What is the number one priority for businesses nowadays? Most companies will probably say it’s getting more customers. Increasing sales is the basis of healthy growth, it allows you to better recompense your employees, support product or service innovation, it’s the end goal really. And if you run a start-up or a small business, getting more sales is even more critical to ensure survival and growth.
But things are not very easy or straightforward when it comes to attracting and converting more customers. The customer buying journey is fragmented across different devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) and platforms (social media, search engines, your owned media).
If you are a B2B company, things can get even more complex because your sales cycle might be longer and your prospects might need more nurturing and educating before being ready to buy.
At Stoica Digital, we’ve been working on a process to help small B2B companies get more customers online. Using our experience in working with small companies and startups, we put together an easy to follow the process and hopefully after going through it, you will have more clarity as to what you need to do.
So if you’ve been looking for a simple yet thorough method to ramp up you B2B sales online, let’s dive in.
The basis of our process is:
Before anything, you need to attract (the right kind of) visitors to your website. You can either get visitors through organic search, social media or paid advertising. Once these visitors step foot onto your website, your goal is to engage with them in a meaningful and relevant way. A beautiful and intuitive interface is critical for a positive first impression while well written and helpful content can keep visitors on your website longer. Before they leave your website, your goal is to capture their contact details so you can keep communicating with them. Your next job is to nurture those visitors who previously gave you their contact details and focus on providing them with valuable content. As some of these now turned leads become ready to buy, you need to concentrate on converting through well-targeted offers.
Here is a list of all the topics we cover in this article. You can jump to any section by clicking the corresponding link.
Your first task is to attract the right audience to your website. It doesn’t matter how optimized for conversion your website is; if you don’t manage to attract enough traffic you can compromise the rest of the process.
You can attract visitors from different sources:
Organic traffic is made up of visitors that reach your website using a search engine such as Google or Bing. With people spending ever more time on the internet, it is crucial to get in front of users when they research services or products.
Getting your SEO right will increase your chances of being found in search results. A good SEO strategy should consider:
If you want to learn further how to increase your website’s visibility, check out our guide on how to do in-house SEO.
Paid advertising can be especially helpful if you run a new business. When you compete with older, more established businesses, beating them in search results can take a lot of time and effort.
Depending on where your customers spend their time, you can opt to advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn or go for Google Ads. You can start with a pilot campaign on all three platforms and compare results to decide which one makes more sense for your business.
Social media can also help you attract visits. When you post interesting material that your current followers interact with (comment on, share), you increase the likelihood of reaching new people. So don’t neglect your social profiles, put them to work by posting on a regular basis. Also, be mindful of what type of content works better for each platform. More visual content such as graphs, infographics might work better on Facebook while longer articles might be better suited for LinkedIn.
Visitors enter your website from the different sources we discussed above. Granted your users land on pages consistent with what they were expecting to find, they will spend some time there.
Your focus now is to make the most out of their visit and turn strangers into leads. This is where a lot of websites fall short. They do a good job attracting visitors but don’t create opportunities to collect contact details except for maybe the contact page. Or they attempt at collecting data at the wrong time or the wrong manner.
Here are a few things to watch out for when asking for contact information from your visitors:
Hubspot, LeadPages and Conversion XL are just a few examples of how you can engage with your visitors in a meaningful way.
Similarly, Conversion XL offers a conversion guide to download while browsing a checklist type of article on how to increase online sales. It makes perfect sense to download the conversion guide as more in-depth reading.
LeadPages hands out a downloadable sales & marketing guide at the end of their article on how to attract more clients.
Keep in mind that there is no bulletproof recipe for creating email collecting forms. Your best option is to test different variations, understand what works and optimize as you move along.
A/B testing tools such as Omniconvert or Crazy Egg allow you to test your copy, design, placement. Heatmaps and screen recordings offer a deeper understanding of how users interact with your web-pages, where they click, how much they scroll down and more. Hotjar is a great tool for this kind of insights.
You’ve now offered something of value to your visitors and they are no longer strangers. This is essentially the foundation of a (hopefully long-lasting) relationship with them.
What you now need to focus on moving further is developing the relationship, nurturing your leads through helpful and educational content.
Lead nurturing is super effective, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured one as per The Annuitas Group. Yet a lot of companies don’t pursue nurturing at all or target potential buyers with improper content. So how you go about lead nurturing will directly impact your conversion rate.
If you want to make the most out of your nurturing strategy, there are a few things you should pay attention to:
If you did a good job with educating your leads with practical, smart and well-targeted content, some of them will move further in the buyer’s journey, reaching the decision phase.
Some of your leads will never buy from you. And it is perfectly alright, as it’s impossible to cater to everyone. What you need to focus on is recognizing which leads are ready to purchase and offer them an incentive to buy.
But how do you know when a certain buyer in your funnel is in the decision stage? Truth is, we don’t have a bulletproof answer because every business is different. However, there are a number of signals to look for that can indicate the purchase intent. You will have to decide if these signals make sense for you or if there are additional ones for your business in particular. But this should be a good checklist to get you started:
If you prefer a mathematical approach, you can also go for a lead scoring system. This means listing out all signals and attributing a value to each one, then evaluate each lead based on the final score.
Here is an example of lead scoring from SnapApp.
When you have a good idea who are your ready to buy leads, it’s your chance to ask for the sale. Some of the most used incentives at this point are:
We hope that after reading this article you have much more clarity as to how you can get started and what steps to take to increase conversions.
If you think that our process makes sense for your business but just can’t find the time to do it on your own, we can assist you.