The 10 reasons your B2B conversion optimisation strategy is failing

The answer is conversion optimisation. With the right set of tactics, you can increase the percentage of website visitors who ultimately convert. Unfortunately, many B2B marketers find themselves plagued with a low conversion rate despite their optimisation attempts.

What could account for this, and what steps can you take to correct this issue?

The Most Common Problems in Conversion Optimisation

When most B2B marketers experience issues when optimising for conversions, the root cause is one of these 10 problems:

1. You’re targeting the wrong audience (or no audience at all). First, you may be targeting the wrong audience, or worse, having no target audience in mind. This problem applies both to your traffic generation strategy and to the framing of your onsite calls-to-action (CTAs). If your messaging isn’t relevant to a specific audience, it’s not going to be persuasive. Make sure you do the demographic research necessary to better understand your target market, and craft your messaging to be specific to them.
2. Your content is low quality. It could also be that your content is too low quality. If you write about your products and services in an unskilled way, or if there are critical mistakes in your other onsite content, it could leave visitors with a bad impression—making them unwilling to convert.
3. Your calls-to-action (CTAs) aren’t visible. People will only convert if they can find your CTAs. If your CTAs are hard to see due to their positioning, color, or other factors, your conversion rate is going to suffer.
4. Your pitch is uncompelling. Most conversions include a pitch, especially if you’re selling products or services. What are the benefits of making this purchase, and who are these products and services “right” for? If you’re not able to make a compelling pitch, people won’t make the purchase.
5. There’s no incentive to convert. If your conversion involves filling out a form rather than making a purchase, the incentives could be the issue. If you want people to hand over their personal information, you need to give them something in return—like a piece of premium content.
6. People distrust your brand. Visitors will only convert if they trust your brand. Reviews, testimonials, and onsite trust badges are all great ways to increase trust—even among visitors who have never heard of your brand before.
7. The costs are too high. About 61 percent of consumers abandon shopping carts due to high costs. If you’re charging too much for the product, or if you’re demanding too much personal information in exchange for a piece of content, visitors will walk away.
8. It’s too hard to convert. Onsite visitors will only be willing to convert if the process is easy; they tend to be impatient, and they thrive on convenience. If your conversion process takes too many steps, or if it’s confusing in any way, your conversion rates will suffer.
9. You aren’t using AB tests. AB tests allow you to create two similar instances of a webpage with slightly different variables. With this framework, you can run an experiment and figure out which of those variables lead to more conversions. Without AB tests, you’ll have no meaningful way to improve.
10. Your AB tests are inconsistent (or generating bad data). That said, AB tests aren’t an automatic win for your brand. If your tests are inconsistent, or if you’re collecting data incorrectly, it could compromise your results.

What Next?

Let’s say you’ve taken all these potential problems into account, and you’ve taken corrective action to improve your approach—but you still aren’t seeing higher conversion rates. What can you do now?

First, make sure you keep experimenting. As long as you keep tweaking variables like photos, copy, headlines, benefits, and CTAs, you should eventually stumble upon a set of variables that works. However, if your conversion rates are suspiciously low, it may be a sign of a different problem; for example, your product may not be as appealing as you thought it was, or there may be a problem with the flow of traffic you’re sending to your site.

Successful B2B marketing requires the coordination of many different channels, and the adjustment of hundreds of little variables, so it’s hard to diagnose or predict every potential problem. Make sure you work with a professional marketing firm or a marketing consultant if you continue to have issues.