Increasing your B2B conversion rate
Most Business to Business marketing is a bit like searching for
the proverbial needle in a haystack. You probably only want to
target a limited number of companies in a specific niche.
Moreover, the chances are that at any one time only a small minority
of those are actually ready to purchase.
Your web marketing must therefore focus clearly on attracting the
few potential customers actually searching for a relevant service at
the time. Quality is far more important than the
quantity of total visitors. The key measure of effectiveness
of a website is then its ability to turn visitors into enquiries.
The most effective tool at present to persuade visitors to give
their names, email and phone numbers seems to be the offer of
downloadable white papers.
The right white paper should achieve a conversion rate from
visitor to enquirer between 10-20%. If you do not get to this
level, you should review the overall site content and the
navigation. Then check that the title of your whitepaper clearly
illustrates relevant and useful information.
The next stage of your marketing is to qualify the leads you have
received. In general people seem more than willing to accept phone
calls from a company they know has provided them useful information.
That enables the marketer to assess the quality of the lead
and, if not right, to correct the approach on the website and white
paper.
A recent survey by MarketingSherpa in the USA asked a sample of
technology marketers to rate other offers for effectiveness in
producing results. In order of importance they answered:
- Free trial demo
- Webcast / webinar
- White paper
- Blog
- Product discount
- Instant call back button
- Email newsletter sign up
- Live chat button
- Request for Proposal form
- Podcast
In the UK I suspect that Webcasts, Blogs and Podcasts are less
cost-effective. They take more time to organise and the UK
market may not be large enough to justify the expense. Also
customers may be less accustomed to these methods. On the
other hand companies like Salesforce.com are using webinars as part
of their standard sales and demo routines. So for the right
product, you should start to experiment with the newest sales tools.
Talk to you next month,
Stephen Orr
|
