How to Build a Consulting Website That Drives Leads

If you are running a consulting business or any other kind of venture providing professional financial services, then you will need to build a consulting website to engage with a wider audience. Most clients will visit your site before they decide whether they can trust you and rely on your services. Unless your consulting services website can impress the web audience, you won’t be able to make your business grow. Having a great and usable website can be the major difference that makes your site unique and helps you stand out from the competition.

What are the major requirements that one needs to follow as you build a consulting services website? First of all, it needs to reflect your knowledge, experience, and innovative approach to running a consulting business. This is a professional web environment that needs to establish an authoritative status for your venture, showcase your strengths, and persuade customers to work with you.

Everyone working in the consulting industry knows that consulting agencies face a number of risks and business challenges. On top of the list are marketing and sales issues that affect the efficiency of your business.

Before we proceed to the list of the tips on how to build a consulting website that generate leads, let’s discuss the major challenges that consulting businesses can face.

Major Challenges of Consulting Agencies

Whether you are a freelancer or a well-established consulting company, rest assured there are plenty of ways to track new business development. What’s cool is that it doesn’t require any disruptive emailing or marketing tactics. This mostly takes your time to develop a consulting company website, evaluate its performance, and adjust it for the maximum efficiency.

Designing a consulting website that generates leads requires tackling various web design challenges.

So, how can you know that your website works well and provides your web audience with all the necessary pieces of information they may expect to find on your site? Before we move to the section with useful tips on how to build a consulting website that drives sales, let’s consider the major challenges that such businesses can face.

Simply ask yourself the following questions to find it out:

• Is it easy for a prospective customer to find my projects online?
• Is my online recourse responsive and user-friendly?
• Did I update my existing website with new pieces of data in the last 2 years?

If you have a negative answer to any of these questions, then it’s high time to consider revamping your existing website or building a new one from scratch.

Proven Tips to Build a Consulting Website

A consulting business website can be compared to a lead generation software that works 24/7 to help you attract new business opportunities to your venture. If you already have a website, let’s first consider in what ways it can be failing you.

Have you heard such term as a “brochure” website ever before? It was first coined back in the 2000s. It stems from the mindset that just having an online presence is enough to meet your company’s marketing goals. As you might have already guessed, such an approach doesn’t work on the present-day web. It’s no longer enough to build a good-looking web page and expect to receive a steady flow of customers without any proper optimization or promotion of your content. A poorly optimized website would only welcome those customers who already know about your business and use your offers. They are likely to reach your web resource for updates and up-to-date price lists.

If you want to achieve more than that, make yourself comfortable and let’s move to the list of tips on how to build a consulting website that will drive you lots of new leads.

Shift away from Using Traditional Brochure Websites

Most of the contemporary businesses take up on the holistic approach to build a consulting website. They think beyond the traditional brochure approach to running their web presence, bringing a bigger focus on establishing a powerful web presence that includes rich content and inbound marketing strategies.

In order to make a major shift in the way you build and optimize your consulting website, you need to start thinking about the major values of your site. Your web page needs to be considered as a hotspot for useful and educational pieces of content that can be used to attract your potential clients and present your consulting agencies as a place where they can find new business opportunities for themselves and their own ventures.

Keep this in mind and evaluate all major online marketing opportunities before making any assumptions. When you decide to build a consulting website that drives impressive amounts of leads for your site, make the process of your content creation the center of the universe. In order to make your content reach the audience and stick to users’ minds, it’s essential to build a clear cut strategy to develop a website that can be transformed into a powerful lead generation machine. f you are still having trouble with lead generation, you might consider reaching out to the best lead companies in order to make sure you are on the right track.

What does this mean to you as an owner of a consulting business site? Start off with the optimization of your site’s content. Carefully choose short and long tail keywords that resonate with your business services and can appeal to your target audience. Nonetheless, do not stuff your articles with all the keywords that you found for your online marketing campaigns. While creating your content, make it readable and easy to comprehend. Deliver your quality message through eBooks, blog posts, white papers, etc. Share engaging and useful pieces of data that are embedded with comprehensive CTAs, which will help you acquire new leads.

Who Are Your Ideal Prospects?

In order to increase relevant traffic to your site, you need to have a clear understanding of the ideal persona of your prospects. The best way to do this is by making up a list of your ideal customers personas and optimizing your website based on this knowledge.

