Adam SteinbergIf you oversee lead generation and nurturing at your company, this post is for you.
Here are four inventive ways to generate and nurture leads via your B2B company website.
1. Create the perfect, simple website for each visitor persona.
Ever meet someone at a party that immediately tries to tell you their entire life story? You lose interest quickly, right?
Yet, that’s what B2B companies do on their website. Hey, look! We have all of these products! Oh, and check out our solutions! Wait, we have case studies too! Look at everything we have!
In trying to appeal to ever visitor, you’re appealing to no one. In fact, most visitors leave a website within the first 10 seconds.
In order to create the perfect website, you need to appeal to the specific goals of each visitor when visiting your website. Depending on a visitor’s company, industry, job title or location, this could change dramatically.
A visitor from a Fortune 500 company might want to know about you support and services. While a VP from a small business might be more interested in your product and ROI case studies.
To create the perfect website, you have to understand the buyer persona for each type of website visitor.
What are their goals? What are the problems? What do they need from you to solve them? Your website must match this.
2. Push content, don’t rely on a visitor to know what to do next.
A common mistake in B2B websites is relying on a “Resources” center.
Only 1% – 5% of website visitors will even visit your Resources section. Even fewer will actually download a piece of content.
The clicks required to get a visitor from your homepage to your resources page are a huge bottleneck. Most potential customers will get stuck.
Instead, why not recommend content your visitors will find helpful? Based on their buyer persona, search terms and pages viewed on your website, it’s relatively simple to identify the best content for each visitor.
Your visitors will appreciate the helpful content, and you’ll generate more leads by not losing visitors in your website bottlenecks.
3. Nurture prospects on your website, not just email.
Sure, sending helpful content to visitors via email is great.
But, the challenge is that when a visitor opens your email, they could be at their office, in the car or on the couch watching a movie. You don’t have their undivided attention.
When a prospect visits your website, they’re focused solely on figuring out how your products can help them. You have their undivided attention.
Yet, most marketers don’t think about lead nurturing happening on the website. Your website content should align with your email nurture programs – it shouldn’t remain static.
As prospects move through the sales process and read different content, your website should change to present them with different information they’ll need to progress in their decision.
For example, you might recommend different content to each visitor based on their buying stage:
- Research: Industry surveys, eBooks, blog posts
- Evaluation: Analyst reports, demo videos, reviews
- Implementation: Case studies, technical documentation, SLAs
Based on your buyer personas, you’ll know which content is most important to each visitor. As prospects come back to your website, help them through the buyer’s journey by providing the right content along the way.
4. Eliminate calls to action.
That’s not a typo. Yes, you need to eliminate calls to action.
Here’s the problem, marketers have become so obsessed with calls to action that they’re everywhere! Demo signups, ebook downloads, email newsletter registrations, webinar signups are on every page.
I visited a leading marketing automation company’s homepage and counted 13(!) different calls to action. How can anyone ever know what to do next?
The key is to simplify. What is the single most important thing you want visitors to do next? Ask them to do that one thing and one thing only.
What are your thoughts on improving lead generation and nurturing on the website? What do your prospects find helpful or frustrating on the website?
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