Who hasn’t had the experience of being chased out of a showroom by a pushy salesperson? Those experiences are tiresome because they don’t respect where we are in our customer journey.
We see this mirrored in B2B landing page performance with annoying popups and premature calls to action (CTAs) that don’t offer prospects what they need when we need it.
For digital marketing, integrating customer journey and intent into landing page design is essential for its success. You can reverse engineer a path to higher engagement and conversion rates by mapping out the customer journey and intent across all stages.
What Is Intent in the B2B Customer Journey?
The customer journey is like a timeline of their experience with your brand, from initial awareness to the final decision to purchase. At each journey stage, prospects have a specific intent for their goals.
Intent refers to what the customer wants to achieve at each journey stage – and this also speaks to their underlying motivation.
Remember that customer intent is almost always very different based on price. For example, in high ticket sales, customers rarely intend to purchase the first time they engage with a brand.
Prospects may value their time more than shopping around for small, low-risk purchases. In this instance, the landing page may look like a traditional sales page, hosting the entire funnel content from awareness to consideration to a “buy now” button.
Understanding intent can help businesses create targeted, intentional marketing strategies that align with the customer’s journey phase. This awareness is essential to creating an excellent customer experience. From the customer’s perspective, the wrong offers at the wrong time are confusing or irrelevant at best and annoying at worst.
Why B2B Landing Page Performance is More Important Than Ever
Recent research shows that most post-pandemic B2B buyers prefer a self-service customer journey over “booking a call” to speak to a salesperson or company representative.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in digital channels, making landing pages more crucial to lead gen and conversion than ever.
It’s also excellent news for companies that fully embrace digital marketing. Landing pages allow for a precision-tailored approach to marketing. Optimizing landing pages can result in more effective lead generation, higher conversion rates, and better customer retention.
Successful conversion rates for landing page forms vary across industries but tend to hover around 2 to 3%.
When you consider landing page content for each stage of the journey, a good starting place is to ask what kinds of questions your prospects have at each phase. That question can help you tailor content that anticipates their needs.
Optimizing CTAs for B2B Landing Page Performance
What makes a landing page a landing page? It’s the Call to Action (CTA). The most important predictor of landing page success is how well the content and the CTA align with the customer journey.
For example, a prospect at the awareness stage of a high-ticket purchase will likely not click “buy now” but may respond to a CTA for an educational webinar. A typical conversion CTA is a free trial requiring credit card information with lower-cost products and services.
Now, let’s look at some landing page tips for each step of the customer journey.
B2B Landing Page Tips for the Customer Journey Awareness Phase
In the awareness stage, the customer is just getting to know the brand. Common questions include “What solutions or options can address my business problem? Who provides these solutions?”
Their intent likely includes narrowing their options. Here are some key considerations to increase B2B landing page performance in this phase:
- Content: Landing page content at the awareness stage should seek to move prospects further into the consideration funnel. For lower-cost purchases with minimal risk, like a SaaS subscription, the funnel is relatively short, so the landing page includes consideration information and a “sign up now” button.
For higher ticket items, you can use “top of funnel” (TOFU) content like blog posts, whitepapers, and industry reports to cover the most common questions and challenges your prospects face to drive organic traffic to your landing page.
- SEO Optimization: Conduct keyword research to understand what your target audience is searching for and optimize your landing page content to increase visibility in search engine results.
- Retargeting: Only some visitors will convert on the first visit. Showing targeted ads to visitors who didn’t initially convert keeps your brand top-of-mind and provides multiple touchpoints along the customer journey. With dynamic retargeting, these ads can showcase products or services they viewed, reminding them of their interest and your value proposition.
B2B Landing Page Tips for the Customer Journey Consideration Phase
In the consideration stage, you now have something precious and rare – your prospect’s attention. Gary Vaynerchuk goes so far as to say that attention is the number one asset in the business world today.
In this stage, simply providing more information about your product is not enough to engage and nurture leads. The CX during this phase builds trust. Trust is essential because people rarely buy from companies they don’t trust.
So, how do you keep the audience’s attention and build trust with B2B prospects? Here are some ideas.
- Personalized messaging and experiences. Consumers now expect personalized experiences across all their customer journeys. Let your prospects know you understand where they are in their customer journey by providing appropriate content. For example,
consumers looking for in-depth information will be annoyed by constant “buy now” pop-ups or repeated offers for the same lead magnet they just downloaded.
- Personalize the viewer experience. Implement dynamic content on your landing pages, meaning integrate that content changes based on visitor demographics, industry, or behavior on your site.
- AI for landing pages. As you might expect, AI tools are taking landing page personalization options to the next level. At Funnel Envy, we leverage AI and manage the added complexity of multiple landing pages to help our clients optimize results.
- Lead magnets. Customer preference for self-service info is good news for lead magnets if done correctly. Instead of making “book a call today” the only option for moving ahead, offer valuable resources like webinars or downloads appropriate for the consideration phase in exchange for contact information.
B2B Landing Page Tips for the Customer Journey Conversion Phase
By this time, your prospect has gotten to know and trust you. Landing pages for sales are both an art and a science. Here are some tips:
- Testimonials and Case Studies: Provide social proof through testimonials, reviews, and case studies. Real-world success stories can significantly influence decision-making.
- Live Demos or Consultations: Now is the time for in-person contact for high-ticket items. Offer live demonstrations or free consultations to prospects who have shown a high level of engagement. This direct interaction can be the final nudge they need to convert.
AI for Continuous B2B Landing Page Improvement
Continuous improvement in B2B landing page performance is a crucial goal. With AI, A/B testing is evolving rapidly. AI can now manage dozens of split tests of landing page elements, such as headlines, images, and CTAs, and even automate optimization based on the results.
This development has significant implications for improving lead gen because studies show that the more landing pages companies run, the better. The study revealed that 31 to 40 landing pages generate five times more leads than 1 to 5 landing pages, and over 40 pages generate 12x the leads.
Moving Ahead
Optimizing even five to ten landing pages can be a lot to manage in-house. From testing to reporting, Funnel Envy can help you with the complexity of scaling your landing page strategy. We specialize in optimizing B2B landing pages to drive conversion and boost sales.
We understand the complexities and have the tools and expertise to help you take your landing page performance to the next level. Reach out today to get started.
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