The development of ideal prospects personas should be a mandatory thing for all B2B companies searching for better lead generation opportunities for their sites. The worst mistake committed by companies is rolling out websites and paid advertising campaign without thinking about their ideal customers.

In order to simplify the process and make it more fun to create your ideal prospects profiles, you can examine profiles of your existing clients that you think are ideal for your business. Give them names, create lists of their preferences, think about their education and jobs. Print your ideal customer profiles and share these materials with your team members. Keep these personas always handy when you work on new marketing assignments.

Use CTAs Wisely

As soon as you identify your ideal customer profile, start working on the development of content for your site. Sharing well-written pieces of data aren’t enough if you want to encourage your readers to take some actions and drive more leads to your web resource. It’s essential for every consulting website to be equipped with CTAs that are strategically placed on each of their site’s pages.

Here’s a good template for a crypto mining company:

While working on the perfect presentation of CTA messages, mind their simplicity and outstanding design that makes this piece stand out. The primary goal with a CTA should be the focus on the primary value propositions on your site and benefits that people can drive from your offer.

There are different types of CTAs that you can use on your website to drive more leads. For example, you can use a CTA that welcomes your readers to subscribe to your newsletter and follow your updates right from their email inboxes. You can also add a request a consultation or download demo buttons on your site.

The choice of the perfect CTAs for your consulting website is mainly grounded on your goals and actions that you want people to take on your site. In order to achieve the best results with an effective CTA design, mind the following checklist.

1. Create an eye-catching design using contrasting colors that will make your CTAs stand out from the rest of your site’s elements.
2. Create a clear value proposition. People should know exactly what benefits they can get from clicking on your call-to-action message.
3. Include actionable keywords and first-person phrasing. A CTA featuring “Start MY free 30 days trial” performs 90% better than “Start YOUR free 30 days trial” phrase.
4. Taylor your CTAs for specific stages of the buying cycle while providing content that’s relevant to where a buyer persona is in their journey.
5. Update Your Website with Educational Pieces of Content
6. We live in the age of informational technologies. People use the web to find answers to the questions that worry them as well as find useful educational information. Running a consulting business website, you need to focus not only on sharing purely educational content but also educating your audience, thus gaining the trust of your prospects.

When you decide to build a consulting website, think about creating a plan of publications that would contain 80% of educational and 20% of promotional data. Customers value such an approach to sharing posts on your web resource because you give them an opportunity to learn and consume educational pieces of data.

When you decide to launch your consulting business website, your top priority needs to be the development of a smart content marketing plan. Sharing informative educational posts you can attract more people to your consulting business site and convert traffic into qualified leads. Here are a few useful tips that will help you create educational content for your site and attract more high-value clients.

• Whatever piece of content you share on your site, make sure that you tell a helpful story. This can be video, audio, email or blog-based piece. Sharing a helpful story you can help your customers right decisions and feel more confident in the reliability of your consulting business.
• Your content needs to be both helpful and engaging. It’s likely that your customers will look through a range of other consulting business websites before they make the final buying decision. In order to keep them with you, you need to apply extra effort to making your data original and highly engaging. For example, if other bloggers from your business niche are just posting how-to articles on their blogs, then you can go further and share an interactive infographic or a video post on your web page.
• Share personalized pieces of data. As soon as you manage to capture your prospects’ attention, get straight to the personalization of the data that you deliver to them. This can be achieved by means of personalized messaging in the email so that your customers will feel that you are addressing them directly.

Select Inbound Marketing Automation Tools

Did you know that marketers that use automation software generate 2X more leads than those who use email software only? Investing in inbound marketing campaigns will help you drive more opportunities for your consulting business, thus growing your revenue and ROI.

The choice of the best inbound marketing automation tools is mainly based on the size of your consulting company and your deal flow. If you build a consulting website for a startup, then an inbound marketing solution like Hatchbuck can be the ultimate choice for you. With its help, you can keep tabs on your customers using a convenient CRM, implement autoresponders in your marketing campaign, keep track of sales stats, and more. If you are a mid-sized company, then the opportunities that Hubspot has on offer are likely to appeal to you. It provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, and search engine optimization of your data.

