How To Build a Lead Generation Website: Our Bulletproof Framework

A lead generation website is an efficient, 24/7 salesperson for your team. It’s customer-focused and built to bring visitors into your funnel by showing them the gravity of their challenges and the value of your solution. 

On the flip side, a traditional brochure-style website is just there to show company information and product details. Instead of speaking to visitors about their problems and challenges, a brochure site screams “me, me, me!” and, as a result, often struggles to convert anything but the hottest of traffic. 

Some of the key advantages of lead generation websites include:

• Visitor-centric focus: These sites are designed around the needs and interests of the visitor, prioritizing user experience and relevance.
• Action-oriented design: Each page and section is crafted with clear calls to action, guiding visitors toward the next logical step in their journey.
• Value-first approach: By offering valuable content, tools, or resources upfront, these sites build trust and encourage engagement before asking for commitment.

When you craft a strong lead gen website, your site can drive your sales funnel, pulling in potential customers and guiding them through each stage. 

At the top of the funnel, your site serves as a powerful attractor, drawing visitors in with valuable content and offers. Moving to the middle of the funnel, your site takes on the role of a nurturing guide. It provides more targeted content and personalized experiences, helping customers feel seen and understood and bringing them around to see the value in your solution.

At the bottom of the funnel, your lead gen site becomes a skilled closer. It provides that crucial final push, offering the right information and incentives to transform interested leads into committed customers. 

Related Read: Lead Generation Pricing: How Top Lead Generation Companies Price Services

If your current website isn't actively generating leads, it's time to consider an upgrade. 

And you’ve come to the right post! With this information in mind, let’s now explore the six elements of our bulletproof lead generation website framework, giving you the steps and tools you need to create a killer lead gen website for your business. 

1. Establish Core Positioning 

The first step to building a lead generation website is establishing a strong core positioning. Your brand’s core positioning is the foundation of your website. Your messaging, content, and user experience all report back to this positioning, so nailing it early on in your process is critical. 

How can you develop and implement effective core positioning? Follow these steps: 

1. Craft a compelling unique value proposition (UVP): Your UVP should succinctly communicate the distinct benefit your product or service offers, addressing why a prospect should choose you over competitors. It should be clear, specific, and focused on the outcomes your customers can expect. For example, instead of "We provide cloud storage solutions," consider "Secure, scalable cloud storage that reduces IT costs by 30% for mid-sized enterprises."
2. Identify and segment your ideal customers: Develop detailed buyer personas that go beyond basic demographics to include industry-specific challenges, professional goals, and decision-making processes. 
3. Articulate how your solution solves specific pain points: Be explicit about the problems your product or service addresses and how it does so more effectively than other options in the market. Use concrete examples and data points to support your claims. 
4. Differentiate your offering with clear, concise messaging: Identify your unique strengths and communicate them consistently across all touchpoints. This could be your innovative technology, exceptional customer service, industry expertise, or a combination of factors. 
5. Align your positioning with your brand's mission, vision, and values: Your core positioning should be a natural extension of your company's broader purpose and principles. This alignment helps you attract customers who share similar values, making it easier to build stronger relationships with them over time. 
6. Conduct market research to refine your strategy: Gather feedback from current customers, prospects, and lost opportunities. Use surveys, interviews, and market analysis to understand how your positioning is perceived in the market and where there might be gaps or opportunities for improvement. 

Related Read: How To Have Consistent Voice And Branding Across All Marketing Channels

Your core positioning is critical to your marketing efforts. When you have a strong identity as a brand, it’s easier to ensure your website and all other touchpoints have consistent messaging and content for your target audience. 

2. Map Your Buyer Journey 

Once you know who you are and what you stand for as a brand, you’re ready to move on to step two: mapping your buyer journey.

If you want to guide prospective buyers from awareness to the point of purchase, you need to understand all the steps and potential friction points on that journey. When you have your buyer journey dialed, you can provide the right information at the right time. 

Related Read: How We Optimize The Customer Journey Stages To Accelerate Growth

Start by breaking down your sales funnel into distinct stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Each stage represents a different mindset and set of needs for your potential customers. Let’s look at each stage:

• Awareness: At this stage, prospects recognize they have a problem or opportunity but may not be familiar with potential solutions. Provide educational content like blog posts, infographics, and eBooks that help prospects understand their challenges better.
• Consideration: Prospects in the consideration stage are actively researching and comparing different approaches to solve their problem. Offer comparison guides, case studies, and webinars that demonstrate the value of your approach.
• Decision: These prospects are ready to choose a specific solution and are evaluating vendors. Present detailed product information, free trials, demos, and customer testimonials to help nudge them over the finish line. 

