The Real Secrets to Skyrocketing Your B2B Conversion Rate

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You know the B2B buying cycle is long but why aren’t your leads ever converting into customers?

If you’ve spent most of your time generating leads without worrying about quality or vetting, there’s a good chance that your B2B conversion rate is suffering.

If so, now is a valuable time to take a step back and re-evaluate your acquisition process.

How are visitors arriving on your site? Where are you collecting email addresses? Are they engaging with your content?

Put yourself in the mindset of your visitors and everything will start falling into place.

Your Leads Need a Mobile-Friendly Experience

Your target B2B audience isn’t a bunch of boomers and generation Xers. Like it or not, you need to meet the needs of millennials and Generation Z.

As of 2015, Think with Google reported that 46% of all buyers were between the ages of 18 and 34. For B2B marketers, this means creating a user-centric experience with plenty of personalization.

Your buyers go home and workout with their fitness devices, order food through UberEATS, and binge endless streams of customized content on Netflix. Their expectations for these hyper-personalized algorithms don’t change when they come into work the next day.

Think with Google also recently reported that B2Bs spend between two and three hours each day researching brands on their mobile devices. Mobile activity influences roughly 40% of B2B revenue every year.

If that wasn’t enough, by next year, 70% of all B2B searches will take place on mobile devices.

If you want to improve your B2B conversion rate, it’s critical to create a mobile-friendly experience from start to finish. In other words, everything needs to be optimized for mobile from your web pages and blog down to your lead magnets and emails.

Source: Think with Google

7 Secrets to Improving Your B2B Conversion Rate

Now you know that improving your visitors’ mobile experience is critical to boosting your B2B conversion rate – but how can you put this into practical action?

Here are a few tips to start bringing your B2B marketing strategy and website into 2020.

1. Get Rid of Forms

Forms are holding you back. No one opens a blog post, sees a form and thinks “Oh great, I can’t wait to give another website my information just to read an article.”

The truth is, there’s absolutely no way to optimize forms for mobile devices – no matter how much you tweak your layout, change the order, and update fields – because it’s still a form.

Forms are clunky and they get in the way of leads consuming your content. Instead, give your visitors a sample of your content and ask them to provide an email address if they’d like to read the rest.

Source: Hushly

2. Create an Adaptive Content Hub

An adaptive content hub with content bingeing features can satisfy your buyer’s expectation for a Netflix-like experience and ultimately boost your B2B conversion rate.

When you get rid of forms, people will spend more time reading your content and educating themselves about your company.

Use an adaptive content hub to put all of your content together in one place:

  • Ebooks
  • Podcasts
  • Tutorials
  • Case studies
  • White papers
  • Videos

3. Give Away Your Best Content

You spend so much time and money creating amazing in-depth content for your visitors – why are you hiding it behind a form?

Instead, include your best content in your adaptive content hub.

Research shows that 78% of buyers consume between three and five pieces of content before talking to a sales team. Putting your best content on display is important for demonstrating the value of your company and the services you can provide.

4. Let Leads Nurture Themselves

The idea of self-nurturing follows into the points above.

You want to offer your visitors an experience that allows them to educate themselves about your company, industry, and the services you provide.

When you incorporate self-nurturing landing pages into your website, your B2B conversion rate will jump because leads will be further along in the sales funnel before they even reach out to your team.

5. Incorporate AI

AI and algorithms are the only way to make these features work.

When a visitor arrives at your website, an algorithm will monitor the types of content they consume in the content hub and continue offering them similar content.

Yes, AI can sound scary but it’s essential today if you want to provide the type of experience that your visitors expect.

6. Create the Content Your Audience Wants to Read

According to LinkedIn research, B2Bs aren’t out there reading white papers – 49% of them consume video during the buying process while 65% say they find podcasts valuable for learning about a brand.

It’s up to you to do your research and find out what type of content they want from you. If your B2B conversion rate is low, it may be because you’re not creating the right kind of content.

7. Only Collect High-Quality Leads

At Hushly, we use human verification to make sure our clients only receive the highest quality leads.

Collecting email addresses from everyone who visits your website doesn’t just waste resources and send you down rabbit holes, it also throws off your data.

Accurate data is at the heart of every successful personalization campaign. Sadly, over 60% of businesses say their data is either not current or correct. Using correct data to drive your personalized campaigns like email or LinkedIn retargeting is sure to make your B2B conversion rate jump.

