down. Put that header in the footer (and no, don’t put the footer in the head – not unless is extremely simple).
That “clears the deck” for your one, single call to action. Just one. That is visible above the fold, on your landing page.
It might be an email subscription or just a request for a consultation, but it turns the formerly decorational and informational homepage into an action center, as we used to say in my digital advocacy days.
What would it take for you to turn your homepage upside down?