3 Quick Tips for the Proper Care and Feeding of a B2B Website

This is a guest blog post by Jen Agustin. Jen is the Director of Marketing at Bizo, a Business Audience Marketing Platform. You can connect with Jen on Twitter (@LeadJen) or Bizo’s Facebook page.

In an age when we B2B marketers (myself included) are worried about crafting our next tweet or posting a fun infographic to Facebook, it’s easy to forget about our trustworthy and reliable friend—the corporate website. If marketing channels were like friendships, the corporate website would be that person who grew up next door, a person you can always count on to come through for you because she is just that dependable. But, when things get busy, you may forget to see how she’s doing, despite your best intentions.

With so many new marketing trends to keep up with, it’s hard to make time for your website—but it’s also never been more important, especially in B2B. Your corporate website is really the best indicator of whether or not any of your marketing programs are reaching the right people. Why? Because regardless of the channel with which you’re trying to reach them, be it social media, email, display advertising, or paid search, your prospects eventually come to your website or landing page and your ultimate objective is to have them convert. As such, it’s important to take the time to monitor how well your website is helping you accomplish this goal.

Here are some tips to ensure that your B2B website is in the best shape it can be in for driving online conversions:

1. Create great content that drives people to your site—and great content that keeps them there.

It’s important in B2B to develop interesting content and offers to demonstrate your thought leadership in an area or increase your brand awareness. But don’t stop there. Make sure that when people reach your site, they are greeted with just as engaging of an experience so that they can’t help but click around, learn more about what you do, and start building a trusted relationship with your brand, which is so important when it comes to longer B2B sales cycles. If you initially captured their attention with a whitepaper, make it easy for them to locate other whitepapers, but also try to promote engagement with your videos, infographics, or other resources. And if they filled out a form, make sure you don’t require them to fill out a form again if they’re interested in additional content.

2. Use your web analytics tool to understand who exactly is coming to your site.

Website traffic is great. But qualified website traffic is even better. Put another way, if you are a software company that targets finance professionals, would you rather have 1,000 visits or 1,000 visits from CFOs at Fortune 500 companies? By knowing the business demographics of people coming to your site—and even your specific landing pages—you can tell if every single one of your campaigns, from social media to search, is reaching the audience that matters most to your business. If it’s not, you know where to spend the time making optimizations.

3. Incorporate website retargeting to keep in front of all those visitors who don’t convert the first time around.

Hardly anyone converts right away, so we need to do our best to stay top of mind with visitors after they leave our websites. The easiest way to do this is through website retargeting, in which you place retargeting pixels on your website pages, which will then enable you to serve targeted display advertising to these visitors after they leave your site and travel the Web. Retargeting is especially useful in B2B because the sales cycles can be long and complex, and one of the biggest challenges for marketers is staying in front of our prospects over extended periods of time. With retargeting in place, what once may have been a “lost” conversion becomes a “second-chance” conversion, in which you can tailor your message based on your prospect’s previous interests, which will increase relevancy and your chance at conversions.