One of my favorite things to do is watch college football. And if you think I’m going to compare optimizing B2B conversion rates to football, you’re absolutely right.
Just like each player of the team needs to work together to score a touchdown, the parts of your B2B conversion strategy need to work in harmony to catch website visitors and turn them into paying customers.
If there’s a weak link in your strategy (like a player on the team not performing at their best), you’ll need to tweak it or pull it from the roster.
For this post, I sat down with Daniel Lynch, President and Owner of Empathy First Media, to discuss optimizing B2B conversion rates. Settle in as we go over the differences between B2B CRO and B2C CRO, and I’ll share some of his tips to help you plan a winning conversion strategy.
Table of Contents
What is B2B conversion rate optimization?
Before I go too far into it, let’s take a moment to define B2B conversion rate optimization.
B2B conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a strategy to improve the number of desired actions on your website and landing pages. Ideally, your desired action, whether it’s a new sign-up in your forms, a new subscriber to your channel, or a click on a demo link, leads to a new conversion.
I like the way Lynch puts it. “In my opinion, where conversion rate optimization is going for B2B is not just the form fill,” he explained.
“Instead, it’s the first impression of what your brand offers. Like customizing it to that person and then having very detailed automated responses with sequences and chatbots. Then, using conversational artificial intelligence data enrichment to foster those conversations.”
Lynch said conversion rate optimization should really be dubbed “conversation rate optimization.” He said, “A conversation rate optimization is more than just a conversion. The conversion can be a vanity metric. But, conversations are what the goals should always be with marketing.”
CRO boils down to understanding the customer journey, identifying ways to improve it, and making it more appealing to potential customers to start a conversation. As your customers journey through your sales funnel, they come in contact with elements designed to grab their attention and spur them to action.
Those touch points include:
- Sales and landing pages
- Sign-up forms
- Pop-ups
- Call-to-actions (CTAs)
- Compelling content and copy
- Free trials and freemium tools
Making an effort to optimize each of these things can help convert a lead to a loyal customer. You’ll want to track and analyze each part of your conversion strategy to fully understand where you need to make changes to encourage more clicks or sign-ups.
Thankfully, there are tons of conversion rate optimization tools that can help you analyze your sales funnel and optimize your strategies. These tools can help you make appropriate, meaningful changes, as changing the wrong strategy or tweaking the wrong layer of your funnel could negatively impact your CRO.
You also don’t want to make a ton of changes at once. Instead, consider using a conversion rate optimization planner to help make small, meaningful, and measurable changes.
B2B CRO vs. B2C CRO
Let’s face it: Conversion rates vary across markets.
Even though over 60% of B2B and B2C leaders are leveraging AI tools for marketing, the marketing and conversion strategies that work well for each market are very different.
This means you can’t really use the same B2C tactics to optimize your B2B conversion rates. Logically, it’s still marketing, and it seems like the strategies you’d use for B2C sales should apply, but the B2B market is a whole different ball game.
Here’s why.
Target Audience
As marketers, you and I both know how important it is to understand our target audience. You’ve likely spent time creating an audience persona to gain a deeper understanding of what makes your audience tick.
But, when it comes to B2C marketing, the audience persona is likely just one individual. Instead of appealing to a broad group of people, B2C marketers can get oddly specific in their personalized marketing strategies.
This is often easier because you really only need to influence one person to convert a sale — the individual buyer.
In B2B sales, though, the target audience is a wide range of people, from the CEO to the director of marketing to the content marketing manager.
For instance, let’s pretend your company sells engagement software designed to make connecting with customers easier. To really drive home the benefits of your software, you need to think about how it improves the workflows of each department within an organization.
This means you need to segment your audience into subcategories.
Going back to the engagement software example, your sales team will use that software differently than your marketing and customer support departments.
So, to really nail down how to connect with these groups, you’ll need to think about how your software can best serve them and tailor your approach to speak to those solutions.
Segmenting your audience isn’t just a good idea for companies — it’s a great strategy to bring in more revenue. 70% of companies use segmentation to better market to their customers. And, of those who use this strategy, 80% of those businesses see an increase in their profits.
So, if you want a better ROI and optimized conversion rates, consider segmenting your target audience.
Decision-Makers and Research
As I mentioned, in B2C sales, a purchase is usually an individual decision. However, in B2B sales, the decision to make a purchase is a group activity.
With more stakeholders involved, there are more decision-makers. If those decision-makers are anything like me and have to research a product from all angles before purchasing, it means there will be double or triple the research notes before the group as a whole decides to purchase a product or service.
With more people helping to make a decision, individual research will likely uncover more purchase options for group consideration.
According to B2B SaaS Reviews, 27% of B2B buyers consider six or more options before making a purchase, compared to just 17% of B2C buyers.
This means that to convert visitors on your website who are somewhat interested in your product, you really need to position your product or service as the solution to their B2B needs — or you risk losing a lead to your competition.
