Sometimes it’s hard to spot the root cause of a problem. You know you have one, you know you can do better, but you just can’t put your finger on the cause of the problem. That’s how most B2Bs feel about their online presence.
You may be having so much trouble finding the problem, because it doesn’t look like a problem. Something you think is great about your digital marketing may be the factor that’s dragging you down.
It may even be a collection of things. Lets look at some of the most common digital marketing mistakes.
The “What We Do” Mystery
When a visitor arrives on your website, do they instantly know what you do? How many links do they have to follow and lines do they have to read to get it? This “what we do” mystery has become more and more common on B2B websites. Companies name menu items “products”, “services” and “our difference” without giving any indication of the industry they’re in. You may think this is a minor issue; that users will just follow those links. An effective online presence isn’t about giving users options; it’s about encouraging them to do what you want. So where’s their encouragement if they don’t know what you do straight away?
Style Over Substance
What are you most proud of on your website? The imagery? Navigation? The Content? Or how it helps you grow your business? When you’re building an online presence it’s easy to get bogged down in design. You want things to look cool, you want a website you can show off. But it needs to be effective too. If your design makes your industry unclear, or creates difficult navigation or distracts from the business it will negatively affect your ability to generate online leads.
Boring Brochures and Billboards
What is your online presence? Is it a brochure or billboard for your brand? Or is it a lead generation and sales machine? It should be both. Your website, social media presence and digital marketing can become your company’s main sales channels; but you need to let them do that by creating an organic online presence. You need to do more than just list your products online. You need to regularly create and share new content, actively work on sales channels and qualify leads.
Need to Know Basis
Even if you do already create regular content, like blogs, whitepapers etc., you may be hampering yourself by ‘managing’ the detail contained within them. Offering free content or content in exchange for an email address is a great way to drive traffic and generate leads, but the content needs to be useful. Many B2Bs offer the minimum of in case prospects take the information without becoming a client. The theory goes something like “You can’t tell them that, they’ll be able to do it without us.” If your business is so simple that a few whitepapers can explain it in full, you probably don’t deserve to be in business.
One More Thing…
You may have committed one of the above mistakes, in which case you have a good indication of ways you can improve your online presence. But even if you have avoided the above, or you ignore the advice we’ve given you, this last point is most important. When your prospects encounter a piece of content, or visit your site, do you tell them what to do next? Is your site filled with calls to action that invite visitors to download content, read or subscribe to your blog, or find the next piece of vital content? The end of every piece of content should contain a call to action or conversion point.
If there’s only one thing wrong with your online presence, that’s probably it. Now that you’ve put your finger on it, why not have a read of our whitepaper on creating an effective marketing strategy?
See what I did there?
