Here are five website features that improve conversion rates:

Prominent Opt-in Forms

This may seem obvious, but many companies camouflage their opt-in forms because they are under the belief that they are unattractive or that customers will take the initiative to seek them out. This is not always the case. A customer is more likely to sign up when the form is clear and the process is easy.

Videos

B2B companies should take advantage of every opportunity to showcase their product or services. Adding a video feature to the site makes visitors feel more engaged and, therefore, more likely to become a direct lead.

Testimonials

One of the easiest ways to increase conversion is to provide positive peer recommendations. Use your website to provide testimonials in whatever format works for you, whether it is video, reviews, or positive press.

Calls-to-action

Your call-to-action should be the most prominent thing on your site. All other content should be built around this, your foremost goal. Make it very clear to your customers what you are asking of them, and most importantly, make it easy for them to respond.

Proven Success

Your website’s content should be created with the intention of proving success. Offering white papers on topics in your field are a way to demonstrate your ability, and a case studies page allows prospects to get to know your work more deeply, from whichever angle interests them most.

For B2B marketers, increasing conversion rates requires consistent reexamination of your website’s functionality and content. With some attention, your leads and sales will directly benefit from your efforts.

What has been your website’s most valuable conversion tool?

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Prospects are more inclined to purchase when a sense of trust has been developed with a particular company. Marketers must consider whether or not they are building this confidence – and how to do it best.

Here are some ways to establish trust with your customers:

Demonstrate Thought Leadership

Identify yourself as a leader in your industry. Present solutions for the problems you know your customers face. This builds trust, giving customers the feeling that you actually want to help them, rather than just make a sale. Establish yourself as a generous leader in the field by providing resources and tips, rather than just a product.

Cultivate Brand Empathy

Last month on this blog, we discussed the importance of creating brand empathy – the perception that your company cares deeply about its customers’ problems and needs. Customers should feel that you have genuine concern for their challenges and want to help solve them. For more help in this regard, download Movéo’s Brand Empathy White Paper.

Listen to Customers

The most valuable way to build trust is to listen to your customers. Ask your sales force what problems customers are mentioning, and tune in to customer conversations taking place on social media. Most importantly, show customers that you are willing to respond. Answer their questions, improve your product, and meet their needs.

Building trust is essential to good marketing. How has your company created confidence with customers?

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The most important part of email marketing is making sure that your message is opened. This is not always easy considering the number of emails the average person receives on a daily basis. The content of your email will not be useful unless your subject line is compelling enough to warrant that first click.

It may seem simple, but subject lines require careful consideration. Here are some tips:

Ask a Question

Your email subject line is the only thing you can guarantee the recipient will see. Take advantage of that opportunity to ask a question. More importantly, as a question you know your customer needs answered. Position yourself as the company who can solve that problem before the email is even opened.

Be Brief

Keep your subject lines short and to the point. According to Mail Chimp, 50 characters or less is the way to go, with 28-39 characters having the highest click rate in a study of 200 million emails.

Be Specific

Don’t shy away from your subject line. Go ahead and tell your customer what’s inside the email. Make it relevant for them, and it will be opened.

Use a Call-to-Action

Using the subject line as a call-to-action is another way to get your email opened. Even better, it aligns your company with the solution a customer seeks – even if he doesn’t realize it.

While you employ these tips, avoid numbers and length, both of which cause visual fatigue for the recipient. Good luck with your new, improved email subject lines. Let us know what works best for you!

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Demand generation creates awareness

Demand generation focuses on cultivating awareness surrounding a particular brand or company. This awareness eventually results in leads.

Lead generation gathers actual contacts

Lead generation is all about concrete prospects. It involves collecting names from consumers or potential clients, giving those names to sales reps, and directly boosting revenue.

Demand generation has a broad focus

Demand generation seeks to create awareness with a wide net, casting it broadly across groups of potential leads. When one-on-one contact happens, it is because a prospect takes it upon himself to reach out to a company.

Lead generation is based on specificity

Lead generation is meant to gather specific names and data to be translated directly to sales. While demand generation makes sweeping efforts, lead generation targets individuals.

As you’ve gathered from this comparison, demand generation often stimulates lead generation at the finish line, when it counts. For marketers attempting to master the new B2B sales funnel, demand generation is essential. Its wide net guarantees that brand awareness is present throughout the twists and turns of research and consideration that play such a large role in today’s sales process.

How has your company focused on creating demand?

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Ask yourself – how well do you understand this process? If you have any doubts, here are some ways to find out:

Ask The Question

Consider something as simple as including a “how did you hear about us” line on the sales form, the contact form, or the email sign-up form. This will help you learn whether it’s word of mouth, content, or something else that brings in your best leads.

Pay Attention to Traffic

Google Analytics is your friend. It’s important to pay attention to website referral traffic, because understanding this important step can help you formulate a strategy to attract a larger pool of customers. Alternately, it can help you determine what potential lead sources need some attention.

Invest in Data

On Monday, we mentioned the importance of developing a robust CRM. It’s so important, in fact, that we recommend that you consider using a premium program such as InfusionSoft. The customer understanding you can glean from a program like this makes the investment well worth it, and it’s geared towards small businesses, making it easy to use and sort the information that is most usable.

What methods have helped you understand how your customer enters the sales funnel? What gets you discovered?

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Though most B2B companies use Twitter to engage their audience, fewer actually do paid advertising there. In the past, “promoted tweets” seemed out of place to a user — even nonsensical at times. Test groups showed that a user is more likely to respond to a promoted tweet when it has a close relationship to the tweets that have recently engaged him. These ads are more relevant and seem more natural.

