If you are a B2B marketer you have probably found yourself asking at least one of these questions.
Why have our website leads started to decline?
We are B2B focused not B2C… will mobile optimization really help us garner more opportunities?
How can I increase the quality of our leads for our sales team?
Perhaps you have even asked all of these questions, but you have yet to make much progress in garnering more leads through your website. Rest assured, you are not alone. Even the most seasoned of marketing pros have a tough time staying out ahead of the best practices for increasing lead conversions on their websites. Not too surprisingly, the B2B Technology Marketing Community reports that the biggest challenge over 61% of B2B marketers face is generating high-quality sales qualified leads.
Yes, the process of having all angles covered on your site and achieving your best possible chances for sales qualified web conversions will require a bit of strategy, design, and testing. So to make things easier, we have laid out 7 commonly overlooked areas where your B2B website might be losing valuable lead conversions. We even included a few tips on how to get back on the right track
1. Poor CTA’s (Call-to-Action)
You have managed to get users and potential prospects to your site awesome! You may have even created great content and a compelling reason for your site visitors to reach out to you or buy. However, you might have forgotten to provide an easy to locate and intuitive call to action to convert that user into a warm lead. By now this user might have gotten antsy and left your site in hopes of finding what or who they were looking for elsewhere. This may seem unfortunate as it is obvious of a fix, but you would be surprised to find out that that 42% of offer-related graphics on landing pages are not clickable. (MarketingSherpa)
Tips to Improve: Make sure that each of your CTAs is visually captivating and that the copy compels users to click on the offer. KISS, keep it simple and describe your CTA with no more than 4 or 5 words. Finally, make sure that your CTA contrasts your web page in an easy to find spot with a clear action-oriented verb like “download” or “subscribe”.
2. Too much text, not enough compelling visuals
All too often B2B websites are stuffed with bulky text that is so overwhelming it loses a user’s attention and while also subsequently reducing the chance to generate a lead. There is a delicate balance between providing enough substance for prospects to learn about you and keeping their attention. A great way to keep users engaged as they evaluate your services up until they are willing to provide their information is to communicate your offerings in a more visual manner.
Did you know that Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text? Visuals have been found to improve learning by up to 400 percent.
Tips to Improve: Don’t be afraid to utilize the power of white space, give your messaging and visuals room to breathe. This helps make your content look less intimidating and much more digestible. Also be sure to add multimedia to your text—this could be high-quality images, infographics, or explainer videos. Companies have been able to increase lead conversion rates by 20% thanks to explainer videos, according to Unbounce.
3. Lacking a clear headline and unique value prop
You might be surprised how quickly first impressions are formed the second visitors arrive at your website. The very first thing that they see are your headlines and your unique value proposition. If you haven’t made it clear on your homepage or key landing pages why exactly your visitors should do business with you and the benefits thereafter, then they simply won’t.
Below is an example of one IT Solution company that decided to not use a headline of any sort on their homepage. They surely didn’t showcase their unique value proposition either by claiming “we fix everything”.
On the other hand, OneNeck IT Solutions did a much better job in displaying their unique value proposition in their header with an action driven CTA to capture those valuable leads.
Quick Tips to Improve: Over at the American Writers & Artists, their trainers teach the “Four U’s” approach to writing headlines:
1) Urgent – Create a sense of urgency in your B2B website headlines or subheadings.
2) Unique – Make sure you are clearly communicating your unique value prop so users don’t get lost in the sea of the competition.
3) Useful – Convey the utility your products or services have to offer, and don’t be afraid to be BOLD.
4) Ultra-Specific – Don’t just tell your clients you are their “go-to IT provider”. Be specific and tell them why you are best as implementing the best in class cyber security solutions for Fortune 1000 companies.
4. Non-Mobile Optimized Web Site
In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of research and commerce happening by B2B buyers on mobile devices. This may be a no-brainer because if you are reading this blog there is about a 46% chance you are reading from a mobile device. What you probably don’t know is how your B2B web presence is being crippled from a lack mobile optimization, ultimately stymying your chances for lead generation.
In recent research by B2B Inbound Marketing experts Axon Garside, it was revealed that 52% of B2B customers are using smartphone to research products for their business, but there is still a staggering 47% of B2B business that have yet to take advantage of a mobile optimized website. A mobile optimized website means much more than just trying to keep up with the competition, it means creating a great user experience for your visitors when they explore your site away from their PC’s or laptops. Those same users are 67% more likely to purchase from a mobile-friendly site.
