This is a guest post contributed by our client Bechara Jaoudeh, CEO & Founder, Philly Marketing Labs
Is your website selling for you, or is it a brochure stuck in the past?
I want you to think of your website as the center of gravity for your company’s digital presence. Search, email, video, social media—they all invite people to visit your website. So, is your website your top salesperson? Does it convert prospects into customers, or is it just a digital catalogue?
Why is it so vital that your website is selling at peak performance?
In B2B leadgen, remember that for 50% of industrial customers, the last point of influence is online.
89% of B2B buyers use the internet during the B2B research process, and more than 70% of those queries are made on smartphones. Is your website modern, responsive, and up to the challenge?
Understand Your Audience’s Journey
In the past, marketing was mass marketing. It was a one-way channel, broadcasting a single message to everybody via TV, Radio, Billboard and print ads.
Today, however, technology has changed everything. The rise of the internet and especially social media had enabled the development of segmentation and persona marketing. Now, marketers can reach out through different devices—mobile, laptop, tablet—and across various channels, including social media, email, and video.
Today’s buying journey is more complex than ever before. When considering how to optimize selling via your website, remember that while the buying journey is heavily fragmented these days, online research is a big factor in the B2B buying decision, and not just for B2C. Your customers will be segmented across devices and channels, and more of them than ever (60%-70%) will be experiencing your site via mobile devices.
Attract Your Audiences
So how can you drive B2B leads through your website? It all begins with keywords and intent through a search query.
Keyword searches are the first time in history when we can get in front of a prospect the moment they ask about a product or service. 57% of the purchase process happens before customers reach out to you, so your digital content needs to be working on your behalf before your customers ever get in touch.
PAID ADVERTISING
Relying on organic search for your search engine marketing (SEM) is a steep hill to climb these days (I’ll have more to say about that below), and online is now primarily a pay-to-play market. To win with paid online advertising, you need to understand some basic strategies:
- Keyword Intent: aka descriptor of the keyword
- Navigation Intent: searching for something specific (e.g., wanting to get on Symetris’ website and typing “Symetris” in Google). However, this is not necessarily in the buying process, so we want to stay away from that in paid advertising.
- Research Intent: high level, broad and very educational searches (e.g., typing “how to set up a PPC campaign”). If you want to target this, you should post articles, blogs, and other informational content.
- Purchase intent: these types of keywords tell us that this person has gone through the research process, has identified what they need and is now looking for someone to buy it from (e.g., “Drupal agency in Montreal”). These are the best keywords to focus on for driving sales and leads.
When the search criteria match the problem description and the solution description, the conversion of all three elements is relevance, and that’s where you want to focus your spend. For example, if I’m searching for a red umbrella, I see an ad for a red umbrella, and I go to the landing page where I see a red umbrella for sale. That is relevant paid advertising in action.
But this is all rudimentary knowledge, the basics. So how can you stand out? What can you put in place on top of these general strategies?
Audience targeting options