Conversions in a nutshell for B2B companies

Whether you’re new to conversion rates or you’re a conversion pro, one thing is clear; conversion rates matter. That’s why we’ve put together this handy guide on conversions for B2B companies. We know your brain is working overtime today, so this is designed to be nice and easy to read and understand – nothing too complicated. But, if you’re looking for a more comprehensive, overall view of conversion, you can check out our Complete Guide to Conversion Rates here.

The Basics

Before we delve into the depths of conversion rates with a B2B focus, let’s quickly remind ourselves of the basics.

A conversion is simply any desired action a visitor to your website has taken in order to interact with you in some way. What this looks like is deteminded by you, and can depend on different things – your industry, your aims, your market.

The type of action also gives us a clue into how far into the buying process each customer is. For example, someone who downloads a resource (such as a whitepaper) is not going to be as far along in the process as a client looking for a demo. A demo means they’re considering your product, but downloading a resource could mean that someone is just looking for information for the moment.

Calculating conversion rate looks like this;

  Conversions (desired actions taken)   x 100

Website Visitors 

To simplify; if you had 200 visitors to your site today, and out of those 20 downloaded a resource and another 4 signed up to your newsletter, then that means you received 24 conversions today, or 12% conversion rate, because (24/200)*100 = 24.  Nice one. 

Conversion rate optimisation is where you fine tune your site to maximise the number of people who convert, and therefore the number of marketing qualified leads you can share with your sales team. In a B2B world, some might call this the *pinnacle*.

Right, so what’s a good conversion rate?

Well, again, that very much depends on your business/industry/market. We think that you should set out to continuously improve it, rather than a target rate. If you want to see the ballpark for your industry, we did some research on conversion rates across different markets, so you could check that out.

Like I say, your focus should be on improving your rate, and it just so happens that we recently got the hottest tips, fresh from our Customer Success team, on how to do just that. You can read that here. 

Why does this matter to a B2B company?

When you’re selling to the end customer, it’s pretty easy to get hold of them – they usually come searching for you. You need some window cleaner to make those windows shine? Pop down to Tesco and see what they’ve got. Cute plant for your desk? Amazon can sort you out. I know I simplify, but the end customer is the devil we all know.

But, the devil you don’t – a busy COO, Salesperson or Marketing Lead – needs you to make things really easy for them. They’re busy people, just like you. And their buying process is much more complex; it might involve more people, there are probably many more options for them, as well as some budget constraints to work through. The very last thing they want to do is jump through hoops all over your website in order to even consider your product.

This is where Conversion Rate Optimisation swoops in to save the day. Focusing on the interactions you have with each individual customer during their time on your site allows you to see their level of intent, and this means you can personalise their experience to continue to nurture them as a lead. The more they interact, the more information you’re armed with, the better your sales team can understand their problems and how your product solves that issue.

We make some serious use of our chatbots to improve conversion rates, and this works in all kinds of industries. For example, we helped our friends over at Etuovi.com to better understand the visitors they were getting to their site and create some bots to capture information. They could capture 15 different data points within one bot conversation – something you’d probably otherwise struggle to get people to share willingly. We also helped IRO Research, a market research company, to improve their ROI by 600% by utilising bots on their site. And SpeedScreed Ltd., they saw an increase of 250% in leads once we had optimised their site. You can read about that here. 

When you have a conversion platform you can do all of this and so much more. When you join Leadoo, you get an onboarding specialist who’s there to guide you through the onboarding and set up, as well as ongoing support provided by one of our conversion gurus. You then get regular check-ins with your guru, who will help you to make changes to your site and to the bots we create for you to help you continuously improve your conversion rate. Improved conversion rates mean better leads, and better leads make your salespeople happy. That’s important, right?

Key takeaway

Conversions are here to stay, and they’re an easy way to up your leads and help your sales teams to make you more revenue. Focusing on them as a B2B company is all but essential now – your customers don’t have time to waste and you may only get their attention once. 

Make it count.