So you drive traffic to the web site. Then What?
One of the most important responsibilities of an HR supplier's marketing department is to generate qualified leads for the sales team. More often than not, the marketing tactics that best support lead generation (e.g., direct email marketing, SEO) drive traffic to a company's website. Once the traffic arrives at your website, the job of the lead-generating tactic has ended (and succeeded). Now, it is up to the website as to whether or not these visitors turn into a lead and to what extent they are qualified. And unfortunately this is where most suppliers fail.
An effective B2B website must be designed to convert traffic into leads. It is alarming how many vendor websites are not properly designed for collecting leads. Many fail to have the basics including: "Sign up for our eNewsletter," "Download our latest White Paper," "Take a Demo of Our Product/Service," "Get the RSS feed for our Blog," "Sign up for our latest Webinar," etc. These "action items" should be front and center on a website's welcome page as a way to get prospects to give you their contact information. The primary purpose of your website is to turn traffic into leads.
A great "before" and "after" example of these points is provided by Marketing Experiments utilizing a landing page. Marketing Experiments shows how conversion rates improved by more than 40% when a company redesigned their landing page associated with a direct marketing campaign. See the before page and then check out the after page, and then see the details of what this company did to improve their landing page.