Marketing is like a game of baseball. Your marketing channels are the bases you want B2B traffic to touch. However, a phenomenal swing using SEO and social media to generate traffic doesn’t guarantee a home run sale.
So, what can you do to help those hits go further, so your traffic is more likely to make it home to a sale?
The strategy you have in place to turn your website traffic into B2B leads and those leads into customers is conversion rate optimization.
Use this B2B conversion rate optimization checklist to update your website and strategies for converting traffic to B2B conversions.
Weed Out Traditional Strategies That Don’t Work Anymore
Before you can build a B2B conversion rate optimization strategy that works, you must weed out any tactics that no longer reach your leads.
You can know if your conversion rates are optimal by comparing them to past performance and similar industries. The average conversion rate across industries is 2.9%. However, B2B account-based marketing usually produces higher conversion rates.
Image from Ruler Analytics
Here are a few outdated B2B conversion rate optimization strategies to review:
Creating Too Many Forms
Businesses WANT conversions. That’s the goal. Yet, often, websites make visitors jump through many unnecessary hoops. Adding multiple steps, long forms, and gated content during every stage of the conversion process can do more harm than good. It may discourage leads from signing up or engaging with content they’re interested in.
The first step to optimizing your website is opening it up to more people.
Manually Converting Customers
Manually managing conversion strategies can reduce your conversion rate. When you restrict yourself to manual processes, you limit your response timeframe, personalization ability, and the number of leads you can handle.
Offering the Same Experience for Everyone
All your customers are unique and will respond better to a customized experience on your website. When each customer, whether the company’s CEO or a financial decision maker, enters your website to the same landing page and content, you won’t connect with those visitors as well as when you offer unique journeys with curated content.
6 Crucial Steps for Your B2B Conversion Rate Optimization Checklist
Once you identify the outdated strategies, you can begin updating and replacing them. Here is a checklist of conversion rate optimization best practices to get you started.
Step 1: Streamline the Conversion Process
Since you removed unnecessary gates, how will you convert website traffic?
Hushly offers a mini form that’s quick and convenient for visitors to fill out without interrupting the browsing experience. Only one to three fields are necessary to collect the lead’s name and email. The rest of the information comes from visitor behavior and analytics.
For example, an email tells AI whether the lead is a business contact or consumer, helping you identify those B2B leads. Their behavior, such as what content they read, tells you their interest level and needs.
Because we offer multi-asset browsing, once a lead fills out a form, they can view endless content, allowing you to collect more lead information. We also allow visitors to fill out the form AFTER consuming content, which helps you build trust with your B2B leads before asking them to trust you with their information.
Step 2: Target Your Ideal Customer
You’re most interested in numbers if you’re building awareness or generating website traffic. You want to reach the maximum number of readers with your content through ads. However, once you begin focusing on conversion, your goal is to sort through that traffic and identify those most likely to become customers or clients.
To target potential clients, begin with creating an ideal customer profile. This includes who the decision maker is within your target companies, plus firmographic information such as the industry and company size.
Once you understand your ideal customers, you can create targeted content for each of those customers. You can attract those customers through specific niche keywords and connect with them through common pain points and relevant solutions. Those targeted website visitors are the ones most ready to convert.
Step 3: Design Unique Landing Pages
The B2B landing page is a crucial step in the conversion process. When visitors arrive on your site’s homepage, you can have little to no control over where they go, how long they stay, and what they do while on your website.
When you create landing pages, you give them a guided tour of your website by highlighting the most relevant content and offers. You also provide the next steps in their browsing experience to point them directly toward conversion.
Landing pages will become even more essential as more B2B companies offer ecommerce experiences. A 2023 survey showed that 74% of B2B marketers expect half of their sales to come from their websites.
A landing page should have several elements, including:
- No distractions: Remove the navigation bar and other distractions that may keep them from taking the desired action.
- Conversion content: While you want them to take action, like filling out a form, don’t forget to add conversion content that builds trust and tells them why they should act. Hushly’s landing pages will personalize the conversion content based on each landing page visitor.
- A highlighted action: Make the desired conversion action front and center. You can use a large button or colors to bring attention to it. You should also keep it above the fold, so visitors see the action without scrolling.
- A secondary action: If visitors begin scrolling and reach the end of the landing page without acting, there’s a chance they’re not convinced. Instead of losing those leads, offer a secondary action that requires less commitment but still allows you to connect with the visitor.
Step 4: Personalize the Browsing Experience
Your website is packed with quality, targeted content. To ensure the right website visitors see the most relevant content, you must create a personalized browsing experience. B2B customers in 2023 expect personalization.
Hushly’s automated system creates unique experiences for each visitor based on their behavior. As visitors interact with more content, our tools can better make recommendations based on the content they interact with.
Step 5: Segment Your Audience
Once you collect the B2B leads from your website, it’s time for your home run.
Each audience takes a slightly different route to conversion. The road to conversion depends on their point in the buyer’s journey, how long their decision-making process takes within the company, and their needs.
To account for these variances, B2B audience segmentation is crucial for B2B conversion rate optimization. So, the next part of your conversion rate optimization checklist is dividing the B2B leads you generate into groups based on similar characteristics. This allows you to customize your conversion strategies based on those similarities and know when to begin the conversion process based on their intent.
Step 6: Automate Conversions
Use automation to increase conversion rates and avoid limiting yourself to your manual capabilities. Automation keeps the conversion process moving. You can use automation to sort leads, send marketing emails, and customize experiences.
Automation not only has speed on its side, but it also has data. It can be more personalized for each lead than manually contacting them. Therefore, you can expand your marketing processes, even complex account-based marketing campaigns, using automated tasks.
Time to Update Conversion Rate Optimization for B2B Companies
The world is changing, and so should conversion rate optimization strategies. Use this checklist to audit your current conversion rate processes and replace them with updated tactics that use automation and personalization to turn more web traffic into home runs.
Get our FREE personalized demo to learn more about how Hushly increases conversion rates.
