Conversion Rate Optimisation For B2B – Part 1

The biggest challenge B2B marketers have regarding lead generation is generating high quality leads, and that’s a fact.

Why does this happen?

This is what we’ll find out in this chapter.

• What mistakes beginners make
• How to identify what your starting point should be and what questions you’ll need answers to before getting started with CRO
• How to leverage the traffic you already have to increase conversions
• How to use surveys to find out more about your audience and personalise their experience
• How to ultimately convert more leads from your existing traffic

 

Avoid Making Novice Mistakes Before You Start Doing CRO For Your Website

How would you go about starting conversion optimisation for your website?

You could go onto Google and just check the lists of things to test, right? Or, you could just find a bunch of blog posts with extensive lists of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) techniques.

If we implement all 100 ideas at once, we’ll get this:

And yes, there is a site like this! Most of us don’t want that. At least I hope not anyway.

OK, so, we can’t do that; instead, we need to implement A/B testing. Just to test what works and what doesn’t work quite right.

Easy.

Not really. Running A/B tests to look at traffic alone can take about 4 weeks on average. If we have 100 things to test, it might take 7 and a half years to finish everything.

Not a good idea as digital marketing moves very fast.

What about CRO checklists?

They are useful, but they are just a starting point. Things that seem simple to implement with a click of a button, such as just taking a look at some checklists, are all BS. If it were that easy, we would all be millionaires.

Source: Moz.com

What about best practices?

Best landing page, best product page, best pricing page, and so on. They are useful, but again, they are just a starting point.

When you’re designing the first version of your website, best practices are where you start, not where you end up. There’s a huge difference there.

What about design trends?

We could look at all kinds of cool websites for inspirational ideas.

Such as using ghost buttons that we want people to click, but they are made to be less visible.

Not a good idea.

Or including video backgrounds on your website. They sound fun, but they distract people from what you’re offering as they’re watching what’s going on in the background.

What about copying market leaders?

Can we just copy them? For example, Amazon is doing well, and so is Netflix.

In the US, Amazon’s subscriber conversion rate for Prime is 74%. What is yours? 5%? So the difference is 15 times greater.

Is Amazon’s design or copy 50 times better than yours?

I don’t think so.

So, believing that Amazon’s success is down to its copy and design and that we could just rip it off is just naive. The world doesn’t work like that.

And copying your competition is not a good idea either. Most probably, they are copying someone else too.

So what do we do in this case?

How can we sustainably and continuously improve our conversions?

The most important thing in CRO is discovering what matters.

To find out what matters, we need to know WHAT the problems are and WHERE to find them.

In my opinion, we need to start making sure that we have a clear system in place.

Keep reading and we’ll go through some of the main steps for building a simple, useful system that you can start implementing right away.

source: Omniconvert

Nowadays, we have lots of information and a plethora of data, but the biggest problems we have in our businesses is that we don’t know how to organise and analyse that data.

We don’t necessarily need more traffic to our website or to create more content; we just need to make sure that the value we are adding is relevant for our audience and that it is converting.

So, you need to ask yourself a few things before getting started.

Ask and answer these questions before you start diving into CRO:

• Whose problem are you solving?
• What do they need?
• What do they think they need? Why?
• How are they choosing / making a decision? Why?
• What are they thinking when they see your offer?
• How is what you’ll be selling clearly different?
• Where is the site leaking money?
• What is the problem?
• What are they doing or not doing on the website?
• What leads more people to do X?

Make sure you ask yourself these questions before you get started with the rest of what you’ll be learning in this chapter of the guide.

There are 4 things that you need to do in order to get the most leads from your traffic. This is what we’ll be talking about here:

1. Getting real insights into your audience
2. Using the good old Pareto principle to understand your buyer persona
3. Developing an ongoing process to A/B test your landing pages
4. Re-engaging visitors with exit-intent

Get Real Insights Into Your Audience

We covered a lot in Chapter 2, where we talked about How To Do Market And Competitor Analysis For Your B2B Business.

There are some additional pieces of information that I would like you to look at regarding conversion rate optimisation for your website.

The first stage is to get real insights into your audience.

What kind of sources do you use to get this information?

We get our insights from:

• Web Analytics
• Surveys
• UX Audits

Get Data From Your Audience Using Web Analytics

The first thing to do is to figure out the whys and to get the right insights into your audience.

The first source you could work with is Google Analytics, or any other analytics tool that you might use. This could be Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, etc.

We went into detail on how you can get Demographics And Geography Insights in Chapter 2. Go back and read it carefully so that you know what data to look at before going ahead with CRO.

