Has your website evolved?

With over 80% of the buyers journey happening online before prospects are ready to engage with your sales team, B2B websites are having to evolve beyond online brochures to become a 24/7 lead nurturing tool.

So what does this mean for businesses looking to attract more opportunities? There are three key elements to a lead nurturing website:

Thought leadership website content
With potential customers turning to search engines at an earlier stage in the buying cycle, content that is too product specific is unlikely to hit the mark. Consider taking a more thought leadership approach to website content by linking products and services to business problems that prospects are looking to solve.

So rather than leading with marketing automation software, for example, lead with content about increasing leads, lead nurturing, improving conversion rates and shortening sales cycles to ultimately grow revenues and attract new customers. This approach has the benefit of drawing in a wider audience for your solutions as well as being organically better for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and demonstrating a better understanding of your prospects' business issues.

Gated content
High value content that is typically educational by nature is offered to website visitors in exchange for some information, such as their email address. This is a great way of qualifying those visitors that are interested in starting to evaluate solutions in more depth, but are not yet ready to engage with sales. Gated content could be in the form of a piece of research or white paper, an eBook or ‘how to’ guide. The level of information requested to gain access will depend on the perceived value of the gated content, but the key objective is to move the relationship from an anonymous website visitor to an known contact who can be marketed to on a one-to-one basis.

Personalisation
To further develop the relationship with the contact, personalise the customer experience as much as possible, based on what is known about them and then use this personalised experience to encourage them to offer up even more data in exchange for greater personalisation. This could include their role (audience persona), areas of interest, budget and readiness to buy.

The best way to implement personalisation within a website is to utilise a marketing automation platform such as SharpSpring or Hubspot which, as well as allowing personalisation to be automated via business rules and workflow, will also provide dynamic lead scoring based on their interaction with your content and their level of engagement. This is important as it will identify the hottest leads within your pipeline and allow the sales team to focus on engaging with the opportunities that are most likely to buy.

To discuss what is involved with turning your brochure website into an always available lead nurturing machine do get in touch.