Ditch Forms and Watch Your Leads Grow

We promise – you won’t miss forms, and neither will your leads. Getting rid of forms in favor of self-nurturing landing pages won’t only reduce your bounce rate, but it will also skyrocket your lead conversions by at least 51%.

When people aren’t bombarded with clunky forms, they’ll spend more time consuming your awesome content and educating themselves about how you can help them. When they’ve decided you’re a good fit, they’ll sign up.

See what it’s like to build a database of high-quality leads. Learn more about optimizing your lead magnets for conversions.

How to Audit B2B Marketing Strategies

B2B Marketing Strategies

Nothing is quite as frustrating as putting lots of time and money into your B2B marketing strategies only to be disappointed by their results.

However, before you go investing even more into improving your funnels, take a step back and conduct an audit first, so you can be sure of what’s wrong.

3 Ways to Audit B2B Marketing Strategies

The only way to consistently improve the ROI on your B2B marketing strategies is to continuously audit them.

Here are the three best ways to do it.

1. Audit Individual Marketing Assets

Today’s B2B marketing strategies may use any number of different assets to generate leads and nurture them towards conversions. Even social media platforms have become extremely popular in B2B industries.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all equally effective, though, which is why you should audit your company’s individual marketing assets regularly.

This seems obvious enough when you have, say, blog posts with no social shares, comments, or clicks. Clearly, that needs to be addressed ASAP, either deleted completely or updated.

A simple content audit could be all it takes to improve your conversion rates, even when it involves getting rid of whole pages on your site.

Where most B2B marketers struggle is assuming that, as long as a piece of content is bringing in leads – no matter how few – it’s doing its job. Marketers put a lot of work into creating these pieces, so they just assume that it’s doing as well as it possibly can.

Even if that was true when it was first published, its effectiveness may drop over the years for countless reasons. If there’s not a way you can improve it now, you may need to replace it with something better.

We recently talked about one of these misconceptions. It used to be that time spent on an asset led to higher sales. This was taken for granted for years until it became impossible to ignore it was no longer the case. Companies that haven’t adjusted or replaced assets designed to increase the time that leads spent on them are going to continue to see funnel problems until they do.

2. Actually Speak – and Listen – to Your Sales Department

It should come as no surprise that one of the most common ways to judge if B2B marketing strategies are working or not is to look at their conversion rate. If you know you’re generating leads, but you’re not seeing new clients, that’s a logical place to look.

Usually, this “audit” involves looking at the sales teams’ numbers relative to the amount of leads the marketing team is generating for them. If there’s a costly disparity, it’s usually assumed that the marketing department needs to be more careful about focusing on qualified leads.

The problem is that the sales department is rarely consulted for specifics. Maybe the leads are qualified, but they’re getting sent to the sales team far too early. They still need some nurturing before they’ll convert.

Maybe the problem is fraudulent contact information, an extremely common problem that often ruins the potential ROI on otherwise valuable lead magnets.

Of course, there could be a number of different issues at play, too. The only way to know for sure is to sit down with the sales department and find out what their experience is with trying to convert the leads your marketing team generates.

3. Understand Sales Velocity

Finally, this next method is absolutely essential to auditing B2B marketing strategies if for no other reason than because most marketers don’t even know what sales velocity is.

Simply put, sales velocity measures the efficiency of your marketing funnel. In other words, not just how many sales your funnel nets you, but what kind of timeframe is involved. This concept is absolutely essential for effectively auditing your funnel because it provides you the most comprehensive view of its performance.

For example, without this kind of perspective, you might think the problem is an insufficient number of leads. So, you start investing in lead-generation without realizing that it’s the average ROI and the conversion rate that’s killing you.

Fortunately, the equation for sales velocity is extremely simple. It’s:

Number of Leads x Average Deal Size x Conversion Rate Percentage

Then, take that number and divide by the average amount of time it takes to get a conversion.

This equation – not just its product – will help you better understand why your results aren’t satisfactory.

Are B2B Marketing Strategies Falling Apart Right at the End?

Finally, if you’ve checked every other box on your B2B marketing strategies but are still losing qualified leads after they visit your site, it’s time to start using Hushly.

We are so confident in our platform that we actually guarantee a 51% increase in lead-generation and ABM conversions. Contact us today to find out why.

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