How Inbound Marketing Drives Website Conversion Rates Through The Roof

HINT: IT ACTUALLY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR WEBSITE

I know, surprising, right? Everyone thinks that conversion rates are all about the website, but when all our testing and experiments wrapped up, we learned that conversion rates have very little to do with website design. We found that content offers, marketing messaging and stories had more to do with conversion rates than the actual design of your site.

Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. If you have a horribly designed website with landing pages that are awful, you’re going to have a very low or potentially non-existent conversion rate. What I'm saying is that today a lot of sites look similar and are well-designed. Landing pages have been scientifically engineered to eliminate friction and most pages we see deploy many of the best practices.

Increase Sales – 83% of Sales Depend on the Customer Liking You

Everyone knows people buy from people they like. Yet, you can’t really like someone you don’t know. You can’t like someone you don’t trust. And that’s exactly why most attempts to sell fail.

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

How to Adapt Your Negotiation Tactics Depending on Who You are Talking to In The World

You can't expect negotiations with the French to be like negotiations with Americans, and the same holds true for every culture around the world.

British linguist Richard D. Lewis charted communication patterns as well asleadership styles and cultural identities in his book, "When Cultures Collide," which is now in a third edition. His organization offers classes in cross-cultural communication for clients like Unilever and BMW.

Although cultural generalizations can be overly reductive, Lewis, who speaks 10 languages, insists it can be done fairly. "Determining national characteristics is treading a minefield of inaccurate assessment and surprising exception. There is, however, such a thing as a national norm," he writes.

Scroll down to see Lewis' insights on negotiating with people around the world.

Jenna Goudreau contributed reporting.

Americans lay their cards on the table and resolve disagreements quickly with one or both sides making concessions.

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

7 Ways Inbound Marketing Drives Website Conversion Rates Through The Roof

1. Tell Them What You Do In The Headline

Marketers get caught up in their own creativity and sometimes bury the lead, making it even more difficult for prospects to quickly know what you do and how you can help them. A cyber security company used the headline “Appearances Can Be Deceiving.” It's creative and it’s accurate, but can you tell me what they do? No!

Here's a better headline: “Your Job Might Be In Jeopardy If Hackers Are In Your Network Right Now.” This would likely encourage targeted prospects to read more, visit more pages on the site, and then convert from an anonymous visitor into a lead for this company.

2. You Have To Pass The 'Scratch Out, Drop In' Test

Your website has to be different than your competitors’ websites. If you can scratch out your name and put in the name of any competitor and what the site says would still be accurate, you have an issue. Your prospects are going from site to site looking for differences. Your site needs to be different. It has to look different, say different things and provide a different experience.

Good marketing is about standing out in the crowd. Make sure your website stands out and helps your company appear different than all of your competitors. Again, this is not about design; it's about messaging, stories and the experience.

3. Make Sure Your Story Is In The Right Order

Human beings process information in a very linear and systematic way. If your website presents information out of order, the people you want to convert on your site are going to feel uncomfortable and bounce off before converting.

To prevent that, stick to the process that a human being’s brain goes through when making decisions. Start with a pain statement that all prospects can connect with in 10 seconds, then follow up with your solutions so they know quickly that you have a way to solve their specific challenges. But you’re not done yet.

You're remarkable, right? Of course you are because you’ve been following our advice and you know your business has to stand out. Make sure your visitors see how remarkable you are right on your home page.

Now that prospects know you understand their pain and you have remarkable solutions, it’s time to make them feel even safer. This is where you bring in the social proof. Only now are they ready to evaluate your case studies, success stories, logo library or testimonials. But if you present these too early, your prospects won’t mentally be ready to process this type of information out of order.

4. Add The Right Offers On The Right Pages

On Wednesday I wrote about having pages for awareness, consideration and decision-making. Once you have your site set up like this, you need to map the conversion offers to those pages in an equally strategic manner.

You can’t put all your offers on every page and expect that the more offers you use, the more leads you’ll get. Trust me, we did that and it didn’t work. We want you to avoid making the same mistakes we did. Less is more in this case. Prioritize your best offers at the right stage in the sales funnel and then use only those offers.

5. Always Answer Questions

Your prospects have questions and they’re coming to your website to get answers. Make sure your website is built, designed and written with this in mind. Each page should have a specific question in mind, answer that question and then offer even more information to help prospects with their individual buyer journeys.

If you don’t know what questions your prospects are asking, you need to find out. You can ask them directly, you can ask your sales reps or you can ask your customer support people. All these folks know exactly what prospects and customers ask at all stages of the sales funnel.

6. Make Sure It Works On All Devices

Search for the keyword "mobile searches" and you’ll see a variety of data points that all point to the same conclusion. People are doing searches on their phones. In some cases, 50% of the initial searches for content are done on mobile devices, and the initial experience prospects are having with your company is on the responsive version of your website.

This means your site has to not only be responsive, but it also needs to be designed deliberately and strategically to support that initial experience on a prospect’s phone. How many times have you visited a website on your phone only to have a mediocre experience? Probably too many times. The result is a less-than-stellar feeling about that company. Perhaps you never even try to connect with them again. This is what you want to avoid.

