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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.