The current state of *B2B*
Time for a change for B2B
According to research out in the last few months, over 60% of B2B leads now come through the website. Whether you invest in content, SEO, paid search, email, social or ABM, the one constant in all that marketing spend is the website itself. It’s the place the buyer visits at the beginning, middle and end of their customer journey and through every stage of the funnel.
However, less than 2% of the B2B buyers we spend thousands of marketing dollars every month driving to our website actually convert, even less in many sectors. What’s worse is that we’ve been conditioned as marketers to accept this is ok. Remember these buyers aren't coming to our website for entertainment. They have a need that they are hoping our organizations can meet and most of them are leaving without ever connecting.
So how much of our hard-earned marketing budget is spent on optimizing our website for conversion? In the majority of B2B organizations, it’s less than 10%.*
Having worked with B2C and B2B companies for the last 20 years, there is a gulf in attitude toward optimizing the website itself and not just the digital marketing campaigns that drive traffic there. B2C site owners know that optimizing the website will, in turn, improve the performance of all the acquisition activity at once, which is far better for our ROI than just focusing on each part of the digital strategy individually.
The data backs this up. The latest figures suggest that B2B conversion rates are averaging at 1% - whereas B2C are over 3.2%. That may not sound like a huge difference, but for every 100 conversions you are getting, your B2C counterpart is getting 320. When you consider that most conversions in B2C are sales rather than leads, you can see the gap widening.
Add this to the fact that over 80% of B2B marketing leaders cite ‘more leads’ as their biggest KPI, it’s clear why we believe that 2023 is the year that B2B needs to start thinking a bit more like B2C.
During this article, I’ll outline some of the key differences in more detail and how you can learn from B2C to make strong gains on your B2B site.
But first, let’s look at the one big problem you must overcome first. If you can’t do this, you’ll only ever make small incremental wins at best.
How can you make the change?
When starting a conversion optimizing program for customers, many of them have the same problem which stands in the way of them ever meeting their target. And the likelihood is B2B marketers have the same challenge.
The problem is not “more leads” or “more sales”. Sure, this is the desired end result and certainly the key metrics departments will be judged upon, but neither are the big problem.
So, what is it? Everyone is just guessing.
Guessing what to add or change. Guessing how to turn more traffic into meaningful leads and sales. Guessing what your prospects want to see before they fill in the lead capture form.
It is happening now in boardrooms and marketing departments in every office. It’s a problem so vast that an entire industry was created to solve it. We all have enough data to see where the buying bottlenecks in a website sit – but very few know how to interpret the data to make meaningful improvements in performance.
CRM Managers don’t know which psychological ‘nudges’ work best to guide buyers through the complex journey from being a warm lead to a customer.
Digital Managers don’t know how to replicate the success of their company’s best salespeople on their website and landing pages.
So it’s time to stop guessing and take a data- and insight-led approach to improving your website that generates considerably higher returns - and in a much shorter space of time. In turn, that means acquisition costs drop through the floor and ROI goes through the roof. The higher your conversion rate, the easier all aspects of marketing become and the faster your business grows.
Understand your buyers journey
It’s often said that the B2B buyer journey is different from B2C. And that is true, it’s longer and more complex. So does that mean we can’t take any inspiration from our B2C colleagues?
Of course not…
Yes, a B2B sale could involve multiple people across multiple departments and run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or in some case millions).
But the process is not much different to a reasonably sized B2C decision – a new car, a family holiday to Orlando, or, a new kitchen are big decisions for a family with an average income. A $10M software purchase to a $100M dollar company is the same level as a $10k decision to a household with a $100k income. You still need to win over the key decision-makers. You still need to convince them of the value they will be getting in return. You still need to convince them that you’re the right company for them to spend their money with.
B2B marketers understand that in 2022 much of the buying journey is done before the prospect is ready to talk to a salesperson. This is why the website now has to work twice as hard once we've finally driven these prospects there.
In B2C this has been the case for far longer, and this is why they have such a huge focus on CRO. They know the buyer will be extensively researching the shoes, the car, and the holiday before they ever get out their credit card, so they do everything they can to understand that journey and ensure the right ‘nudges’ are in place to help people with their buying decision.
People are people - but no two people are the same
It’s cliché, but people are just people – whether they are in the office or at home, they are fundamentally the same person with the same personality and the same buying traits. Of course, priorities and focus may change slightly, but this doesn’t change who they are.