Sales Cycle
Remember the days when you watched infomercials in the middle of the night and were persuaded to purchase new exercise equipment that would solve all your insomnia problems?
For me, it took just thirty minutes into one infomercial to decide to buy a new piece of gym equipment.
The point of that story? The B2C sales cycle is relatively short. It often goes like this: You see something that catches your eye, you think about how it’ll solve all your most pressing problems, and then you plunk your card down and go home with something new.
Seems like a relatively effective sales cycle, right? It is — for B2C.
That’s not how it works in the B2B world, though.
B2B sales often take more than 30 minutes to reach the end goal. In fact, the average B2B sales cycle is just over two months long.
During this time, your sales team will need to make every effort to convert leads, strike up a conversation, and close a sale. That might mean that you invite decision-makers to lunch, call them to follow up and re-pitch (and re-pitch!) your services, or schedule a live product demonstration.
These are all tactics you wouldn’t use to close the B2C sales cycle.
Messaging and Marketing
How you market your products or services also varies slightly depending on your market. Content marketing, influencer partnerships, and social media marketing are all effective conversion methods, but some work better than others for B2B sales.
For example, influencer partnerships are a fantastic idea for promoting your brand, but they work best for B2C brands, as they can be more persuasive to the individual.
Content marketing is a great option for getting the word out about your products or services, and 91% of B2B marketers include it in their overall strategy.
For B2B marketing, writing how-to tutorials, offering case studies, or sharing videos of product walk-throughs is a great way to produce highly engaging content that converts leads to sales.
Content marketing works for B2C brands, and 86% of B2C marketers include it in their strategy. But, the more effective content they share, like short-form, trendy videos, is different.
Customer Journey
Finally, the biggest reason B2B CRO varies compared to B2C is that the customer journey is different.
B2C brands know that they’re often selling a one-time purchase product. This doesn’t mean they won’t have repeat customers — they will. However, it does mean their focus is on getting customers to their site as quickly as possible to make a low-value purchase.
B2B purchases, though, are high-value purchases. This means your customers aren’t just purchasing a product; they’re purchasing an experience.
They need to know upfront the value they’re getting from your product or service before agreeing to a contract. It’s why your B2B customer journey should be filled with as much valuable content as possible.
Instead, you should focus on providing various resources, including explainer videos, case studies, and tutorials, to help influence their purchasing decision before encouraging them to contact your sales reps.
Oddly enough, involving your sales reps too soon can be detrimental. Garner found that 44% of millennials don’t want to interact with a sales rep before making a B2B purchase.
Lynch said this is because we (as consumers) are selfish with our time. That’s why text-based marketing, like chatbots, works so well in B2B marketing and sales.
Now that we know the differences between B2B and B2C conversions, let’s look at some of Lynch’s favorite B2B conversion rate optimization strategies.
B2B Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
1. Monitor your website.
Heat Mapping and Recording Sessions
Your website is a gold mine of information, and you can uncover valuable information about your website visitors with the right AI tools.
And I’m not just talking about metrics relating to form fills or bounce rates. Lynch told me the key to optimizing B2B conversion rates is implementing AI tools for heat map tracking and session recording.
These conversion rate tools provide users with a visual representation of the most visited places on their websites. This gives you a better understanding of the kinds of things, like your calls-to-action or graphics, that catch your visitors’ eyes.
Lynch told me he likes using heat maps because they create a timeline where you determine the sequence of button clicks by users. He said, “It’s super important that you identify with their cursor. What did they highlight? What did they focus on their screen?”
Once you understand their interests, you can filter out your product or service features your leads don’t care about and only focus on the things they do. Not only does this cut down on wasted time, but by targeting their interests you’re on your way to opening a meaningful conversation (and conversion!) with your leads.
User Experience
This strategy might sound repetitive, but the user experience does affect your overall conversion rate. In our conversation, Lynch made it a point to tell me that a well-designed landing page doesn’t necessarily mean it’s chock full of interactive elements. Instead, less is more.
He said, “What a lot of people don‘t realize is that the best landing pages are the ones that don’t look the best. You want them low, quick, to serve the purpose, and have some visual aesthetic to them. But less is more.
“Minimalistic is what drives conversions. You just want to get them to sign up, so you can talk to them and move on. And the more you add to that page, the longer it takes to load. And the longer it takes to load, the lower your conversion rate will be.”
If you’re not sure which landing page converts the most users, consider A/B testing. A/B testing can help you easily identify which elements of your landing pages lend to the best user experience.
2. Optimize lead forms.
Although your lead forms are only a small part of your conversion rate optimization strategy, they still hold some weight. And a bad form will send your visitors running in the wrong direction.
According to Lynch, “There‘s plenty of data that every additional form field you add lowers your conversion rate because it’s one more field that people have to take time to complete.”
And he’s right. 27% of people will abandon a form because it’s too long. Thankfully, there are AI conversion rate tools available to help optimize your forms. He wholeheartedly recommends using them, too.
