Conversion Rate Optimization for B2B Businesses.
What is CRO?
CRO stands for conversion rate optimization, and it means literally what it sounds like i.e. improving your website to optimize the conversion rate of traffic on the website. Where conversion rate is the number of visitors to a website that completes the desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors. At first, you might think that CRO is only important for B2C companies. But if you’re a B2B company, CRO can be just as effective at helping you earn more revenue by increasing conversions on your website, landing pages, and emails.
Why is it different for B2B and B2C?
B2B also known as business-to-business marketing strategies are based on more of a process-driven approach but on the other hand B2C strategies are based on an emotional-driven approach. B2B typically has a longer sales cycle, more people are involved in decisions, and a very high purchase price. The conversion on the website may be a very early conversion and may still be ahead of the sale for many many months and even years. Whereas, generally B2C conversion is a quick process. Sometimes there is an overlap in the strategies. Many of the times in B2B scenarios, users and buyers are different but in B2C we are always designing our marketing strategies keeping end-user at the center.
Also, when in the case of B2B we are dealing with a fewer number of products than in B2C. That makes it very much difficult in terms of content marketing. You have to consider not only the persona of the user that is coming on the website but also the user journey is very much important.
Conversion Optimization course at CXL has explained a process for optimizing conversion for B2B businesses very nicely.
The optimization process for B2B:
— Defining goals.
— Determining and prioritizing lead type.
— Identifying and optimizing personas.
— Optimizing Call-to-Actions.
— Optimizing for content.
When it comes to B2B marketing setting up goals and measuring them is very much important. Generally, goals in B2B marketing are different than the B2C marketing process. The big goal is getting a lead. When customers are visiting your website they could be at any stage in a conversion process, such as they could be old customers revisiting your website or they are here just for researching or they have made up their mind on buying your product. In order to maximize the value of your website, you need to define goals for each of these stages and how you can track them across the purchasing journey.
The other thing that you typically want to look at is account-based marketing. If you are looking at a very high price sale, and if you find someone from a very big company is looking at your product, you will probably want to spend more time on that lead than someone who is visiting from some random source. You can prioritize your leads based on this. There are various tools available on the web that help you map the IP addresses of your visitors with the companies they are associated with.
As the sales cycle is a very long process, many people are involved in the buying decision. That makes it more difficult in identifying the user personas. A big part of B2B mastery is understanding and building buyer personas. Also, in many cases, the user journey is equally important as building user personas. It’s difficult to map these personas with the customer journey and what type of content to serve them depending on the stage.
If you want better B2B conversions, you need to make sure that your website features clear, and call to action are very well optimized that grabs user’s attention and encourage them to take the next steps. Optimizing call to action and content on your website is very important for conversions.
CRO strategies for B2B Businesses:
- Analyzing Heat maps: Heatmaps are visual representations of data that allow you to monitor user interactions and behavior on your site. You can always use these heat maps to understand which part of your website is getting more attention. Along with account-based marketing, the use of heatmaps helps you meet the buyer’s expectations of your websites.
- Email marketing: An email has always been marketing’s connective tissue. And the best weapon when it comes to ROI every marketer should have in his or her arsenal. Email marketing software can help you analyze and improve the performance of your emails and generate more leads.
- Improve websites load time and user experience: When it comes to page abandonment, load time is the important factor. Also, the user experience must be as frictionless as possible and must align with the user’s attitude. Ideally, the user should not feel any need for directions or documentation to complete a particular task. This is true in both B2C and B2B businesses as user experience is of at most priority.
- Customer value proposition: Mostly in B2B businesses conversion is a long process and it highly depends upon the user’s relationship with the product and his experience on your website. Customer value proposition convinces your end-users why your product is better than that of your competitors. This helps in building trust which is very important in B2B businesses.
- Social proof: This principle talks about the human tendency of following any trend. If a large number of people doing something, the product must be authentic. They can self approve the product by reading the feedback and reviews of the customers. Many of the websites use these kinds of social proofs on their landing page to make look more promising. “We have more than 50k subscribers”, “Our product is validated by XYZ company”. Companies hire famous and recognizable people as their brand ambassadors to increase their product value.
So the process of conversion optimization in B2B businesses overlaps with the process in B2C businesses, but we need to take different approaches when dealing with these two businesses.
It has been a great learning journey with CXL until now, excited to explore more.