Keeping these broad stages in mind, you can then create targeted content that addresses the questions and concerns your target audience has at each stage. But you’re not ready to create those pages just yet. First, you need to craft your buyer personas!

Your buyer personas will guide content creation and marketing strategies. These customer profiles should include not just demographic information, but also details like:

• Job roles and responsibilities
• Industry-specific challenges
• Decision-making processes
• Information sources they trust
• Key motivators and pain points

Use these personas to inform the type of content you create and how you present information on your website. 

Important Note: Your buyer personas and buyer journey mapping isn’t a “one and done” process. You’ll need to watch site analytics to track user behavior and optimize your journey map over time. 

3. Avoid Dead End Pages 

You want your website to have a seamless flow. Every page should keep visitors engaged and guide them toward conversion. Dead end pages stop this flow in its tracks, interrupting a user’s journey. When they don’t know where to go from a certain page, they’ll get confused. And you know the old marketing adage:

A confused mind always says “no.”

Here's how to make sure you don’t have any dead end pages on your site:

First, be sure to implement clear calls-to-action (CTAs) on every page, guiding users to the next logical step. Each page should have a purpose and a clear direction for the user to follow. Consider the user's intent and stage in the buyer's journey when crafting your CTAs. For example:

• On a product overview page, include a "Request a Demo" CTA
• At the end of a blog post, offer a related resource or webinar
• On pricing pages, add a "Talk to Sales" option for those ready to engage

You also need to create a strategic internal linking structure that keeps users engaged and moving through your site. Internal links are incredible for helping users discover related content and lowering exit rates, but that’s not all they do! A strong internal linking strategy also helps distribute your page authority, giving you a boost when it comes to SEO. 

Ensure your internal linking is purposeful and relevant. For instance, you might link to product pages from related case studies, or to service offerings from problem-focused blog posts.

Another tip is to create content clusters around pillar pages to improve SEO and user experience. This approach involves creating a main "pillar" page that provides a comprehensive overview of a broad topic, with links to more specific, related content.

This structure helps search engines understand the breadth and depth of your content and provides users with clear pathways to explore your key topics in greater detail.

You can also implement exit-intent popups with compelling offers to recapture leaving visitors. You should be careful not to overuse popups, but an exit-intent popup can be a really effective way to re-engage users who are about to leave your site. The key to an effective exit-intent popup is to offer something of concrete, immediate value, like:

• A free consultation
• An exclusive webinar
• A limited-time discount on your services

Remember, your goal is to create a website that guides users smoothly through their journey, providing value at every step. Avoiding dead end pages improves your user experience and, by extension, increases your likelihood of conversions. 

4. Create Magnetic Messaging 

The next element of our lead gen website framework is all about capturing and retaining your audience’s attention. Your site content needs to be informative, engaging, and persuasive. A tall order, we know!

Here are some tips for crafting magnetic messaging your target customer can’t ignore: 

• Write powerful headlines: Your headlines are often the first thing visitors see, and they play a crucial role in determining whether a user will engage further with your content. Effective headlines should be clear, concise, specific, and create a sense of urgency.
  For example, instead of "Our Cloud Security Solutions," consider "Protect Your Data with Military-Grade Cloud Security in 24 Hours." 

• Develop benefit-driven copy: Your content needs to focus on solving customer problems rather than listing features. While features are important, your messaging should primarily address how your product or service improves your customers' lives or businesses. For each feature, ask yourself, "So what?" to uncover the true benefit.

• Focus on storytelling: Strong storytelling is what will help you create those critical emotional connections with your audience. Even in B2B, decision-makers are human and respond to compelling narratives. 
• Leverage social proof: You’ve got testimonials, reviews, and case studies, right? Leverage those assets by displaying them prominently on your site. (and if you don’t yet have these assets, getting those testimonials from your happiest customers should be a top priority!)

You should also maintain a consistent brand voice across all pages to build trust and recognition. Your brand voice is a critical component of your overall messaging strategy. It should reflect your company's personality and values while resonating with your target audience. 

Once you've defined your brand voice, ensure it's consistently applied across all website content, from homepage copy to blog posts and product descriptions.

Remember, in marketing, change is the only constant. Creating magnetic messaging is an iterative process. Continuously test and refine your messaging based on user feedback and performance metrics. A/B test different headlines, copy structures, and calls to action to identify what resonates most with your audience.

5. Build High-Impact Conversion Pages 

Another best practice for building a lead generation website is focusing your energy and attention on building high-impact conversion pages. These pages are the workhorses of your B2B website, designed to guide users toward taking the actions you want them to take. 

