Websites are a marketing staple, they have been for years. Shawn Cabral, marketing director at Sitecore UK offers advice on making the most of the sales potential from your site
Research from Sitecore in conjunction with B2B Marketing shows B2B marketers know that their website is the main touch point for prospects wanting the find out more about their business, but 80 per cent of sales orders still come through via phone calls, faxes or emails.
Fifty per cent of B2B marketers report that less than 10 per cent of their sales orders come via their website, but 56 per cent of marketers say generating sales leads (and sales) is their primary objective for their website.
Our research shows that much of the website content B2B marketers feature on their website is focused around the core basics – the ‘about us’ section, product information, case studies and testimonials. All of which will give an effective overview of what a company does, but the visitor’s website journey will typically stop at that point. B2B marketers need to work on the next stage of this journey, how to engage the visitor more effectively and how to work towards a ‘conversion’ goal, such as providing contact details, downloading relevant content or even making a purchase from the website.
Below are some pointers on how to begin to use websites more effectively as a sales lead generation engine, and convert more website visits into something more meaningful for your business.
1. First impressions matter
If you know your web visitor has come from a search engine and is looking for a specific product or service, use this information to show content on the first page they see that is relevant to that search. This will help to reduce bounce rates away from your site as the visitor will see exactly what they were searching for.
2. Make it easy
Some brands report 30-40 per cent of traffic to their website comes from mobile devices, but from our research, 46 per cent of B2B marketers rate their website experience on mobile devices as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. If your web visitor struggles with your site on a mobile device, they will more than likely simply leave and increase your bounce rates. Using tools such as GEO-IP location look-up to see where your visitor comes from can help to show local information that may be useful to them, such as their nearest store.
3. Establish conversion goals
What would you like your visitors to do on your site? The more you orchestrate their visit towards meaningful goals for your site, the more likely you will achieve these goals. If you want to capture contact data, how do you begin to drive this, what steps does the visitor go through to leave contact data, what is their incentive to do this?
4. Not all the same
Our research shows that B2B marketers actively segment their prospects by organisation size, vertical or seniority of the prospect. However, on their websites, most B2B companies will present the same content for every visitor. Give opportunities on your site for your visitors to tell you which vertical they represent or what the size of their business is. If you sell to many vertical sectors, once you know which sector is of interest to a particular visitor, you can present content tailored specifically to that sector – such as just showing automotive, rather than 20 other sectors.
5. Continue the conversation
Prospects who are interested in your business will probably return to your website a few times during their research. If you know they are a returning visitor, use the knowledge you have about the visitor and their previous visits to deepen the conversation with new, relevant content and start to introduce calls-to-action. Similar to a prospect who visits a sales showroom multiple times, this shows the prospect is interested in your brand and could be moving towards a purchase.
6. Sell on the site
Our research shows that half of B2B marketers report they get less than 10 per cent of sales from their website. As the growth in ecommerce shows, more and more consumers want to buy online. This trend is crossing over into B2B. Maybe
your competitors are selling directly from their website. If you feel your product or service could be sold from your website,
this could open a huge revenue stream for your business to not only generate sales leads but convert them to actual sales on your site.
Delivering a more effective customer experience online is an integral part of attracting and nurturing sales leads and generating sales through digital channels. Following these pointers will help your brand to achieve more on your website and start to use digital as a lead generation engine, with six out of 10 B2B marketers planning to focus on digital lead generation in 2014.
