As the hub of your marketing efforts, your website serves as Ground Zero for information, education, and lead generation. But how can you take full advantage of this marketing tactic?
Here, we will explain what lead generation opportunities are, some lead gen best practices, examples of how they can be used on your site, and some tools to get you started.
What are Lead Generation Forms?
In the simplest of terms, lead generation forms provide your website visitors the chance to fill in their information and thus, they become a lead. There are many different kinds of lead generation opportunities, including landing pages, gated content, contact requests, and more. No matter the type, though, they generally result in the same goal – gathering information on your prospects so you can develop marketing campaigns around them.
Lead Generation Best Practices
When implementing lead gen forms on your website, it may be hard to know where to start. Financial advisors ready to take this next marketing step should be aware of a few best practices when it comes to lead capturing. We suggest:
- Considering friction when designing your lead generation forms. Friction refers to the difficulty your website visitor faces when they go to take an action. Make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish what you want, whether that is scheduling an appointment, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading content (read more about friction in this extremely comprehensive post on the topic!).
- Not asking for too much information on your forms. It may be tempting to want to get all the information you can out of a website viewer on their first visit, but too many form fields actually decreases your conversion rate. On all of our FMG Suite forms, we ask for 3-4 fields, maximum. We suggest doing the same for financial advisors.
- Placing your forms in strategic locations that prompt action. For example, you may want to put a form fill on your homepage or after you’ve just explained a complicated topic. These are great places to ask if your reader has a question. You may also want to gate content, or require a form fill, before someone downloads a brochure, ebook, or whitepaper.
These are just a few tips to get started with lead generation. Now, let’s look at some examples of how forms can be used to grow your financial advising book of business.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are pages on your website designed for a singular purpose, such as generating leads. They live on your site, but only contain relevant information for the goal you have in mind. This landing page, for example, directs you to one of our whitepapers with a short summary of what it includes. While visitors can click around to the rest of our site, the goal is to gather information and request the download.
Gated Content
Gated content is an umbrella term for the type of landing page shown above. This marketing strategy involves providing a piece of content to your website viewers in exchange for their information. Our team just released this functionality to all of our Attract clients, including ebooks available for financial advisors.
Widgets on Your Site
Another great way to generate leads is to add widgets, or small forms on your website. Our platform provides different options, including “Have a Question?” and “Sign Up for Our Newsletter” widgets. Some robo-technologies, such as Riskalyze and Hidden Levers, also have their own forms that financial advisors can easily embed in their site.
Tools to Help You Start Generating Leads
Now that you understand the basics of lead generation, it’s time to put some forms on your site! As we mentioned, all FMG Suite sites come with forms that can be added or integrated on your own. In addition, there are many tools available to ramp up your lead gen efforts.
One of our favorites is Sumo, a website that allows users to create forms to integrate into their website. You can create an exit-intent form that pops up when someone is about to leave your site, an in-post form that integrates into a blog post, and many others. Similar tools include Opt-In Monster, Leadformly, and Pop Up Monkey. All of these third-party tools can be added into our FMG Suite websites.
Kevin Brown of Gateway Financial uses Sumo on his site as a popup. Here you can see what that tool would look like on an FMG Suite Concierge website.
You can’t afford to have a website that is solely an online brochure. These lead generation tools and strategies will help you grow your book of business and financial advisory practice digitally.
