For anyone wanting to track the performance of their B2B marketing efforts, you have likely heard about the importance of landing pages on your website. You might also have an understanding of landing page best practices. Both are important to learn, especially for improving lead generation efforts.
If you are considering a time and effort investment to update your strategy for landing pages, it’s important to know the benefits of a landing page for a B2B business. With a better understanding of benefits and potential outcomes, you can craft a strategy that aligns with your specific goals or KPIs in mind.
Four main benefits of landing pages are:
Many legacy websites have one overarching “contact us” form for all interactions on the website. This is a poor practice and will impact your ability to generate leads. While there are many negative outcomes for this approach, there are two key reasons to avoid this bad practice.
Firstly, it puts the impetus on website visitors to submit their information before the value has been presented to them. Forms on your website should really be quid pro quo -- you get something in exchange for giving something. B2B buyers have come to expect relevant content in this exchange. As a result, a generalized form with no incentive offer can negatively impact the rate of conversion.
Secondly, a generalized form doesn’t let you tailor your marketing efforts based on the new lead’s intentions or interests. Contact Us forms are often free to fill text boxes that you cannot automate into a specific follow-up email and can’t add a lead to a targeted marketing or sales list. This practice hurts your ability to follow up quickly and relevantly while also affecting your ability to remarket when necessary.
This is why landing pages are so crucial. Landing pages are dedicated to one main conversion, which helps focus on the action leads should take.
In doing so, you create an opportunity to promote very targeted destination points, which can help you learn more about a business lead's interests. Dedicated pages improve conversion because they create a very specific incentive to convert, and the lead knows what they are getting when they fill out the form.
Companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15, according to HubSpot.
A landing page is ideal for a campaign in which you need to drive people to take a desired action. For example, landing pages make a fantastic targeted destination for an Ads campaign and can match the keyword and conversion you promoted in your ads.
See also: 6 Myths About a Landing Page Strategy (That Will Actually Kill Conversions)
How are you moving leads through the sales funnel now? Many companies answer in one of these two ways: nothing, or personal sales outreach. Unfortunately, both of these lead nurturing strategies are ineffective.
If you do nothing, you put pressure on your leads to continually self-educate and reach out when they are ready. When this approach is taken, there is a high chance you will lose potentially great sales opportunities if you don’t have a plan in place. Likewise, if you follow up with a sales outreach too soon, you could scare a lead off and lose the sale.
Landing pages serve another important function of nurturing leads through the funnel.
Depending on the targeting and conversion offer, landing pages can accommodate many places in the sales funnel. With an offer like an eBook or infographic, you can convert a high percentage of casual website visitors into new business leads. By sending targeted emails to new leads, you can drive them to landing pages with sales demo videos, case studies, and sales one-pagers -- content that helps convert them into sales leads.
Additionally, you can progressively profile leads with landing pages. Progressive profiling is a way to capture information over time as a lead fills out different landing pages. Your form field questions can be replaced with new, more sales-related questions as leads fill out additional forms.
When capturing a lead on a specific conversion instead of just a generic catch-all form, you know something specific about this lead. This context is extremely helpful and can be used for your outreach or next marketing step. This allows you to effectively nurture them based on their interests and provided information.
Create many landing pages, optimize them for your keyword targets, and see keyword rankings rise. It’s a simple formula that shows Google you have new content around a topic.
Landing pages targeted to a keyword are often called SEO pages or "search engine optimization" pages -- and they do just that.
These pages can have plenty of content on a topic, and can also serve as a central linking hub for all pages related to that key term. In other words, you can link multiple blog posts to one central landing page around the same topic. This helps create a lead generation funnel out of your blog. This linking structure will also tell Google that you are authoritative and deserve a higher search rank, which means more visibility and leads.
B2B companies see the highest growth spike in lead generation when they reach a threshold of 40 landing pages or more, according to HubSpot research.
By creating SEO pages, you add more content to your website. This is good news for your keyword strategy and search rankings because search engines like to see that your website is full of helpful content, growing and updated often.
Think of a landing page as a great lab for isolating factors that you can test. Split- and multivariate testing gives you insights that you can roll out to all of your digital properties to entice more business leads. However, testing on a homepage or major website page can be tricky. You often have many hoops to jump through and don’t want to throw off a carefully crafted homepage design or messaging strategy -- especially before you know that it would work.
Conversely, a landing page gives you a perfect testing area to gain insights that you can use across multiple channels. Most B2B businesses have a variety of messaging statements, imagery, value propositions and conversion offers. By running tests, you can narrow down this variety to what resonates with your buyer’s the most.
A test-based methodology significantly improves B2B lead generation. In order to run successful tests, test one factor at a time in a split test and ensure the landing page earns enough visitors to be statistically significant. At times, you might need to put a budget behind a paid campaign to drive enough traction early on.
Because of these benefits, landing pages are a crucial part in successful lead generation strategies for B2B companies. Fill your sales funnel with qualified leads by implementing these strategies.
Sources
HubSpot, updated August 2017, “Why You, Yes You, Need More Landing Pages”