Today, a solid presence on the web is a must-have for businesses. A great website can help you drive valuable leads into your sales pipeline and generate a steady stream of prospects to engage with. However, this is all dependent on if you’ve got the right content and layout.
So, what makes an MSP website most successful? Well, I’ve had the chance to look at a look of MSP websites—whether it be in my day-to-day or at the Grow Your Business Hub at Navigate—and I’ve noted a few key essentials. Let’s go over the six elements to include on your website in order to generate more leads and create a positive experience for your users.
1. Make It Personal
First of all, you should showcase yourself on your own website. Managed IT services is a relationship business; it lives and dies with the relationships that you have with your clients. In order to build trust and establish rapport that you’re real people who are accessible and provide great services, you need to convey that on your website.
I have seen one too many stock photos that make the representations of a team or friendly business seem fictitious. Instead, you should get a photo of yourself or your team and put it front and center on your site. This will help express your authenticity, who you are, and let your personality shine as a major differentiator.
2. Showcase Client Testimonials
There’s no better proof that you’re as good as you say you are than having client testimonials or case studies on your website. While it’s important to present the benefits of your solution or services, it’s much more effective to showcase how you’ve helped an actual client from an IT perspective. If they can share how you’ve helped them save money and operate more efficiently, it might convince a similar prospect to look deeper into your services in hopes of you doing the same for them.
Not sure where to start? Click here to learn how you can better leverage client testimonials.
3. Start Blogging
I can’t stress enough how important having a blog is! A blog is a great way to provide valuable, educational, and informational content that website visitors want to read and consume. It also serves as a way to position yourself as an expert and attract more visitors to your website. People will view you or your business as an industry leader who really knows the ins and outs of managed IT, cybersecurity, data backup, or any of these topics and trends that are relevant in today’s market.
On the lead generation side, a blog gives visitors an opportunity to subscribe and sign up to have your posts delivered straight to their inbox. This is a great form of lead capture and an excellent way to build your mailing list and prospect database.
Now, not only is it important to have a blog, but to maintain it as well. You should be blogging regularly and posting articles at a regular cadence. I’m not saying it has to be every day, but every week or a couple times a month should do the trick. This way, readers and visitors will grow to expect, anticipate, and seek out your content. If you’re not sure where to get started, here are some helpful blogging tips, but I’d also suggest turning to your internal team. Ask a sales representative, “what are the top questions or objections you hear when on a prospect call?” You’d be amazed at how many topics you can source from your own employees, local community, or even events that you are involved in.
4. Clean up Your Navigation
It can be very frustrating as a user to go to a website and not understand where to go when seeking information on a product, solution, pricing, or a blog. If visitors don’t have a clear path to get to that resource they’re looking for, they’ll end up jumping ship and going back to Google to click on the next best result.
To avoid this, you need to have a clear, intuitive navigation. Here are a couple of key sections that you should include:
- About Us – This page should tell visitors about your company, your story, your mission, and who you serve.
- Solutions and Services – This should be a breakdown of exactly what you offer and the benefits of each service (remember to keep this client-centric).
- Resources – This is the go-to place for your resources, such as your blog, white papers, or other gated assets.
- Contact Us – This is a dedicated area where people can easily email you or pick up the phone to contact you.
Ideally, it shouldn’t take more than one or two clicks for visitors to make it to the page they want. Therefore, you should have a clean navigation experience so people aren’t confused about how to get to where they need to go and they won’t be deterred from leaving your site.
5. Provide Multiple Ways to Engage
A great website allows visitors to engage and connect with your business, so you need to provide multiple mediums to accomplish this.
There are plenty of different channels and avenues visitors can leverage to get in touch with you or reach out to learn more. You should have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and provide links to these social media channels on your website. Similarly, give visitors the opportunity to easily pick up the phone and call you or send an email to a sales inbox. The more channels that you can have and the more opportunities that a prospect can reach out to you, the more likely they are to do so if they find a pathway that is their preferred method of communication.
6. Lead Capture Forms
Last but certainly not least, you need to get lead capture forms up on your website. From a marketing standpoint, the most important thing your website should be doing is capturing information and generating leads. But what does this look like?
It can be a “contact us” form, for example, or a gated piece of content like an eBook, webinar, or another sort of asset that lives behind a form. You could also use forms that allow visitors to get a quote, request pricing information, or schedule a free network assessment or IT consultation.
There are lots of different approaches you can take. Whichever one you choose, it’s vital that you at least capture their name, company, and email address. You also want to try to have as much information as you can around the type of business they are or the role they play in their organization. At most, there are around four or five fields that you’ll want to include in these lead capture forms so you can build your prospect database and transform your website to become a lead-generation engine that’s helping bring new business in the front door.
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Lily Teplow is a content marketing manager at Continuum. Read more Continuum blogs here.