AI-optimized forms work by collecting user data as a visitor roams around on your website. Think data — like company name, industry, and position within the company. Then, when they land on a form, your AI tool can change the form to collect only the necessary data.
This can drastically reduce the number of form fields a user needs to complete, which in turn can help increase your conversion rates.
3. Use social proof.
Remember how I mentioned 44% of millennials don’t want to talk to a sales rep when making a B2B purchase? It’s important to keep this stat at the forefront of your mind when tweaking your conversion rate strategies.
One way to show off your brand without involving a salesperson is to use social proof. Lynch said, “Testimonials, reviews and trust badges help leverage your authority and position you as an expert in that industry.”
Considering 84% of B2B buyers use review sites, it’s worth it to take some time collecting customer reviews. You’ll also want to scour the internet for any mention of your product or service on review sites like G2, TechCrunch, and TechRadar.
It’s also not a bad idea to ask your loyal fans to record a short video for your website and social media platforms. If other B2B customers sing the praises of your product or services, it’s easier to convince another business to work with you.
No sales reps needed.
4. Incorporate conversational AI.
When I asked Lynch for his thoughts about millennials not wanting to speak to a salesperson, he wasn’t surprised. Instead, he told me that’s why incorporating conversational AI tools, like chatbots, into your website is so important.
He said, “A lot more people are going to be less hesitant to anonymously engage with chatbots.”
AI-powered chatbots can be trained on your visitors’ behavior and your company data, including your company’s knowledge-base library and your tutorials.
So, when a visitor lands on your website, your chatbot is equipped with the best, most up-to-date information to help guide visitors to fill out your forms or book a demo call.
Plus, chatbots provide immediate support. Lynch mentioned that potential customers, as a whole, are selfish with their time and don’t necessarily want to wait on a response from a sales rep.
He said, “They want to have real-time conversations. The beautiful thing about chatbots is you give them that instant dopamine, versus having to wait for someone to call them and schedule it. A scheduled call doesn’t respect your time as much as an instant one does.”
While AI chatbots can’t do everything to close the loop on your B2B sales cycle, they do lend a helping hand to help speed up the lead generation process before potential leads lose interest in your brand — talk about optimizing your conversion rates.
5. Dynamic content optimization.
There’s no doubt you’re creating content based on your ideal customer profile (ICP). But, because there are so many decision-makers in a B2B purchase, it can be challenging to nail down the right call-to-actions or the most effective copy.
Enter: dynamic content optimization. Using AI and its data to optimize your copy and content takes the guesswork out of your advertising. AI can detect who in the decision-making team is looking at your landing pages. Then, it can optimize your call-to-actions to better encourage sign-ups or clicks.
For example, if a CEO is on your webpage, your CTA might be “book a call.” Compared to a content manager who might need approval before scheduling a demo, the CTA might say, “Request more information.”
Lynch likes to think of this approach as “marketing with the scientific method.” He told me, “That‘s why the data is so important. If you cannot improve your copywriting optimization, unless you’re willing to assume you’re wrong. Look at the data to adjust your approach, adjust your copy, and go from there.”
6. Account-based marketing.
Going back to the football reference that I started out with, to optimize your conversion rates, you need to think of the B2B decision-makers as individuals on a team.
Each individual has their own role, whether that’s the CEO, a department manager, or a department director. Each of these roles functions differently within a company. How they interact with and use your product or service will be different, too.
It’s best to think of how each decision-maker will use your product or service and market it based on that.
But you shouldn’t just think about how they’ll individually use your product, you also need to map out who has the most buying power and pull within the team.
Lynch explained it to me like this. The CEO holds quite a bit of power in the buying decision, but they also don’t want to spend time wrestling with the decision — they’re busy. They have things to do, and they trust their team to make the best decision.
On the other hand, there will be someone in the decision team who thinks it’s better to go with your competitors. These are the people you should focus your marketing efforts on.
And, it’s where account-based marketing comes in.
Danial said, “Account-based marketing is identifying buying roles in the process that match your ICP and audience personas. You can associate the different buying roles and identify them as the gatekeeper, the champion, the blocker. The champion is the one who wants to choose you … [and] is advocating for you to the team.”
According to Danial, the blocker is someone who wants to go with someone else.
“And if they‘re a blocker and you’ve identified that, you can even put them into a list to be retargeted with certain emails, LinkedIn messages, Facebook ads, or LinkedIn ads to try to change their mind by giving them more trust with your brand,” Danial says.
This is also why it’s really important to create compelling content, like case studies and ebooks. You can send those materials to help persuade team members to start a conversation with your brand.
Optimizing B2B conversion rates starts with a conversation.
Your B2B conversion rate strategy doesn’t have to fall flat. Instead, consider using AI to help optimize your conversions and generate better leads.
After all, like Lynch told me, conversions boil down to conversations. And, using the data your AI tools collect, you’re better equipped to have more meaningful conversations with interested prospects, without needing to go over the preliminaries and risk wasting valuable time.