B2B sales professionals realize the relevance of acquiring and managing business contacts for a long-standing relationship with their clients in a relatively longer sales cycle than in B2C sales. Hence, in B2B, the drive should be to authentically support visitors to discover more and more about your products and services and to gain their respect and trust in the process.
Consider these tips to make conversion elements more appealing to your visitors.
1. Design Your Website Well: A clean and easy-to-navigate website with industry credentials, influencer reviews, authentic memberships, client logos and quality awards will surely grab your prospects’ attention. In addition, security seals such as VeriSign and any press mentions are likely to lend additional credibility to your website. This will boost your traffic but to convert this traffic into usable sales leads by obtaining visitor’s information is an entirely different phenomenon.
2. Ingeniously Ask for the Contact Information: Never ask for contact information early in the sales cycle. New visitors are more interested in becoming acquainted with you and your products and services and will be reluctant to offer any details just to read more about a product or service. Hence, present the basic information freely and candidly to familiarize your audience with your offerings. To boot, also offer some un-gated yet helpful and high-quality content to your customers in the form of infographics, e-books, videos, blogs, case studies, etc. to help build trust and learn more about you. Nevertheless, restrict and gate some niche content.
3. Gate Valuable Niche Content: While the above free content can lead to higher downloads, content like product comparisons, analyst reports, and research data and so on can offer highly qualified leads, and should be gated. Prospects that are willing to offer their information to access your niche content are certainly a better bet than those merely browsing the content. Hence, when you are a little deep into the sales funnel, offer content to be downloaded in exchange for the contact information, but don’t be pushy.
4. Don’t be Intrusive: Gated content should be offered in exchange for basic personal information such as name, company name, and email id which is easy to offer and isn’t invasive. Besides, once the prospect is familiar with your website and considers your website as secure, it becomes easier for them to lend out their information. Now that you have your prospect’s consent to contact them, the next step should be contact management and data analysis.
5. Manage Prospect’s Contact Information: Import prospect data into your B2B CRM system and understand the pathologies of your data. As this data is coming directly from the customer, it is less susceptible to errors. However, manually entering data or a change in prospect’s profile or duplicates may cause slip-ups. Ascertain proper contact management by ensuring contact de-duplication, and contact updates, in addition to gathering all relevant associated data for the prospect’s company. Thereafter, analyze this data to decide the type of content your prospect may be truly interested in. To learn how to go about it, read – For 2018, enhance your ROI with Marketing Analytics.
6. Nurture Your Prospects: With access to the right information, it is now time to personalize and send valuable and high-quality content to your prospects with a clear CTA, gain traction with social media channels, use video and influencer marketing, host webinars, go for drip campaigns and invest in sales productivity apps. Read 10 Emerging Trends to Boost B2B Lead Gen Efforts in 2018. Whatever tactic you use, communicate clearly with your prospects.
7. Communicate Candidly: While it is crucial to shoot customized valuable content to nurture your leads, it’s equally important to keep them aware of your content type and its frequency. Offer them the requisite information in a straightforward way, and never overload your prospects with too much content. When your prospects are certain about what they will be receiving and you stick to the plan, the chances of getting converted are higher.
Follow the above tactics to make it easier to collect precious prospect data, which can then be nurtured until prospects are ready to make a purchase. Happy Conversions!!