Make sure that you understand this data very well.

Get Qualitative Insights Into Your Audience Using Surveys

Now, one of the most important data resources that you should think about when optimising your website is surveys.

Surveys are crucial for getting qualitative insights into your audience and for optimising your website based on this information.

User Experience Audits – UX Audits

Here, we are looking at the flow of how you present the content on your website, so that you know what you need to change or what things you want test out.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, as UX Audits could be covered in a separate guide all of its own. If you want to learn more about it, I would recommend reading this article on Medium.

Based on these insights, you can gain knowledge about:

• the behaviour of your users
• the motivations that your users might have
• buyer personas and who your users are
• landing page optimisation: what things you need to optimise to get more conversions

The first thing you need to do in order to grab more leads is to understand your audience and to use all of the tools that are now available to you.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

 

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

Experience Optimisation In Content Marketing

The last section in our content marketing chapter shall be taking a look at experience optimisation.

Here’s a dirty little secret.

Great content, even super relevant content, isn’t always enough. You need a really great experience that is optimised for your goals.

Hana Abaza, VP of Marketing at Uberflip, explains content experience like this:

I like to think about it in terms of piña coladas. There is a reason why I don’t want to be drinking one in a dingy dark basement, but on a beautiful sunny beach instead.

Experience matters a lot.

Here is what your content needs to be like to actually deliver a good experience.

• Readable
• Actionable
• Tailored

Readable

Here is an example from the social media website Buffer, which explains how they make their content readable.

They have a nice big headline to grab your attention, and really easy-to-read short paragraphs, which are actually better for mobile, so that you don’t get hit by these big walls of text.

You have social shares, subheadings, and images, which break up the text really well. It’s a really enjoyable reading experience.

Actionable

Is your experience actionable?

It blows my mind when people tell me that their goal is lead generation or audience growth, but they have no call to action. Or they do, but it is a terrible user experience.

Small quiz for you guys: What is Oli Gardner’s (CEO at Unbounce) rule on CTA?

HAVE A F#@?ING CALL TO ACTION!

Simple.

I will echo that sentiment when it comes to content, not just the landing page.

When you are creating a call to action for your content, I want you to remember 3 things:

1. Clarity
2. Context
3. Targeting

Clarity

Is It Clear? Is The Action And Value Obvious?

Context

Context is everything.

This is where we can add the wrong call to action to the wrong content. As you can see below, we have an advanced marketing blog post, but the call to action is for a beginner marketing ebook.

This is better:

Targeting

Last but not least: targeting.

Generic CTAs will only take you so far. You need to be specific about your call to action.

Here’s an example:

A generic one: “Hey, if you are interested in Marketing Automation, why don’t you try building a hub?”

…What?

As you can see, there is no content at all in this CTA.

Here’s a specific one:

“Hey, I know you are using Marketo, so why don’t you take a look at Marketo and Uberflip in action?”

This has to work really tightly with your distribution strategy.

Tailored

We want to make sure that our users’ experience is tailored, so from this position, you’ll want to take a look at how most other people structure their content.

When you look at the navigation of most websites, you have content arranged based on its stage, which may then be divided by topic and type.

This is how most people do it.

The reality is that we need to get a bit more sophisticated and strategic with how we actually put our content out there.

Here is an example from DNN.

I have never been to a resource page and thought “I want to read a whitepaper”. Have you ever done that?

I didn’t think so. But everybody still makes these organisational mistakes.

You need to get a little more strategic about how you organise your content for the people that are trying to find it.

Maybe you need to look into organising your content by type, together with by segment or audience as well.

Here’s how a company called Visual Web Optimizer does it. They do conversion rate optimisation.

They do it by type, industry, and element (depending on what element you want to test on your website).

 

So, you can get something like this: elements on the website that allow you to search for a case study for SaaS that tests price.

A much more tailored experience.

It doesn’t matter if you have thousands of pieces of content or just a few, you need to start putting some thought into how you organise that content.

That’s it.

Conclusions

To summarise, we’ve learned:

1. Customer development for content: Make sure that you are creating really relevant content for your audience. It will have a huge impact on you readers.
2. Strategic content creation: So that you are not writing blog posts just for the sake of it, create content that people care about, and then expand that into different types of content that you can re-use.
3. Distributions tactics are key: Make sure that you put some thought into your distribution strategy before you actually move on to it.
4. Experience optimisation: Of course, you need to make sure that the content you are writing is readable, has a call to action, and is tailored to the needs of your audience.

 

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog