In today's competitive market, B2B companies often invest in marketing so they can stand out from their competition and ultimately generate more sales. To maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing dollars, you need to generate high-quality leads and turn them into customers. However, there are quite a few steps in between investing in a marketing strategy and developing lead generation that truly makes your investment worthwhile.
How can you increase quality leads on your website?
While search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for gaining exposure to the right target audience and driving traffic to your website, it doesn't address how you will generate more leads or facilitate a visitor's decision-making process on your website.
That's where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in – the right CRO strategy increases conversions on your website so the marketing dollars you spend on driving traffic through efforts like SEO will pay off in higher quality leads.
What's a Conversion?
The first thing you should address…what exactly does a CRO strategy involve?
Conversion is a general term that refers to a website visitor completing a desired action. For most B2B companies, the primary goal (i.e., macro-conversion) is often to get a visitor to make a purchase or request a quote. There are also micro-conversions along the buyer's journey, such as signing up for your email list or adding a product to their cart.
What's Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
CRO refers to the process of enabling more users to complete a desired action (e.g., placing an order) when they're on your website by designing or modifying certain elements to increase the percentage of visitors that will convert.
How To Calculate Conversion Rate
There are many ways to calculate conversion rates. In general, they're calculated by dividing the number of times a visitor completes a specific action by the total number of visitors.
If a visitor can convert in each visit (e.g., buying a product on an eCommerce site), divide the number of conversions by the number of unique times the buyer comes to your site (i.e., the number of sessions.) If you sell a subscription or service (e.g., SaaS product), simply divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors.
How Different Website Components Can Benefit From CRO
Conversion rate optimization strategies can be applied to various website components to help achieve your business objectives:
- Landing Pages: Fine-tune the content and layout of these pages to entice more visitors to take the desired actions. Since landing pages are conversion-focused, implementing a CRO strategy can significantly improve their effectiveness. A few ways you can work on improving landing page conversions might include A/B testing copy or images, setting up a heat map to determine how visitors are interacting with your page, or utilizing smart content so that visitors who have submitted information on your site before will see the most relevant copy.
- Blog Posts: Publish relevant and useful content on your blog to attract high-quality prospects (e.g., through SEO) and include elements that will turn them into leads, such as calls-to-action (CTA) that invite readers to submit contact information in exchange for a piece of valuable content. This may be in the form of links throughout the post, or a call-to-action in the side bar or at the bottom of the blog. You can also utilize pop-ups to encourage readers to subscribe to your blog or download a relevant piece of content.
- Pricing Page: Increase conversion rates by adjusting how pricing intervals are displayed (e.g., per month vs. per year,) improving how the product features are positioned, and adding a live chat or click-to-call feature to encourage visitors to engage with your sales team. It’s likely if someone is looking at your pricing page that they may be serious about making a decision soon, so it’s vital to ensure that they have an easy path to reach someone with your company.
How To Improve Your CRO Strategy
CRO offers a sizable opportunity to increase marketing ROI by making often-simple but impactful modifications to your website. Here's how to improve your CRO strategy:
- Focus on the user experience: Website usability encompasses many aspects of website design with the ultimate goal of reducing the friction visitors encounter when completing the desired actions.
- Understand user behaviors with heat maps: As mentioned earlier, heat maps show you where visitors are clicking and which components on a webpage are drawing their attention. Using the data, you can position the critical elements (e.g., a CTA button) strategically to increase engagement and conversion.
- Set up dedicated landing pages: If you're driving traffic with SEO or paid ads, create dedicated landing pages to ensure that the content is highly relevant to each audience segment. For example, you can address the visitors' specific pain points and use testimonials from customers who are just like them.
CRO: The Key to Converting More Visitors Into Buyers
Implementing an effective CRO strategy can help you turn more website visitors into high-quality leads, who are more likely to make purchases. CRO can bring you more customers by:
- Improving customer insights: You can better understand the elements that make your ideal customers tick (e.g., copy, CTA, design) so you can focus your resources on attracting the prospects that are most likely to convert.
- Increasing marketing ROI: Higher conversion rates mean you can generate the same amount of sales without investing more in driving website traffic (e.g., through paid ads) so you can improve profitability.
- Facilitating growth and expansion: CRO allows you to scale up and sell to more customers without being restricted by resource availability or the size of the existing market.
- Increasing customer retention: Improving the user experience of your website helps reduce friction in the purchasing process. The ease of doing business is the key to retaining B2B customers, improving customer loyalty, and increasing customer lifetime value.
- Boosting SEO ranking: When visitors engage with your content and take action, Google will consider your website relevant and rank it higher in search results. Since most B2B buyers research online, and many don't go beyond the first page of Google, a better ranking means you will drive more high-quality traffic to your website.
Taking the Next Step with Conversion Rate Optimization
B2B companies have to cater to audience segments with specific requirements and preferences. A CRO strategy can help you deliver a highly-targeted user experience that will increase sales.
Conversion rate optimization has many moving parts, and you need to dial into every component to maximize your marketing ROI.
At Spot On, we focus on CRO because it directly impacts our clients' bottom line. Not only does it deliver tangible results, but it also allows you to build a solid foundation that will benefit your marketing efforts in the long-run.
We're here to make your marketing dollars really count by getting more clicks, high-quality leads, and sales. Are you ready to grow? Schedule a time to chat with us.