We B2B’ers may roll our eyes when we hear it over and over, but very few B2B companies actually understand that we’re all just human - and do anything about it. Many of us will create persona decks but then totally ignore our different audiences.
Everyone gets thrown into the same pages and it simply becomes a numbers game. For every 200 people we send there, we might get an MQL. B2B is so unwilling to put any potential prospects off that might think this or might have that problem that the result is only ever going to be vanilla. You try to convince everyone and end up converting no one.
Without specific, insightful details on your different audiences you will start writing ads, emails and landing pages that try to cater to all people with a similar-ish problem. And then you’ll wonder why you only have a 1% conversion rate.
Segment, Segment, Segment
Use your data to create meaningful audience segments. In B2C, companies will often initially use demographics, whereas in B2B it's firmographics – it doesn’t matter, the principle is the same: different buyers will want different solutions.
In B2C would you sell the same car or holiday to a student as you would an elderly retired couple? Of course not. So why would a B2B company sell the same product or service in the same way to any company regardless of industry, size, location or, crucially, job role?
And that’s just demographic/ firmographic data. What we really want to do is climb inside the prospect’s head and understand how they think. What’s driving the sale for them? What is the pain point they are trying to solve? Or the aspiration they are trying to reach? You can only get that from good quality qualitative research data (more on that later). There are no shortcuts.
How do you segment your audience?
- Firmographic data
- Funnel stage
- We don't segment our audience at the moment
At first, it seems ironic to make your website all about people, with their human traits and varied personalities, based on sets of hard analytical data. And this is a juxtaposition that perplexes many new to CRO.
But it makes complete sense.
You need to build detailed pictures of your customer segments and create hyper-targeted content and messaging that is right for them. The only way you can get that detail is through the data, otherwise you’re just back to guessing.
Good data takes away the guessing problem. It gives you the insights to be specific and articulate the value of your product or service in the exact way that an individual prospect wants to hear it. You’ve gone from scatter-gun broadcast marketing to saying the right thing, in the right way, to the right person, at the right time.
The *B2B website* and where the *problems* lay
Why B2B websites are (mostly) done wrong to start with
90% of our clients come to us with the same problems: firstly, they need to grow their lead pipeline and, secondly, help the sales team close more deals from the leads they give them.
The trouble is, very few B2B websites have been set up for either of those things to start with. And trying to change them now is like shifting the Titanic after the iceberg has appeared through the fog.
That’s because websites weren’t originally built for conversions.
In the early 1990s, when the web first went mainstream, websites were created by techies eager to learn the new technologies involved. They weren’t interested in how things looked and certainly not in selling anything.
In 2000, businesses were obsessed with hitting the top spot on their keywords (or any other keywords that might get them traffic, however irrelevant). Unfortunately, the then-primitive search engines rewarded sites stuffed with keywords and pages full of reciprocal links, which made for a poor experience once again.
In 2009, with search engines getting smarter and users getting more used to the technology, websites started to be built for companies. The corporate machines and their brand teams demanded more. Unfortunately, none of them really thought about UX. It was all functional, yet complex, CMS systems governing corporate sites became boring and stuffed with content that was not helpful for the user, wrapped up in a rigid functionality that was not helpful for marketers.
Many B2B companies are still here today.
In 2020 the focus switched to mobile. Mobile first, mobile everything - even though 67% of all conversions across the web still happen on a desktop/ laptop. That number rises to 82% in B2B.
During all this time, B2B marketing departments rarely had much independent control of the website. Everyone from the board, to the IT department, to the product managers wanted their say and marketing was left to try and make sense of all the demands.
In B2C, that is no longer the case. Our B2C counterparts test variations of everything and let the data guide them. Does the CMO want the new brand strapline on the homepage? Let’s test it and see if it works. Does the product manager want his stuff front and center? Let’s test that.
And it works. Decisions become driven by the data of how your users are behaving and not just the opinion of who shouts loudest. Board members are bright people. They quickly learn to follow the version that creates the most leads and revenue, even if they personally wanted something different.
B2C companies have also found that this has an extra benefit. Because marketing has this ownership, they are also given the budget to invest in the skills and technology – from the right CMS to A/B testing platforms to personalization tools to make changes and test things quickly. Not having to go through a huge drawn-out process with the dev team to get stuff done allows for rapid testing, which delivers faster growth.
