B2B marketers cannot rely on interruption marketing. As B2B organizations focus more heavily on digital marketing, there will be a trend of crafting their websites to be central to their marketing efforts. These 3 tips can greatly improve the performance and effectiveness of a website for a B2B brand.
- Content strategy
How clearly can your brand articulate it's content strategy?
Content needs to be the lifeblood of your 2014 marketing strategy. Start by creating an inventory of your content assets: whitepapers, factsheets, blog(s), landing pages, micro-websites, news sections, press releases, videos, etc. Having a high-level understanding of your content inventory, will help you decide on where to focus your efforts for the current and next quarter. Create a publishing schedule for your blog and company news. The SEO value of blogs can be high. Most importantly, focus on create blog content that provides value to your audience, subscribers and customers. Don't just sell yourself through this content--provide value: be entertaining, insightful, useful and inspirational.
- Mobile responsiveness
Does your website respond to mobile?
According to Hubspot, 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action. Having a mobile responsive website will improve the user-experience for mobile users. Typically mobile responsive design is more frontend focused than backend. Many websites can be re-skinned without overhauling the backend CMS or administrative tools of a website. We recommend using a frontend mobile responsive CSS framework. Frameworks that we recommend include Foundation CSS, Twitter Bootstrap or Skeleton. Also run a quick test using PageSpeed Insights within Google Developer Tools (also found inside Google Webmaster Tools). B2C brands are more ahead of the curve than B2B brands with mobile.
Resource: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- Marketing automation
Incorporate marketing automation software into your B2B website to improve data, ROI tracking, publishing capabilities and ability to act on the expanded metrics.
A report by the CMO Council revealed that 79% of B2B marketers feel their prospect data is inaccurate and needs improvement, which can be greatly helped by marketing automation software. Marketing automation tools will allow your B2B brand to send out auto-segmented email based on behavior. This will allow your team to communicate and share appealing email content with customers, leads and subscribers. Email marketing can be a highly effective tool, especially when combined with actionable insights, lifecycle behavior tracking, social media publishing tools and other automation technology. 80% of email marketers send the same content to all subscribers, which is a poor practice and leads to subscribes and low engagement rates.
Content with search:
A study with Chitika Insights, How CTR Varies by Referring Webpage, found that traffic originating from search engines offer a higher CTR as a whole.
Mobile:
Websites that incorporated a mobile responsive design saw an increase in conversions increased by 65.71% on tablet and iPhone. Transactions also increased by up to 112.5% for iPads and iPhones according to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Also, according to Hubspot 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action.
Automation:
B2B marketers cannot rely on interruption marketing. Marketers are shifting their budgets away from “interruption” advertising.