B2B Digital Marketing Strategy, Part 1:
5 Things You Should Change on Your Website Today to Make More Sales
You’ve spent months doing marketing research, pitching to investors and raising capital, building a team of ninjas and improving your stellar product. You finally had a great launch, got some PR, spent an equivalent of a good salary on Facebook and Google Ads… and then you got stuck. It’s not that you got it all wrong, but sales figures do miss a zero at the end, compared to your predictions that seemed so achievable at the beginning of the year.
The questions of how to grow your business and outperform competitors keep you up all night. Should you hire that “rock star CMO” from the US your friend mentioned to you on LinkedIn? But it’s only June and you’ve already gone through 3/4 of your yearly marketing budget, you can’t afford another huge expense right now. Yet, you need a new digital marketing strategy and you need it fast.
Luckily you’ve discovered the SAGE Marketing blog, so sit back and relax. We’re going to share with you the secret sauce of effective marketing techniques and underline exactly what you should focus on to win over your customers. The first blog post of the B2B Digital Marketing Strategy series will talk about improving your website’s performance and conversion rates.
Quick Wins: Take a Look at Your Website
Every company’s website has only one major goal – to convert visitors into customers. Trendy design elements, unique fonts, and flashy infographics don’t matter if your webpages don’t help you generate sales at the end of the day. After working with numerous startups and helping them significantly boost their websites’ conversion rates, here’s our golden checklist:
1. Keep SEO in mind every step of the way. Following the recent design trends is great, but it doesn’t mean that you can forget about keywords, page titles, backlinks, etc that are important for your business. Is your web designer insists on a hamburger menu, and throwing in some buzzwords you don’t fully understand? It can sound like a good choice, consistent with your brand voice, but what you might not know is that minimalistic design, for example, can lead to a lack of discoverability of your content, which means lower engagement, which means less revenue for your company. So make sure you have an SEO specialist on board that will do a good job optimizing your website’s pages. The aim is for your business to show up before competitors in Google search for organic traffic.
2. Make your value proposition clear. You know what products and solutions your company is offering. But it doesn’t mean that your website’s visitors will understand it too. Make sure that within a couple of seconds of looking at your homepage, a potential customer is crystal clear on what value your business is bringing to them. Otherwise, they’re likely to close your website as quickly as they opened it (high bounce rates will also damage your Google rankings) and might never find out that your product was the perfect solution for their needs. At SAGE this is usually one of the first things we do for our clients, and the results we achieve in boosting conversion rates clearly justify the effort. The extra advantage is that unlike your in-house team, we take a fresh look from the outside that makes spotting these problems easier.
3. Use credibility triggers to assure users that your product or service is the best at addressing their pain points. Case studies, testimonials, as well as your existing customers’ logos play an essential role in establishing initial trust with your target audience without which your sales team will have a very hard time doing their job well. For optimum results, these credibility triggers should be an integral part of your content strategy and be easily found on your homepage. Using a video format for testimonials or use cases is an even better idea, which is why we implemented it for Octopai and many other clients.
Overall, this means that as a business owner you must not underestimate the value of content and dedicate a sufficient part of your marketing budget to it.
4. Optimize your landing pages. Rule number one – keep it personal. You should always make different landing pages for different audiences. If you think about it, you’ll often realize that in fact, you’re trying the sell the same product to two types of buyer personas: those who know they need your solution and those who don’t know why what you do can be of interest to them. In the first case, your landing page copy should be shorter, and the offer and the price should be immediately apparent. You don’t need to convince users to buy, you need to convince them to buy from YOU, so always include those testimonials. In the second case, your landing page copy should be longer and more educational, while the price should not necessarily be stated.
5. Make it really obvious what your website visitors are supposed to do. There is very little point in spending a lot of money promoting your brand through expensive marketing campaigns, paid advertisement, PR, tradeshows, etc. if your website is a mess and users have to make an effort to find relevant information. Probably the most frustrating out of all the issues is not being able to find the Contact Us information quickly. A simple contact form placed at the top of your homepage in the so-called “above the fold” section can boost conversion rates by 2-3%. You can also try a callback request widget or a calendar tool to offer visitors booking a meeting online with one of your sales team representatives straight away.
Once you’ve made these important improvements, there are always other essential tasks to tackle on your website. Did your team produce a killer e-book or a whitepaper? Make sure this content is well presented and easily located on your website. On the other hand, you might want to make some of this content gated, helping your business generate new leads. Did your product team create a solution brief with valuable information about your product? Ensure that your competitors won’t be able to download it, by investing in marketing automation tools like Hubspot, which is also a great solution for your CRM and sales teams.
Does your company have a blog? You wouldn’t believe how many companies make it almost impossible to actually subscribe to this blog! We recommend placing a creative CTA (call-to-action) button in the website’s footer offering visitors to leave their email and receive essential news or industry updates, thus giving you a chance to take your potential customers through a nurturing journey until they are ready to make their purchase with you. But it goes without saying that they will only be inclined to do it if browsing your website was a pleasant and useful experience, meaning you already took all the steps above.
Hiring a good web designer, programmer, SEO specialist, social media manager, content writer, digital marketing manager, and of course a marketing director to manage them all (besides a lot of other responsibilities), might seem like a daunting task, especially if you are a young startup that juggles a million tasks a day. The SAGE team offers a full suite of marketing services and more to help you grow your business and stay ahead of the curve, so you can focus on what you do best. Want to know more?
