Traffic is a huge part of online marketing.
We talk about traffic quite a bit here on the GBW Blog.
We look mostly at organic sources of traffic; strategies that involve using content to bring potential clients to your website including with a blog.
Those organic channels are usually long-term efforts that can coincide with other efforts to bring in traffic to your site. That can include promoting your content to get traffic and promoting other pages on your site with advertising.
It can also include public relations efforts, which can build over time, but can build quickly if you get on with the right opportunities.
But say you do all that and you get some traffic in the short-term while building a solid foundation of content on a blog for the long-term…
How are you going to convert it?
Here are some steps to take to get your B2B ready to convert your traffic.
Step 1. Map Out Your Sales Cycle
This is the biggest step in the process of online marketing. And it can adapt over time, but you should have a good idea right now of how your sales process works.
Too many websites kind of jump the gun with calls-to-action and we’ll get to that later.
When someone first comes to you in person to discuss buying your product or service you usually don’t ask them to buy within the first two sentences. And with inbound marketing, like blogging, etc., you’re even earlier in the process when the person might not know they need your product or service.
If you run into a potential customer at a conference and they ask you a question about the industry and you answer that question you’re not going to ask them to buy your product in the next sentence.
But you might give them your business card. You might tell them that you have a guide that could help them with other questions they have regarding your industry.
And from there you have other steps to build the relationship.
Your website and your in-person sales are exactly the same.
For online marketing to work you need to understand your sales process.
Step 2. Turn Your Website Into A Salesperson
We jumped ahead a little bit, but the first step is to understand your sales process.
The next step is then turning your website into a salesperson.
Layout the website to match the typical path of a customer working with a salesperson.
Give the website the information that your customers are looking for. Every time a customer asks a common question during the sales process the answer needs to be on the website.
Go back to the conference situation when you’re just bs-ing with potential clients over drinks. You’re discussing the industry, trends, etc.
The questions you provide there make great content for blog posts that will attract potential customers over time to your website.
Once the discussion turns to a specific problem that your product or service can solve or if the customer knows that they need a product or service like yours the discuss moves to a different area on your website; usually your homepage and services page(s).
Once you understand your sales process (and you might already) you can layout your website just as you would train your salesperson.
Step 3. Identify Sources Of Traffic For Each Page, Step In The Sales Process
Each page will have different sources of traffic.
For example, SEO is a long-term traffic strategy especially if you’re starting from scratch. But even with SEO you’ll attract potential customers at different stages of the sales cycle with blog posts vs. your homepage.
And that’s okay.
When someone searches for a blogging services related keyword, we at GBW want them to find our homepage. They’re past the point of being interested in our blog. They’re deeper in the sales process.
But if our target customer has a question related to their job, like about traffic or conversion, we want a blog post to be there to attract them.
So with SEO there are different keywords.
The same works with keywords for advertising.
And you can have multiple traffic sources for all the pages on your site, but understand where the person coming to your site is in the sales process.
You want to attract people that are are different stages, but you have to bring them to the right pages based on where they are when you engage with them.
Step 4. Give Each Page A #1 Call-To-Action Priority
Once you’ve got your pages figured out in the sales process it’s vitally important to have the right call-to-action on those pages.
We looked at it earlier where it’s common to jump the gun with asking for the sale.
I always like to think about real world situations. It’s no different.
Here is an example situation.
I’m at a networking event. A person asks me what software I recommend for a website. I talk a little bit about WordPress. My next step in the chat is not to say, “Want to buy a blogging service?”
It doesn’t make sense to jump that far ahead.
But I might say, “How come you’re looking at new software? What are your goals?”
So with a business blog you are often looking to direct people to other blog posts and maybe to your homepage or to an email newsletter.
But once you get people to your homepage, interested in your service then you are looking to get them further into the sales process.
And on the homepage it’s still easy to jump the gun.
When someone asks you about your service you often don’t tell them the basics and ask for the sale. You give the basics, they ask for more details, they ask about the people at your company and from there you move into the sales conversion.
So on your homepage you’re looking to link to your product or service detail page or pages. Perhaps even your About page from there.
Then you ask for the contact page.
Step 5. Setup Quarterly Audits
The final step I think is important and it would be easy at this point to end things.
After Steps 1-4 you’ll have a really good website, but your website is never “done”.
Every quarter or so I like to look at my website and do an audit. I go back through steps 1-4. I look at the blog posts we’re writing. I look at interactions with clients throughout the sales process and tweak copy on the various pages on the site.
I analyze the calls-to-action and see if any need tweaking.
It’s always an ongoing process because you’re always learning more about yourself and your clients.
Conclusion
Traffic is not an easy thing to get for your B2B website. But it’s also important to turn traffic into conversions. If you are spending money to create content and to bring traffic in through advertising then you for sure want to make it certain that you have a good conversion rate.
Follow the steps above and your website will be in much better shape than many other B2Bs out there.