B2C website evolve - B2B websites get redesigned
In B2B, many businesses create a whole new site and then do nothing with it for years except add regular new content to “keep it fresh”. Then, after a few years have passed, they do another complete overhaul (which takes 6 months and a huge budget) before the cycle starts again.
Often the changes are made when a new leader comes in and are not based on any insight and are certainly not tested (other than, perhaps, with a few grudging staff members from different departments).
But that’s not how the top websites win.
The best B2C companies know that they should focus on their customers and prospects and design websites around what those customers and prospects want to see.
Amazon is a great example. Their site is not pretty, and it now has so many products that finding what you want is not simple. But the experience of buying is so easy, especially for Prime members, that it now accounts for nearly 50% of all Christmas shopping transactions in the USA or UK.
Dell, Salesforce, Netflix and Facebook continue to prove a simple point: customer-centric websites win. They dominate their marketplace by giving their users what they want and drive out the competition, who have been established much longer and should have been able to fend off the threat. Except they kept on guessing what their customers wanted, and the new kids let the customers decide through A/B testing.
All of those winning websites are built around their users. Every change, every idea, every piece of copy is based on some insight from the data they collect and then tested. If it works, it stays. When was the last time you saw any of those sites have a big redesign? They constantly get tweaked and evolve, but they never completely change.
And their customers love them for it.
Data and insights.
All websites are swimming in data and B2C companies are learning how to use this better and better every day. In B2B, we don't use the tools at our disposal enough. For example, GA becomes a reporting tool for goals, not the rich quantitative resource that can unearth bottlenecks (that B2C teams use it for).
There are two types of data: Quantitative and Qualitative. And you need to use both of them if you are going to perform meaningful tests and make big improvements.
Quantitative: This is your number crunching. It is, at the very least, properly using GA to pinpoint where the problems in your website sit. Where do your customer journeys fall down? Which pages are showing a too-high bounce/ exit rate and so on? You should also use a heat mapping solution like Hotjar to see where your users are clicking and how far they are scrolling down your page (there’s a free version so there really isn’t any excuse here).
Qualitative: This is your detailed user research. If Quant shows you where there are problems on your site, properly done Qual will tell you how to fix them. Customer surveys, user testing, focus groups and so on – anything that gives you real, honest feedback from the type of people that your site is aimed at.
TOP TIP:
This is probably the biggest piece of advice I can give you: DO NOT skimp on this stage and think you can get away with not doing Qualitative research. If you do, your optimization efforts are very likely to fail.
Culture of experimentation for improvement
In B2C, the really savvy companies actually take this even further. They understand that improvements only come from data- and research-driven experimentation. Plus, they recognize that anyone in the business can get involved and have a valid hypothesis. In a broad organization, it would be naïve to think that marketing is the only team with any useful data that could drive innovative ideas.
So they establish a culture of experimentation throughout the organization. At Netflix or Booking.com anyone can submit A/B tests and they get added to the timetable. That’s how they conduct upwards of 500 A/B tests every month. In B2B, we don’t understand that kind of revolution, it’s just too scary to contemplate. But if we do what we have always done, we will keep on getting back what we always got from it.
In B2B we need to learn to be less afraid of failure. In B2C they are comfortable with the fact that everything they try won't work – because the wins and learnings from failures are much more valuable. A win can be made permanent and a loss can be switched off after just a few weeks.
In B2B, marketers are too often afraid to test things in case it has a negative impact, but this means they are also missing out on all the wins and the innovation.
Remember this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Just because you have collected and analyzed all your data, it does not mean that the first value proposition you create for your newly laser-focused landing page is going to be the best it can possibly be.
You run an A/B test to validate your thinking and analyze the data that it generates. You will find new insights that suggest iterations and alternatives that also need A/B testing and finally, after a number of tests, you will find the winning formula.
That’s why CRO is the single most powerful weapon in your arsenal. It blends data-driven decision-making with human understanding in a proven framework that will boost the performance of every step in your sales and marketing funnels by structuring everything in the way that your prospects want to buy.
And that is a crucial point that lies at the heart of all CRO:
These winning websites are NOT selling better - they are helping people to BUY from them better.
This may sound like a pedantic play on words but think about it for a second. Can you honestly say that your website helps people buy in the way that is best for them? Or does it force users down your sales funnel?
And no person likes being sold to. But they LOVE to buy from companies that make it easy for them.
