Karen Breen Vogel discusses how to turn your B2B website into a revenue engine. Learn how to define website goals based on your company's needs, how to generate traffic and how to manage sales leads with an effective online funnel (Part 2 of 5).
Thank you, Sarah. In today's session, I'm going to focus on, what are the key value drivers for interactive marketing, which really means understanding how to play out the website, which is one of those key value drivers that corporations have. Effectively, in a B2B environment, what's the purpose of the website, and what can it do for your business? We're going to talk about that at a high level, and then we'll begin to talk more detailed about what that website ought to be doing, how you can measure if it's doing it, and how you can continuously improve the amount of results that you're getting from your website.
First of all, I think it's really important to just talk about what a purpose and a function of a website is. Everybody built them, and certainly everybody felt that they had to have one. But, certainly in the early stages of the Internet, it was more about just having one than really understanding what you expected from that website for your business.
There was also a lot of excitement in the early days about just getting traffic to a website, getting clicks, getting visits. I think people have now gotten to the point that they understand it's really not about just driving traffic to your website, it's about driving the right traffic people that you believe can be customers of yours, or are customers of yours currently, or constituents that there's a value connection between your company and them.
It's also about engaging them. It's not about having just a very product centric website that will be all about you and will be trying to sell any visitor that gets to your site, no matter what their interest is or where they're at in their buying cycle. It's really about understanding those visitors. Where are they? What are they looking to do? How can you best accommodate their needs and help them through their buying cycle?
Lastly, it is about business value. It's very much along a relationship platform. They need value, and you need value. There has to be an equivalent value exchange. So they have to feel like they got content. They got information. They got help. You have to feel like they gave you something in return for that. They moved their feeling about you along their awareness in their engagement level for you.
So, if these things are true, your website needs to function as either a revenue engine for your company, or a profit generator, or a combination of both of those. For most B2B firms, it is a combination of both of those.
For your current customers, you're going to use a website, or perhaps a portal to find ways to service those customers more effectively, probably in their minds better than they were serviced before or at least more conveniently to them, but also in your environment, it's going to reduce the cost of service. So, that's a profit generating goal that you might have. You may have the desire to do that, as well as generate revenue.
For the purposes of the discussion today, I'm going to focus on the revenue side, which is, I think, most of what us marketers are most interested in. We want those websites to either find new customers for us, or upsell and cross sell current customers. So, our website needs to be a revenue engine.
So how do we break that down a little bit more and say, "Beyond generating revenue, what is it going to take in a B2B environment where we are not going to have people necessarily entering shopping carts and making immediate decisions, purchasing, and the cash register ringing?"
We are not going to have that kind of environment. We're going to have an environment where people gradually get interested in our products and services, and become more interested in pursuing that conversation deeper and further, and perhaps becoming a lead that we can hand over to a sales team to pursue.
On this goal path chart, on the yellow side is really if your goals were mostly to reduce costs and to gain more profitability. So let's focus on the primary business goal path being on the blue side, which is increasing revenue.
What you're going to need to know is, are you making progress at every point in the process here? Are you engaging them more? Are you making them more aware? Are you generating leads and defining what that means to your business? Are these qualified leads and defining what that means to your business? Then, do these become opportunities and then eventually sales that happen in your business?
It's very important to break down your revenue, the way you gain revenue in your company, and set up specific goals for each one of those areas.
The other point I want to make, and I think people have come a long way in this understanding, is that this is the hub of all marketing. It is the most efficient environment, and it's the environment that the customers and prospects are most used to coming to now and want to use, and that is the website.
But, it you are spending money in any kind of marketing activity or outreach, your goal is to get people to come to the website so that you can efficiently gain a relationship with them. You can also electronically kind of record that you have this relationship either beginning or moving along.
So, whether you're spending money on trade shows, print advertising, webinars, keyword advertising, whatever it is, you really want to make sure that you have created programs that have offers and have reasons for people to drive to your website, and then you have meaningful activities and engagement there. You record their level of relationship there at that environment, as well as continue to give them things that are going to be meaningful to their decision process.
The last slide that I have brings this all together. What, in B2B, is a website meant to be? It's really meant to be the online funnel. It is a funnel for lead generation. It is the place that the buyers want to start the process. You can think about it as your goal is to make your website your first sales call. It doesn't mean that it's your last sales call. It doesn't mean that it isn't going to need other people to be in the process eventually to get the revenue to happen. You may need dealers and distributors. You may need their websites in the process, as well.
But, you need to think of your environment as the funnel, and that you're trying to get from wherever you message and use as environments to attract visitors to your site, once you get them there, you really want to engage them, and then you want to convert them.
The definition that we use at ClearGauge for conversion is whether or not they leave their information behind. They're unknown to you. Usually, they're an anonymous visitor when they're on the site for the first time, or if they've never felt a reason or set a value that was high enough for them to give you their information.
You're really trying to establish that value exchange. They see something that they want to get from you. Maybe they opt in for future e newsletters or future alerts about something that they care about. They feel that you have thought leadership or you have access to things that they don't have access to, and they're willing to give up their information.
That would be if they're not as far along in the buying cycle. That would be indicated by the arrow moving to the left on the chart. They're going into a database that then you can nurture and bring them back to your site repeatedly, until they are in the part of their buying process where they are ready to do something that is a little bit more qualified.
On the right hand side, we're showing you may have people either on their first visit, or on a repeat visit, that they actually fill out a form and say, "This is who I am, and this is what I want from you. I may want to talk to a salesperson, or I may just want to ask you a question."
You have to create a system that sits outside of your website, maybe an inside sales team or a sales team that then qualifies all of those inquiries or forms, puts those that just need to be responded to effectively in one group, and then the ones that are maybe hot, warm, or cold, actually get moved into other parts of your company so that they can be appropriately handled.
The goal of an online B2B marketing program is to most efficiently utilize this funnel. It's a yield equation where you're trying to bring things to the top, but most effectively get things to happen for you at the bottom of the funnel in the most cost effective way that you can.
So, just to review here, the purpose of the website is to be of assistance to the buyer along their buying process. But it's also to be of value to you to create and grow the relationship effectively and measure how that is going along the path, and certainly, over time, to either move people into a conversion activity. That is, either they're willing to give their information so you can talk to them again, or they actually want to have a concrete conversation with somebody in your company about a specific need or product interest that they have.
In the next session, we're going to pick up from this discussion and talk about how do we take the goals that we have for each stage of this funnel and determine what key performance indicators, or KPIs, which are specific metrics that will tell us how is our funnel performing at each of the layers of the funnel. So that we can begin to get that greater yield from that funnel and make sure that for the money we are spending on our website, or on other marketing activities, that we're achieving the greatest results that we possibly can.
Thank you very much.