Also known as landing pages, your conversion pages are the critical entry point to your funnel — the moment a site visitor ceases to just be a visitor and has the chance to become a lead. 

Related Read: 8 Secrets to Building High Converting Landing Pages

When you’re building out your landing pages, you need to consider the following:

• Avoid distractions: Your landing pages need to be clean and focused. Keep things simple and clear. Remove unnecessary navigation elements, sidebars, or other distractions that could lead users away from your primary conversion goal. Instead, focus on:

• A clear, compelling headline that communicates your value proposition

• Concise, benefit-driven copy that addresses user pain points

• Visual elements that support your message (e.g., product images, infographics)

• A prominent, easy-to-use form or call-to-action button

• Make your CTAs compelling: Create calls to action that clearly communicate the next step and why they should take that step. Your CTA is the gateway to conversion, so it needs to be persuasive and action-oriented.

• Optimize, optimize, optimize: Implement A/B testing to continuously optimize page elements such as headlines, images, and button colors. A/B testing allows you to make data-driven decisions about what works best for your audience. 
• Think about mobile: Most web traffic happens on mobile devices these days. Make sure your landing pages are mobile-responsive and load quickly. Use heatmaps and user recording tools to identify and fix usability issues. 

Remember, building high-impact conversion pages is an ongoing process of optimization and refinement. Continuously monitor your page performance, gather user feedback, and stay updated on industry best practices. 

Related Read: The 20 Best Growth Marketing Tools For Improving Your Strategy's Performance

6. Develop Lead Magnets and Other Key Assets 

Last but not least, if you want to generate leads, you need to give your site visitors a compelling reason to convert. In other words, you need the right lead magnets and assets to attract potential customers and guide them into your sales funnel. 

Here are some of our best practices:

1. 1. Create high-value content offers: Think beyond the whitepaper! Explore offers like webinars, e-books, and more. Your lead magnets should provide substantial value to your target audience, offering solutions to their pressing challenges or insights to help them improve their business. Ensure that each lead magnet is tailored to a specific stage in the buyer's journey and aligns with the needs of your different buyer personas.
   2. Make your forms as simple as possible: Would it be nice to have every scrap of information about your new lead, from their name and email address to their company size and annual revenue? Sure. But making your forms too lengthy can make potential leads abandon ship right at the point of conversion. Instead, keep your initial form as short as possible, then use progressive profiling to gather more information over time as you continue to nurture your lead. You should also implement smart forms that remember returning visitors and don't ask for information you already have.
   3. Score your leads: Implement a lead scoring system to prioritize and qualify leads based on behavior and demographics. Not all leads are created equal, and a lead scoring system helps you focus your efforts on the most promising prospects. Consider factors such as:
      1. Engagement with your website (e.g., pages visited, time spent on site)
      2. Interaction with your content (e.g., downloads, webinar attendance)
      3. Firmographic data (e.g., company size, industry)
      4. Behavioral signals (e.g., visiting pricing pages, requesting demos)
   4. Engage in lead nurturing: Don’t just let your leads sit uselessly in your CMS after they convert! Instead, you need to nurture them, bringing them closer to a purchase decision. Nurture your leads by providing additional relevant information based on their behavior, addressing common objections or concerns, and educating them about your solution. Then, gradually introduce more sales-oriented content over time, pulling them deeper into your funnel. 

As with anything, your lead magnets can’t be a “set it and forget it” asset. Regularly update and refresh your lead magnets to ensure they remain relevant and valuable. The B2B landscape is constantly evolving, and your lead magnets should reflect the latest trends, challenges, and solutions.

Remember, the goal of your lead magnets and nurture campaigns is not just to generate leads, but to create informed, engaged prospects who are more likely to become customers. By providing consistent value throughout the buyer's journey, you establish trust and position your company as a knowledgeable partner rather than just another vendor.

Build a Lead Generation Website The Profitable Way

You've now got six killer best practices in your arsenal to build a lead generation website that converts like a charm. But implementing all of this on your own can feel overwhelming. If you can feel stressed out, you’re not alone.

So, what's the solution? Simple: Don't go it alone. Partner up with a team that knows lead generation websites like the back of their hands. 

Lean Labs has helped hundreds of brands like yours crush their lead gen goals in the past, and we’d love to help you, too! We have two paths forward from here: 

• Book a free consulting call with our team today.
• Check out our free training resource, "The 4 Pillars of a Winning Website." 

Remember, in the world of lead generation, you're either feasting or fasting. So why settle for crumbs when you could be having a banquet?

Ready to take your lead generation to the next level? The ball's in your court. Reach out for that free call or dive into our training. Your future leads (and your bottom line) will thank you!