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Marketers have a lot of data to work with when it comes to content marketing, lead generation, and website optimization. Because websites drive most digital leads to sales and trial signups, B2B marketers understandably spend a lot of time thinking about the content, flow, and offerings on their landing pages.
As experienced B2B marketers know, when creating B2B landing pages for programs and campaigns, it’s important to keep a few general things in mind before getting into the finer details of landing page optimization:
- Longer buying cycles: It’s common for B2B customers to spend months or quarters deciding whether or not they want to purchase a service or product. As a result, B2B landing pages often have to cater to multiple stages of the sales funnel at the same time.
- Long-form content: Because business purchases are rarely impulse buys, B2B prospects tend to do a lot of research before making a purchase. B2B marketers often try to make it easy for prospects to do their homework by focusing on the most important customer-centric aspects of their product or service in landing pages.
- Usually more than one person is making the purchasing decisions: B2B customers tend to work in teams. As a result, many B2B marketers follow an account based marketing (ABM) strategy and ensure their content caters to multiple audiences across multiple pages.
While there is no magic equation to creating the perfect B2B landing page, there are a few tactics we’ve come across that tend to perform better while helping B2B marketers optimize their websites. Read below to learn more and see if these tips resonate for you.
1. Use “symmetric” messaging
If you brought a prospect to a B2B website using an email or an ad, continue the messaging you used in that email or ad on your landing page. You invested a lot of time, energy, and money to target this person, put the right messaging in front of them in that moment, and get them to your website. Create a consistent experience for them that makes the content easier to understand, and they are typically more likely to take the next action you want them to take. The ROI of your email or ads tends to be higher when you use symmetric messaging.
2. Show your visitors industry-specific case studies and that their competitors are your customers
If you are using reverse IP lookup, you can de-anonymize visitors to learn which company they’re from. You can also get access to firmographic data like how many employees the company has, the company’s revenue, what industry they are in, and more.
From there, you can display the visitor’s competitors’ logos on your landing pages if they are your current customers. As an example, if one of your visitors shows up from JetBlue’s corporate office, you can include logos from United, American, and Southwest (if they are your customers) on your landing page to get their competitive juices flowing.
You could also show case studies from your visitor’s industry to make the page more relevant. Using the JetBlue example, you could show case studies around aviation or travel more broadly.
3. Meet your prospects where they are in your sales cycle
Landing pages give you the opportunity to meet your prospect where they are in your funnel. Recognize where they are based on their behaviors. Here are some questions that may be helpful before developing personalized content and offerings:
- Is this the prospect’s first interaction with your website, or are they a return visitor?
- Has this visitor engaged with top-of-the-funnel content?
- Has this visitor requested a demo, asked to attend a webinar, or downloaded gated content?
- Has this visitor engaged with mid-funnel content or looked deep into product-related content?
- Has this visitor engaged with bottom-of-the-funnel content, such as competitor comparisons?
- Has this visitor engaged with reviews on B2B technology platforms like G2 Crowd, Trustpilot, Capterra, if you have that data from those platforms?
- Do you have data you can pull in from your CRM system that can tell you where this visitor is in your funnel?
Once you observe what a visitor has done on your site, you can personalize the experience for them on your landing page. For example, you might want to take a more aggressive approach with a prospect who has visited your website a handful of times. Instead of presenting introductory, overview content as you would with a first-time visitor, you might guide them more directly to speak with sales or sign up for a demo.
4. Keep form fills simple
Simpler forms tend to be filled and submitted more often. It’s rare that we see more form fields result in higher conversion rates.
Sometimes forms can get lengthy because sales teams like to have as much info about their contacts as possible. If you’re in this situation, you could talk to your sales team about the tradeoff between the number of leads coming to their pipeline versus the information sales is receiving about each prospect. For example, would giving up the phone number on a form be worth it if you delivered twice as many leads to sales?
Given the data most B2B sales representatives have available to them now, they can do plenty of prospecting work with a visitor’s email address. A work email address could be the minimum information you’ll need from your form.
5. Take a more targeted approach with calls to action (CTAs)
For marketers, the CTA is the goal for most B2B landing pages because CTAs drive your visitors to move further down the funnel. We suggest thinking about tuning the level of aggressiveness of your CTA based on the actions your visitor has taken.
If your visitor has engaged with your blog, now may be the right time to prompt them to download gated content and submit their email address. If a visitor engaged with content several times, now may be the right time to prompt them to sign up for a demo or a free trial.
One other important detail: Don’t take a “set it and forget it” approach with CTAs. Take the time to test different wordings that reflect what actions you want the prospect to take. You can also test out different colors, sizes, and designs to see what resonates best with your audience.
6. Show social proof
If you want to help prospects feel more comfortable doing business with you and believing your pitch, show them that other companies believe in you too and are happy to work with you as a partner.
Here are different types of social proof for you to experiment with:
Reviews
If you have reviews in G2 Crowd, Trustpilot, Capterra, or other B2B review sites, you can show those ratings and those reviews on your site.
Customer logos
The customer logos we talked about earlier are another form of social proof. You could more explicitly frame those logos as social proof by saying “Join the ranks of these reputable companies” or “Join hundreds/thousands of other companies like yours.”
Press/News
You may also choose to share recent press releases or news articles about your company, in particular from top-tier publications.
Customer Videos, Testimonials, and Case Studies
Word-of-mouth recommendations are often quite important for business buyers. If you have happy customers willing to advocate for your offering, include them on your landing page.
Partners
If your product is integrated with other platforms that are important to your customers (a CRM, for example), consider including those logos on your landing page as well.
Most B2B marketers don’t use social proof on their landing pages enough, in our experience. Consider displaying social proof at different points of your funnel where you’re asking prospects to take action such as signing up for a demo, or filling out a form.
7. Create follow-up thank you pages
You’ve gotten your prospect to download some content, sign up for a webinar, request a demo, or fill out a form — that’s great! But, your work isn’t over quite yet. Be sure to add a thank you page. Not only is this good manners, but a thank you page also gives you an opportunity to continue the conversation or ask prospects to take further action. For example, you could thank a prospect for signing up for a webinar and then ask them to invite their colleagues and friends to the webinar.
B2B landing pages are a key part of driving revenue through your website. To learn more about how you can speed up your B2B website optimization strategy, simply request a demo here.
