As your organization’s virtual face to the outside world of potential clients and customers, a business website should feature many distinctive characteristics. Obviously, it should have a clean, professional look. Certainly, it should be updated frequently. In that regard, I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know. Those are table-stakes; the bare minimum.
But are enough organizations truly maximizing the potential of their sites so they serve as the 24-7, 365 online business development and sales lead generator they have the potential to be? 
Plenty of websites generate one-time visitors. But traffic in and of itself doesn’t move the needle in terms of new clients or customers. Just as we have written about quality trumping quantity in terms of content for your website, you need to make sure the quality of the visitors in terms of their value to your organization ranks higher than the number of people simply kicking the tires in a one-off visit. The content you create must be compelling enough to convert visitors into legitimate sales leads. This philosophy goes to the heart of why we at WordWrite and so many of our industry peers have increasingly become proponents of inbound marketing.
According to HubSpot, 60 percent of your sales cycle is over before a buyer ever talks to your salespeople. Therefore, you need to give your target markets a reason to return to your website over and over again. Constantly speak to the people in charge of purchasing or buying decisions in the ways they want to receive information and in the spaces they want to view it.
Your content must demonstrate a keen understanding of how to solve industry-specific problems, not thump your chest about how great you and your products are. But the content offered is only half the equation. It’s not valuable unless it gets in the hands of people who make purchasing decisions. That’s why landing pages and calls to action (CTAs) that make clear paths to converting visitors into leads matter so much.
For the uninitiated, landing pages are designed to convert website visitors into leads. To paraphrase HubSpot, they are your digital sales reps gathering information and tracking prospect activity 24 hours a day. You want landing page visitors to look at specific content being offered, determine its value to them, and then leave their contact information in order to download or obtain the information.
The content offers you provide on your landing page need to be divided up according to three stages of the buying process: performing research, recognition of a need for the type of solution you can provide, and ready to buy. It’s also sometimes easier to frame these as “top of the funnel,” “middle of the funnel” and “bottom of the funnel.”
The offers associated with the “top of the funnel” might include whitepapers, tip sheets, e-books or videos, while “middle of the funnel” offers might be free webinars, case studies or product specific sheets. “Bottom of the funnel” offer examples could be free trials, demos, consultations or quotes.
Inbound marketing best practices dictate most of the content created should fall into the “top of the funnel” category. That way, you can cast the biggest net over the largest possible number of potential qualified leads to start guiding them through the sales process. These folks haven’t yet recognized your organization is best suited to provide necessary solutions, and they also aren’t ready to buy.
Landing page success depends not only on the quality of the content being offered on each page, it also relies on the ability of CTAs to drive traffic to the landing page in the first place.
CTAs are buttons created for the sole purpose of taking website visitors to landing pages. Ideally, you should have a CTA on every single page of your website. It’s a missed opportunity if you don’t offer a way for someone to take the next step on your site. Examples of a CTA include, “Download our free whitepaper on topic X” or “Click here to see 10 simple steps to X or Y.”
As you likely surmised, CTAs must be relevant to the content on the website pages where they’re located. Otherwise, no one will click them. They’re on that page for a reason—to help them move farther down that discovery path.
And even though CTAs lead to landing pages, landing page creation and content offer creation come first in the inbound process. You need to create content offers with solutions for industry problems, build landing pages that lead to these offers and develop CTAs to take people to the landing pages where the content sits. Create backward to move visitors forward on your site.
This post barely scratches the surface in terms of the ways landing pages and CTAs can turn visitors into leads and leads into customers. Bottom line: HubSpot estimates building 1 to 15 landing pages will result in 100 sales leads and adding 40 landing pages can provide between 400-500 leads.
Fresh content is always critical, but you need an organized, measurable method to move visitors down the path to find that content. Only at that point will they have the necessary information to determine whether you’re the best resource to solve their problems and look to hire you for help.
Click here to download an introductory guide to building landing pages from our friends at HubSpot.
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Jeremy Church is an account supervisor for WordWrite Communications. He can be reached at jeremy.church@wordwritepr.com and on Twitter @churchjeremy. 