There are a lot of other inbound marketing automation tools available on the web. Take a look at the following list of quick tips that will help you make the right choice of automation software for your business.

• How well will the software integrate with your CRM platform so that you will attain seamless information flow between the two platforms?
• Is there a free training included? How will the prices scale as the database grows bigger?
• What are the key metrics and reporting features being included in the software? How can you track the campaign performance?
• Are there any additional resources that the inbound marketing vendor has on offer?

State Your Values Clearly

When prospects reach your website for the first time, they will be looking for the basic information about your company, its history, and background, as well as your value proposition. Similar to your unique selling point, the value proposition of your site needs to be clearly presented and easy-to-find on your web page. It’s up to you to decide how to organize the respective data on your site. This can be a short phrase or a paragraph of text placed on the Home or About page of your site.

As you built a consulting website, it’s important to mind that you clearly articulate what you do, to whom your services can be useful, and what makes your consulting business better than what your competitors offer. In order to establish a more reliable presentation of your company and its values, reveal slideshows of pictures, videos, and graphics that will help you communicate your message in an easy-to-comprehend style.

Choose a Usable Web Design

When it comes to the perfect online presentation of your consulting company, you are provided with a wide choice of ready-made consulting company website templates of different styles. So, you can pick any ready-made design that matches your company image. The best thing about all contemporary web themes is that they feature fully editable layouts that can be customized in accordance with your business expectations and corporate needs.

Some of the major things that you need to keep in mind when you build a consulting website include:

• Making it fully responsive;
• Launching an SEO-friendly and fast-loading web page;
• Keeping the design clean and clear so that your prospects will find it easy to navigate your data;
• Integrating your site with working contact forms and social media options;
• Uploading your site with interactive elements, thus establishing an engaging presentation of your company;
• Revealing photo and video galleries that will help you better communicate your message to the audience.

Keep Your Site Frequently Updated and SEO-Friendly

You can build the most impressive and usable consulting website in your industry. However, all efforts will be worth nothing unless you make your web page findable on for the web community. In order to improve your rankings in search engines, update your site with new blog posts, testimonials, and other pieces of data that are useful to your potential clients.

It’s also important to make your site’s data SEO-friendly. In fact, there is no need to have any special SEO education in order to optimize your site’s content according to the present-day web standards. There are plenty of tools and software that you can add to your site and follow content optimization tips there. Also, use long-tail keywords that are closely related to your consulting business and services.

Talk to Your Prospects

Whatever kind of content you share on the pages of your site, you need to make it quick and easy for your prospects to share their preferred pieces of data via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+. Linkedin, Pinterest, and others. This can help you engage with wider audiences and drive more traffic to your consulting business website when people come across recommendations from the users they follow.

Also, you need to make it intuitive for your audience to comment on your posts. Whenever a person leaves feedback about your content, don’t miss a chance to leave a reply below it. People applied certain efforts and spent their time to comment on your publication. Show how much this means to you as you do not leave a single comment without a reply.

Next, you need to make it easy for your audience to get in touch with you. This can be achieved through a number of ways. For example, put a clear CTA button on the front page of your site. The availability of a working contact form will be a great benefit for your consulting business. In most cases, people prefer dropping a few lines of text instead of making phone calls when they want to ask you about something. The availability of a built-in contact form will help you establish a usable and remarkable web presence of your consulting business company.

It’s a general rule of thumb that consultants need to communicate with their audience without being too pushy. That’s why the strategy of bombarding your clients with sales offers can hardly be called a nice idea. Instead, keep your audience updated with valuable and high-quality content at regular intervals. Use emails, blog posts, webinars, and other kinds of articles series that can engage your potential customers.

Final Words

Keep these tips in mind when you decide to build a consulting website that will drive traffic and generate leads to your site. Think about developing an online marketing strategy that will make your web resource stand out from the rest of the competitors in your niche. Focus on creating engaging and helpful content that your prospects will appreciate. Also, make sure that your website is updated with new pieces of data regularly. Keep it lightweight, responsive, and SEO-friendly. Never miss a chance to communicate with your audience and boost customer engagement with the clever use of CTAs and interactive content.

Every time your company rolls out new products or services, make sure that you have clearly defined the perfect buyer persona so that you are prepared to effectively market your campaign towards your target audience.