What we want is for our website visitors to contact us, to engage with us, and to buy – Aka – Convert! For a lot of marketers, this means we wait for them to call us, or wait for them to book a tour/appointment, or wait for them to visit our “Contact Us” page and fill out a form. That’s a whole lot of waiting isn’t it? Tom Petty wasn’t lying when he said “the waiting is the hardest part”, because if we wait, we could be waiting for our competition to steal our prospects away.https://hawthorncreative.com/website-audit/

What we should be doing is creating conversion opportunities at every stage of our users’ buying journey. Not just creating one conversion point for the “ready to buy” folks, but for everyone. With so much technology at our fingertips, the power is the hands of the buyer. They won’t do anything until they are ready. So let’s take some of that power back and start up some sales conversions now, rather than wait around.

If filling out the contact form is for the “I want to talk to a human” users, then what about the “I’m just browsing” or “I want to learn more about your products or services but I don’t want to speak to an actual person, so give me more information that I can consume on my own” users? We need conversion points for all these users, and you’d be surprised at how many people fall into the latter category.

So how do we create conversions for the cool or lukewarm prospects? After all, leads don’t become hot without warming up first. Here are a few ideas that everyone can do right now to start generating more leads from across the buyer’s journey and start creating sales opportunities a little earlier than if you waited.

Newsletter Sign Ups – This one is simple – just asking for an email address is an extremely low barrier of entry that lets your user know they can expect to receive interesting content from you that will help solve their problem or fulfill their need.

Gated Content – Or content that requires a form submission to access. Have a pricing guide or brochure? Perfect! Throw this up on the site behind a gated form. If you can clearly explain that there is valuable content in this guide or brochure that cannot be found on your website, your users will be more than happy to submit their information to get it.

Schedule a Tour (or Virtual Tour) – For the venues out there, this might as well say “Schedule a Tour and Get a Proposal” but just simply changing up the CTA language can do wonders. If someone is really interested in your event space that they want to come see it in person, sounds like a hot lead to me.

Even if you keep these conversion forms simple and all you get is a name and email address, that is plenty of ammo for your sales team to reach out and connect (via automated or manual methods) to start a dialog. They might not be at the “ready to buy” stage, but if your sales team is any good, you can slowly get them there.

Well there ya go, assign some analytics conversion goals to these forms, and start spending more time selling and less time waiting.

Dan Seitz is the Director of Strategy at Hawthorn Creative and has helped execute marketing strategies for clients from all over the hospitality industry. He has seen Armageddon a hundred times (probably).