Keyword targeting in Twitter ads enables companies to appeal to users when their mind is already on the topic at hand. This real-time interaction could be invaluable to B2B marketers in their attempt to present a solution to a prospect’s problem. The keyword targeting setup is user-friendly, which makes it easy for B2B companies to choose product or service-based ad words and gain leads that don’t even require a web search.

Does your company use Twitter to advertise? Have you tried the keyword targeting feature?

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Today, it is more convoluted, like this:

As this diagram shows, today’s sales funnel is full of questions, research, and answers. Endless comparisons are made from reviews that are written and repeatedly shared. Social media invites open discussion about a company’s strengths and weaknesses. Essential tools – the website, email marketing, and special events – are no longer important to only one phase of the cycle. Instead, they must stretch across the entire sales process.

To make this more complicated, leads no longer fall through a simple funnel to the sale; now, they must be constantly engaged through a twisting, turning process that doesn’t necessarily even promise a sale at the end. Potential customers must be encouraged to progress from awareness to research to consideration to purchase. As a result, marketers must get smarter.

Here are three ways to keep up with the evolution of the sales funnel:

Switch to Demand Generation

Transitioning from a lead generation to a demand generation mindset can be a difficult move for B2B marketers. While it seems promising to collect as many leads as possible, then push them to sale, it is more beneficial today to place an emphasis on demand generation. Cultivating this demand for your product begins with raising awareness and developing a community of interest around your industry — more specifically, around the problem you can solve. As customers build and explore the demand you create within the sales funnel, the end result will be sales.

Uniquely Engage

No longer can marketers focus on engaging the customer in the “interest” and “desire” categories of the old sales funnel. Today, it is necessary to connect with prospects before they even enter the cycle. To capture interest and remain desirable up until the point of sale, it is imperative that marketers find unique ways to get consumers’ attention throughout the selling process. Companies must interact with customers on social media, have active conversations, or offer helpful, industry-related blog content, to give a few examples.

Develop a Robust CRM

Today’s marketers have endless forms of data available to help them understand the customer’s experience. It is crucial that they use this analysis to their advantage, exploring when a customer feels the least engaged and finding ways to fix it. Use the data to determine which social media platforms work best for your consumer base; develop a robust CRM by studying clicks, responses, leads, and deals. This information is key to developing an informed strategic plan that combats today’s complicated sales funnel.

Throughout this month, we will provide you with more tips on how to deal with the complex B2B sales funnel. Stay tuned!

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Here are three ways to overcome these difficulties:

Focus on quality over quantity

Creating enough new, engaging content often feels daunting for content marketers. It is important to remember that less is more. Fewer posts done well speak more meaningfully than daily posts that feel forced. Streamline your marketing plan to make quality the focus. For example, consider two or three blog posts per week, instead of five. Having that extra time is the key to planning, and then generating, better content. Consider a monthly newsletter instead of a weekly one, and try devoting two blocks of time per day to social media, rather than trying to keep up with the all day, every hour race.

Outsource

Outsourcing content is, in many cases, essential to its quality. Finding a partner or freelancer who can effectively communicate your business’s message will provide you with the time to plan a content-driven strategy that ends in success. Do not hesitate to find this support.

Track content with smart metrics

Along with quality and outsourcing, metrics are your biggest ally. Use them carefully, and respond to them as a resource. This information can be used to create content that is actually engaging, tuned in to your customer’s habits, questions, and trends. In short, pay attention to metrics, and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

What challenges has your business faced in content marketing? How did you overcome them?

What marketers might not realize is that maximized potential for these tools lies in using them together. This helpful video explains the emphasis placed on social media by companies like Google and Bing. For the past five years, they have slowly compounded social media and search function. First, blog posts showed up in search results, and eventually, features like the Google +1 button enabled them to base search results partly on popular vote. These developments opened the doors to marketers to combine social and search for optimal results.

For example, answering one customer’s question via social media, and having it indexed in search, can serve to answer hundreds of future customers’ questions at the click of a button. Active customer listening via social provides opportunities to find and answer those questions. Developing, and then disseminating relevant content via social now offers powerful opportunity to answer questions where they start – at the initial search.

This information proves that taking the time necessary to learn how to use social and search in tandem offers endless potential.

Has your company mastered this pairing? How so?

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Sometimes, this quest for fun and shareable seems easier for the B2C marketer. B2B marketers, in contrast, are faced with the challenges of highly complex products, educated prospects, and extended sales cycles. To solve this problem, here are five ways to make seemingly boring B2B content sexy:

Find experts

Whether your product is software or fencing, there are experts who love to talk about it, and they are the B2B marketer’s most valuable tool. Invite them to a roundtable to discuss ideas, or pass around a shared document. In return, you will gain invaluable ideas for quality content.

Don’t ignore blogging

The notion that B2B customers don’t read blogs is outdated and wrong. They are researching their purchases just as thoroughly as B2C customers. Companies that create compelling digital content with this platform tend to have more success with building a community, which in turn will choose them when it is time to purchase.

Find sustainable ideas

Calling on experts and executing a customer listening campaign are excellent ways to find ideas for content. However, not just any idea will work. The best ideas are extendable and sustainable; they lend themselves easily to editorial marketing plans, and they can be broken up over time. This extended release engages customer comments and feedback that can be crucial to building sales.

Answer customer questions

Formulating a marketing plan that is engaging and shareable relies almost wholly on its alignment with customer need. Use social media and your sales force to determine your customers’ biggest problems, and develop your marketing content to answer them.

Use an editorial calendar

The most engaging marketing is planned and executed over time. It is sustainable and organized, and it offers a chance to tie strategy to the sales cycle. Use it to marry your company to its prospects by connecting marketing to industry-wide events.

With some organization and creativity, B2B marketing can be just as compelling as anything else. What strategies have worked for you?

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