Convert and grow: How to boost your B2B website’s performance
1st August 2024 •
1st August 2024 •
For both paid and organic traffic, your B2B website plays a critical role in driving demand and leads through to the Sales team. As such, your users’ expectations must be met – and ideally exceeded – if you want to push them to progress on their journey with you.
To achieve this, everything from the content that’s served, to how your users are able to engage with it really matters. Similarly, the more data insights you can share about your prospects’ website interactions and topics of interests, the better chance you give your Sales team to convert that lead – in an effective and timely way.
So, how does the Torpedo team come together to help our clients make more of their websites? In this blog, we’ll introduce you to our tried-and-tested approach for optimisation. Discover tips and tricks from some of our specialists (who might just be on your project team) and gain insights into how you can boost your conversion rates.
By immersing ourselves within your market and reviewing how your competitors are positioning themselves, we’ll assess your standing and look for opportunities to give you points of differentiation.
Also, by working with you, we’ll build up an understanding of your business goals and target audience/s. This will likely involve desk research, immersion sessions with key stakeholders, and interviews with people who meet your ICP (ideal customer profile). Once we’re confident we know how your users’ needs and business objectives align, this insight will be our guiding compass.
From the content to the UI design and overall experience, these findings will direct our approach. By solving your users’ real problems, you’ll establish a powerful online presence and it will drive meaningful business results.
“Most companies will be clear on their target audiences, but many do not have well-defined personas. Therefore, they don’t have a good understanding of their different users’ desires, goals, expectations, needs, and pain points – or even their preferred channels.
We find that customer interviews or discussions with sales staff are really invaluable in drawing out this information. When budget and timelines permit, we would also recommend commissioning bespoke research with customers too. This is a great way to gain insights into customer needs.
The process of identifying business objectives can be more straightforward. However, we do often find that not all stakeholders are on the same page! This is where internal stakeholder interviews or workshops – at the start – work well.”
Harjit Sandhu, Strategy Director, Torpedo.
Another core consideration is taking learnings forward from how your site is currently performing. If you already have an analytics tool like Microsoft Clarity implemented, we’ll review and analyse this data. From this, we’ll put forward recommendations for how to improve your site.
If you’re yet to leverage such tools and lack the data, we’d encourage you to run a small-scale paid ad campaign that drives traffic to your site. We can then track how this does and establish a baseline.
Having a good data sample before getting started is really important. This approach provides numerous valuable insights. It ensures we’re not working with assumptions, but crafting recommendations based on how your actual customers interact with your site.
“Digital analytics data is crucial for increasing B2B website conversions. It reveals potential issues, such as device-specific underperformance, and provides insights into user behaviour across different channels.
Our process involves analysing this data to uncover valuable patterns, like engagement disparities between traffic sources. By examining engagement patterns, we often find surprising insights – like how LinkedIn traffic might be more valuable than Facebook, despite lower conversion numbers.”
Sandra Kaminska-Paciorek, Digital Marketing Manager, Torpedo.
Armed with insights about how your users’ challenges can be resolved with your product or service, we’ll craft a messaging framework. Distilled initially into a compelling value proposition, this framework will start to structure content based on what we know your business wants to say and what your audience wants to hear. It ensures everything hangs together and aligns with your business strategy and brand vision.
The framework gives a hierarchy to the messaging and starts to refine the narrative that will be brought to life across the different pages of your site. Once this feels right, we’ll conduct a content audit of the existing site. Importantly, it’s not always necessary to do a complete overhaul. This process is more about refining the website based on our high-level messaging pillars – and best practices.
“Typically, once we’ve built out a messaging framework, the main reason we make edits to an existing site is to streamline the pages and break down the story, step by step.
Duplication of the same or similar messaging is common. It’s our job to challenge clients to think about what’s necessary to say and when. Being single-minded and using the flow of the website to tell the narrative is key.
With SEO and GEO front of mind, we also do a variety of checks to ensure keywords are integrated in a natural way and that all copy has a low Flesch Reading Score.”
Becky Adams, Content Strategist and Senior Copywriter, Torpedo.
SEO (search engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) aren’t just two buzz terms, they hold a lot of power when it comes to boosting – or reducing – your B2B website’s performance. And both favour simple, high-value, informative content.
SEO plays a huge role in giving your business better visibility, so understanding the intricacies of every algorithm update is a business-critical responsibility. Equally, as mass user behaviour moves from Googling queries to asking the likes of Chat GPT and Gemini for answers, your strategy needs to shift with it – and cover both bases.
From considering what questions users are likely to input, to recognising the value of citing sources, adding quotes and integrating relevant statistics, you can start to tailor your website so that it ticks both SEO and GEO’s criteria.
Ultimately, to get your conversion rates up, you want your website to be as ‘self-service’ as possible. For this to be feasible, you need to make sure it’s an effortless user experience from start to finish. If in-demand content is buried, the navigation isn’t intuitive, or the buttons aren’t instructional, patience will wear thin and they’ll likely go elsewhere. Not to mention, if a user is able to get all the information they need from your site, by the time they speak to Sales, they’re a much warmer lead.
To create that truly seamless experience, a lot of legwork needs to go on in the background. From conducting user interviews to applying best practices and ensuring we’re meeting accessibility guidelines, the UX team applies their knowledge to get initial designs in place. From there, we will usually leverage moderated or unmoderated usability testing platforms to see if the designs are delivering as we’d envisioned them to. Where necessary, we will iterate to fix any niggles.
“A key part of the research stage is establishing clear objectives. Working with our clients, we’ll determine what we want to learn from the research and create tasks for the users based on these parameters.
Through usability testing we can see and understand how people interpret your message, what they think, and what they feel. We identify opportunities for improvement. A subtle tweak here and there can make all the difference in improving qualified leads.”
Guy Carberry, UX Director, Torpedo.
Of course, your website is an owned channel that has the potential to do a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ in a buyer’s journey. But it shouldn’t be reviewed in isolation. Ad campaigns and any other collateral you’re creating for your business should all slot together to form one connected experience for your audience.
To continue to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, you could also look to integrate your CRM system with your website. This way, the Sales team will be able to review real-time performance data in detail.
By linking up your website with an analytics tool and your CRM system, the Sales team will be able to see heatmaps showcasing how different users have engaged with your website. From this, they should be able to deduce what’s brought them to your site and what’s most likely to motivate them to convert. E.g. cost-savings, fast implementation, your organisation’s breadth of expertise, etc. What’s more, with Microsoft’s recent announcement of an integration with HubSpot CRM, these insights are even more readily accessible.
“Integrating CRM systems and analytics tools within your website is crucial for unlocking the full potential of your online presence. This synergy allows for a seamless flow of customer data, creating opportunities for personalised experiences and data-driven decision-making.
Connecting systems allows you to gain deeper insights into your users, streamline marketing efforts, and ultimately oversee more targeted and effective engagement strategies.
In today’s digital world, such integration can deliver a competitive advantage – leading to sustained growth and success.”
Alistair Dorman-Smith, Digital Project Director, Torpedo.
And last but by no means least, your work is never really ‘done’ in the digital realm. Use the data to your advantage to continue to develop and finesse the website based on the latest performance trends and innovations. A/B test messaging and user flows to work out what your audience’s preferences are. Best practices for websites, by industry, are helpful guidelines, but watching your own benchmarks improve month on month is the most effective way of knowing you’re making the right adjustments.