7. Watch Visitors' Behavior

As smart as we all think we are, we rarely nail anything right out of the gate, and your website is no different. No matter how much time and money you spend designing it you won’t actually know how users, visitors and prospects will respond to it until you launch it. That’s why we prefer an Agile, 30-day approach to website builds instead of the long and painful six-month website project. Get something up quickly, get data and then make adjustments over time based on visitor data.

Since conversions are our goal, you need to see how visitors are making their way through your site. For example, I see a lot of sites with the offer at the very bottom of a long scrolling page. That might make sense on paper, but when you see that visitors are not reading all the way down the page, you have an issue.

If you don’t get this user behavior data you’ll never know whether the issue is your page, your offer, your copy or your design. This could contribute to inaccurate decision-making based on bad assumptions. You should be able to limit this with the right application of tools and technology.

Tightly integrating messaging, search and content along with web and conversion strategy is at the core of what an inbound marketing engagement is all about. If you think about your website as more of an experience for your prospects and you include conversations about the above marketing elements, you’ll see a major lift in your lead generation in no time.

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

It’s Time To Have “The Talk”…About Your Sales Pipeline Stages

Sales And Marketing

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

Should We All Be Working 3-Day Workdays?

Why scientists think we should be working three-day weeks

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

10 Steps to Win the Sale Every Time

Keep Winning

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

The Best Practices for Lead Response Management

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

The Price is Right

“Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will nd your customers buying from them, not you.” - Mark Cuban

40% (20 out of 50) of the fastest-growing B2B companies make their pricing public.

Of the 20 companies that make their pricing public, 14 use tiered pricing.

Of the 14 companies with tiered pricing, 6 have CTAs prompting enterprise customers to request quotes.

Why do companies treat selling to the enterprise di erently than selling to everyone else? ere are lots of factors, but it usually comes down to scale. Rolling out a product or service to a massive organization can be a seriously complex (and expensive) undertaking.

So while being able to make unassisted purchases on a B2B website is convenient for most, enterprise customers need to be able to talk through the ner details of your product/service with a real human before they buy.

Download It's Not the Market, It's Your Marketing

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

The Path to Purchase

“Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customerwants to buy and help them do so.” - Bryan Eisenberg

B2B websites lead people down 1 of 2 paths: toward a product, or toward a salesperson.

The experience prospective customers have when they land on your website can be crucial to whether or not they end
up converting. As Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield once commented:

“... even the best slogans, ads, landing pages, PR campaigns, etc., will fall down
if they are not supported by the experience people have when they hit our site, when they sign up for an account, when they first begin using the product and when they

start using it day in, day out.”

In analyzing the websites of the 50 fastest-growing B2B companies, we found two distinct paths that companies typically try to send potential
customers down. They either direct people to A) engage with the product
or service in some way, or to B) engage with a salesperson or other company representative to learn more.

62% (31 out of 50) of websites have primary CTAs directing people to the product/service.

38% (19 out of 50) have primary CTAs directing people to talk to Sales.

Of course, many of the companies that have product-focused primary CTAs also have secondary CTAs for talking to Sales. And remember the 11 companies with live chat from the previous chapter? All 11 of those websites have product-focused CTAs.

e takeaway: It doesn’t have to be one way or the other. Within the 50 fastest-growing B2B companies in the U.S., both tactics are employed. You can encourage people to discover the value of your product through having them experience it for themselves, and you can provide them with an opportunity to talk to a real person if that’s what they want.

Regardless of the path you choose to send people down, make sure that their rst experience is (as Slack's CEO recommended) a positive one.

36% (18 out of 50) of the fastest-growing B2B companies o er free trials or freemium versions of their product.

A free trial or freemium version of a product can be a driving force behind a company’s growth. It’s a model that allows prospective customers to experience rst-hand how a product is going to perform, which reduces the need for canned sales pitches and aggressive tactics.

As Roger Lee of Battery Ventures once wrote:

“Instead of hiring a huge sales force and sending these people out to convince potential customers to buy your product -- the way Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and even Salesforce.com built empires -- a freemium model is a perpetual motion machine through which your product sells itself.”

Of the 18 companies with some free component to their product ...

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

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Recent Posts

How Inbound Marketing Drives Website Conversion Rates Through The Roof

HINT: IT ACTUALLY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR WEBSITE

Increase Sales – 83% of Sales Depend on the Customer Liking You

How to Adapt Your Negotiation Tactics Depending on Who You are Talking to In The World

You can't expect negotiations with the French to be like negotiations with Americans, and the same holds true for every culture around the world.

7 Ways Inbound Marketing Drives Website Conversion Rates Through The Roof

1. Tell Them What You Do In The Headline

2. You Have To Pass The 'Scratch Out, Drop In' Test

3. Make Sure Your Story Is In The Right Order

4. Add The Right Offers On The Right Pages

5. Always Answer Questions

6. Make Sure It Works On All Devices

7. Watch Visitors' Behavior

It’s Time To Have “The Talk”…About Your Sales Pipeline Stages

Sales And Marketing

Should We All Be Working 3-Day Workdays?

Why scientists think we should be working three-day weeks

10 Steps to Win the Sale Every Time

Keep Winning

The Best Practices for Lead Response Management

The Price is Right

The Path to Purchase

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