Quick Tips to Improve: Consider building your site on a CMS like WordPress that has a number of themes and plugins that allow for a fully responsive, mobile-optimized browsing experience. Also, make sure that on the landing pages that you are trying to convert leads and that you know which elements you should choose to show or to hide. When choosing those elements, make sure that you don’t leave out your call-to-action buttons, or else you may miss out on valuable leads.
5. Slow page load speed
Nowadays, users expect a seamless experience when visiting a website. You might have a great website waiting for them to explore, with rich content, and a compelling reason to do business with you—but if you have slower than normal page load speeds, you have failed to create a seamless web experience and you are likely to have more bounced visitors. Now when it comes to page load speed and missed web conversions, the facts below speak for themselves.
A study by Aberdeen Group showed that a one second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. According to a Radware study, “A site that loads in three seconds experiences 22 percent fewer page views, a 50 percent higher bounce rate, and 22 percent fewer conversions than a site that loads in one second, while a site that loads in five seconds experiences 35 percent fewer page views, a 105 percent higher bounce rate, and 38 percent fewer conversions.”
Quick Tips to Improve: First, use a page speed analyzer tool to analyze the current page load speed of your website. There are a bunch of free tools out there, at FLX we use Google PageSpeed Insights. This will help you benchmark and make sure the improvements you are making are actually boosting your page load speed. Three quick and easy speed fixes include: optimizing and resizing your images, enable web page caching on your CMS, and fix all broken links on your website. You will be surprised with the positive effect just these fixes can have on your page load speed.
6. Lacking downloadable content and resources
Many B2B marketers approach their web marketing strategy with a majority of the focus on getting prospects to their site. It would be great if page views alone paid the bills, but unfortunately, that is not that case. In many cases, your visitors are early in the research phase of their buying cycle and may simply be looking for information to gather and review when they have time to fully absorb the content.
If you don’t provide quality downloadable resources on your website such as e-books, guides, case studies, white papers, brochures, etc., you may be losing a great opportunity to capture leads and build relationships with prospects early on. Forrester Research, Inc. teaches us that B2B buyers are anywhere from 70%-90% through the buyer journey before contacting a vendor. These are the same buyers who are consuming easy to download content throughout their vendor evaluation process.
If your website appears credible and has valuable content that is easy to download for visitors, they will gladly exchange their contact details for your resources.
Below is one example of a free Internet Marketing how-to-guide from HubSpot.
Quick Tips: Start off with taking a look at the case studies or collateral you have already created and see how you might repurpose that information into downloadable content that your visitors will value. Turning a client testimonial into a downloadable case study might very well be worth the time spent designing and hosting online for lead capture. It is best practice to make sure that your opt-in resources are hosted on pages that align with the offerings your ideal customers are gravitating towards.
7. Failing to A/B test your site
So you have just launched your newly redesigned website, and now it’s time to kick up your feet, sit back and watch the leads rain in. Maybe in a few months, you can look under the hood and take a peek at your web analytics… Well, this probably isn’t the best approach if you want to make sure you are squeezing as much potential to generate leads from your site as you can. We recommend that upon launch you have your top lead generation pages ready for A/B Testing.
What is A/B site testing? A/B testing is a strategy of comparing two different versions of a web page against each other to figure out which one performs better. In the case of generating B2B web leads, this can mean testing everything from page titles, images, call to action button placement, and all the way down to the nitty gritty stuff like CTA button colors and copy.
The goal here is to make sure that you are continually evaluating which variation provides the best lead conversion opportunity. “Testing takes the guesswork out ofwebsite optimization and enables data-informed decisions that shift business conversations from, “we think” to “we know.”
Quick Tips to Improve: As you prepare to launch your site, spend a little extra time with your design and development team to create a measurable plan of attack for A/B testing. One really cool tool that will help you further analyze the on page user experience is LuckyOrange. With this tool, you can see exactly how many people are on your site, how they found you, and most importantly what their page by page mouse navigation looks like. Pretty cool right?
These 7 tips should help you get on a solid path to unlock your B2B websites lead generation potential. If you have any questions or you need helping improving lead generation for your website, feel free to reach out to us info@flxinteractive.com
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