Building the Foundations of a B2B Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategy

Gaining the attention of your target audience is the equivalent of getting a foot in the door. Without the ability to hold their attention and transform their passing interest into something more tangible, you merely have numbers. A successful Conversion Rate Optimisation strategy is the key to unlocking the potential of your online audience and transforming it into a significant for your business.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is more than just changing the colour of the button on a landing page to something more eye-catching. It is a systematic process of improving each part of your digital marketing presence to increase the percentage of people who complete specific business goals. These goals can be a macro-conversion, such as making a purchase or micro-conversions, such as filling out an interest form, signing up for an email list, or requesting a demo.

Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation strategies and tactics change as digital marketing evolves. However, the core goal is to understand how people engage with your business online and remove barriers to converting. Benefits that come from implementing a CRO strategy include:

• Understanding your customers. Practising CRO will reveal important insights about your key customers and effective ways to speak to their needs.

• Better user experience. CRO requires that you understand how people navigate on your digital channels and to expand on what works.

• Increased ROI: Improving the efficiency of your conversion process, which includes targeting high quality leads, sales value and improving average conversion rates, makes the most of your resources.

Conversion rate optimisation helps your sales team identify and engage with the right people for your business. By increasing the number of leads who successfully convert, CRO helps you grow without straining your resources or depleting your pool of prospective customers.

Conversion Rate Optimisation for B2B

A lot of information about conversion optimisation is geared towards business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. While many of the underlying principles cross-over, it’s important to examine specific practices and adjust them for a business-to-business (B2B) context.

The B2B buying journey typically involves multiple decision-makers, all independently researching solutions for their business need. Rather than progressing down a linear sales funnel, studies have shown that B2B customers must instead complete six key "buying jobs” before they'll convert:

• Problem identification. “We need to do something.”

• Solution exploration. “What’s out there to solve our problem?”

• Requirements building. “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”

• Supplier selection. “Does this do what we want it to do?”

• Validation. “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”

• Consensus creation. “We need to get everyone on board.”

Decision-makers bounce across different parts of a vendor’s digital presence, hunting for relevant information, and often revisit each of those six buying jobs at least once. As you can imagine, B2B customers value suppliers that make it easier for them to navigate the purchase process — which is exactly what CRO is about.

The Three Pillars for any CRO Strategy

Understanding your visitors' motivations and intentions when they're visiting your website or social media platforms is the foundation of any good conversion rate optimisation strategy. To take things further, here are three conversations to open up in your business.

How Can We Streamline Our Customer Experience?

All too often, B2B companies over-complicate their customer journey to try to qualify leads. However, this can harm conversion rates by alienating potential customers who are unable to find what they’re looking for or how to proceed.

When you look at industry best practices, the following repeatedly come up as key points for creating a positive buyer experience:

• Listen to your buyer and address their needs

• Provide relevant information about products or services

• Promptly respond to questions or comments

Research from Gartner found that B2B customers were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease, and three times more likely to make a bigger purchase with less regret when they worked with vendors who provided information that helped complete their buying jobs. Another B2B Buyer Survey Report found that 95% of buyers chose vendors that provided ample content to help them navigate through the buying process.

Your customer experience should focus on identifying and providing the information prospects need to complete their buyer jobs. Examine your digital presence and consider:

• How visible is your business online? Can the various decision-makers involved in a company's purchase decision easily find you across multiple platforms while researching solutions? Google analytics can help you to understand how people find your business and their interaction with your site. LinkedIn can provide data about what kind of business people are visiting your site.

• What steps do leads have to complete to receive more detailed information? Can they locate and download relevant white papers from your website? Can they easily schedule a call and talk with a sales rep?

• Is your messaging consistent across different channels? Is it easy for customers to understand who you are and how your products or services can solve their problem?

How Can We Be More Strategic About Content Promotion?

Social proof is a well-known psychological phenomenon where people look at the behaviour of others to make up their mind when they’re experiencing uncertainty over a decision. Strategic content promotion integrates social proof elements to help create and reinforce brand recognition and reputation. This enhances conversion rates since potential customers are more likely to accept an offer that comes from a reputable, credible company that they’ve heard of before.

Segment recipients and plan how you will promote specific content to each audience. Create buyer personas to help you understand the problems and needs of each segment and how to provide relevant content in a timely manner. The better you know your customers, the more effectively you can target the content and timing of your messages to build a relationship based on trust and authority. For example:

• Are they new leads versus returning customers?

• What departments are they in?

• What are their job roles?

• What services or products are they interested in?

Ensure that your content mix for each segment includes case studies and social proof elements, such as client testimonials or expert reviews, to reinforce the point that your service or product merits serious consideration. A study by G2 Crowd and Heinz Marketing found that 92 per cent of B2B buyers are more likely to complete a purchase after reading a trusted review.

Interacting with people on social media also helps to increase your credibility. Save all positive comments you receive about your business on social media and use this content as a way to engage with customers and brand advocates. You can also amplify this user generate content by incorporating it into newsletters, brochures, landing pages, etc. Potential customers will see that current or past clients are happy with your work and will think “This is similar to my situation. This company understands the problems and provides a successful solution”.

Retargeting and Remarketing

Multiple studies have shown the effectiveness of retargeting and remarketing for strategic content promotion. In one case study from Facebook, a media company first used long-form content to raise awareness, then used email and client list, CRM leads, and website/social media traffic to create custom and lookalike audiences for targeted ads. Based on the engagement data from these first two steps, they uncovered and targeted a final set of highly tailored ads to the most relevant audiences. As a result, they experienced a:

• 5 times increase in blog readership within 12 months

• 4 times return on ad spend

• 78% reduction in their cost per lead

How Can We Optimise Our Presence?

Landing pages are often where lead generation or conversion barriers become the most obvious — be it lack of a clear call to action, an overly complex form, or inconsistent messaging - but anywhere your visitor encounters you online is ripe for consideration to see how to improve B2B website conversion rates.

It's important to effectively track how people reach and engage with your business online and, wherever possible, to test different variants of landing pages, web pages, email marketing and online adverts. B2B companies generally have a smaller volume of visitors, so it can be difficult to run tests that provide meaningful results, however there are options. Using A/B testing and other methodologies to determine what design features, messaging and timings do and don’t work can help you refine your understanding of what it takes to help your potential leads convert.

In Summary

Conversion rate optimisation covers every aspect of your digital marketing strategy, including your website, blog, email marketing campaigns, videos, social media posts, paid ads, mobile apps, and more. CRO improves your entire marketing plan by examining each part of your customer experience and identifying conversion barriers. By streamlining your customer experience, segmenting your audience, providing relevant content, and creating easy to navigate landing pages, you help customers understand who you are, how you can help their business, and make it easy to them to purchase your goods or services.

Find out how 1827 Marketing’s strategists and marketing automation platform can help improve conversion rate optimisation for your business.