How To Drive B2B Sales With Micro Conversions
As a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, you know the difficulties involved with closing a sale. B2B marketers need to educate their audience. while positioning themselves in front of the primary decision-makers of large and complex organizations.
Leveraging Micro Conversions For Your B2B Marketing Strategy
You do all this while managing an often long-term sales cycle that involves highly detailed sales and marketing material.
The heart of marketing and the art of sales are both a series of small decisions. Each decision either leads your audience towards or away from the end goal of a purchase.
However, while the small steps that go into each purchase are important, many companies only track the final conversions but have no idea about what actions lead their customers to the big “Yes” and close the deal.
Not understanding how your customers come to know and trust your product leaves you vulnerable in the highly competitive B2B market. Not identifying the type of content that drives conversions means you are not able to personalize your marketing strategy. This is why it is imperative that B2B marketers understand, track, and optimize micro conversions along the journey so that they can increase sales.
Micro conversions are vital to growing your B2B digital marketing strategy. This will not only lead to more visits but optimizing micro conversions will also help build trust and authority among buyers. As a result, B2B marketers will also see increased sales across all channels of their company.
What is a Micro Conversion?
Micro conversions are any actions that your audience takes as they interact with your online marketing strategy that may lead them toward the desired conversion goal. The importance of micro conversions is often overlooked, and the success of a B2B marketing campaign is judged solely on the amount of units or services sold.
Examples of micro conversions that you can examine across your digital marketing channels include:
- Clicks from PPC ads to a landing page.
- Clicking on a contact form.
- Submitting a search query in the search box on your website.
- Clicking on an Organic search listing on Google.
- View product page
- Opening and clicking through an email.
- Clicking through to a product detail or information page
- Viewing the pricing page.
- Downloading an eBook or sales sheet.
- Interaction with social media posts.
- Engagement with social media ads and other social content.
- Chat or call with a customer service rep.
- FAQ page views.
Micro conversions include significant steps that your audience must take to come to the final purchase. While they are not the last purchase, micro conversions are typically the goals along the way that help build relationships with your site visitors. Put simply, micro conversions tell you about your customer’s intention to purchase from you.
[Tweet “Here’s how to reach better #B2B #sales with #microconversions from @CJGiarratana”]
Without micro conversions, it is impossible for you to know how your audience learned about your product or service, build trust, increase the number of visitors to your website, and optimize content for more conversions on specific landing pages.
Why Micro Conversion Matter in B2B
Business-to-business buyers are often constrained by issues of accountability in their buying decision. This means that consumers are cautious before signing a deal for their company because they don’t want to lose their job over the purchase of an unreliable product or service.
As a result, many B2B purchases are based on emotional issues, and it is the job of a B2B marketer to provide educational content to establish trust and security. You can look to micro conversions to help you educate and build trust with your customers to increase sales.
You can build trust and safety for your buyer in many ways, but the primary ways you can make your B2B buyer feel safe and secure is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on:
- Brand
- Reputation
- Case Studies
- Service Of The Purchase
- Product Lifespan
If you want to increase conversions throughout the lifecycle of a B2B sale, then you have to focus on each step your customer takes along the path to a final purchase.
Understanding the Customer Journey and optimizing each micro-conversion along toward the acquisition will help you find ways to create content that develops trust and security among your buyers.
While your online sales process can look different based on your industry and sales cycle, it is vital to map out each micro-conversion and touchpoint. Once you map out the micro conversions across your marketing channels will help you not only understand the stage and needs of your audience but also begin to qualify each lead at their different stage.
Small Steps Toward A B2B Scale
Understanding micro conversions across your digital marketing strategy will help you get a good sense of how your audience engages and interacts with your online content. You can incorporate these metrics to provide robust insight and a holistic view of how to improve your strategy to increase purchases and sales.
There are numerous types of content that you can integrate into the Customer Journey as your audience interacts with your brand. The goal of each step is to engage your audience based on their needs with relevant content to guide them through all the small steps until they commit to making a first conversion.
There are many other examples of micro conversions that your audience could be interacting with your brand at various stages of the Customer Journey, but the most important thing is to align your content in the Customer Journey at specific stages of the buying cycle to educate and build security with your clients.
Micro Conversions Drive B2B Sales
The days of a linear path that your customers must take to purchase a product are gone. Today, your audience have a wider selection on the market and more ways to consume content to build a relationship.
Instead of fighting to keep your customers on a particular Customer Journey, you should spend your time and resources finding new ways to deliver relevant content that is valuable to your clients on their path towards a purchase.
The primary path towards a purchase is mainly the same for B2B buyers:
Acknowledge the need or problem
- Search for a solution
- Evaluate the options
- Build trust with a brand
- Purchase
- Re-evaluate the decision following the purchase
No matter the product or service you offer, your B2B digital marketing strategy should be focused on producing high-quality content that meets the needs of your content at every point of their Customer Journey. Here are a few of the most common B2B digital marketing strategies that you can use to understand your client’s’ intentions through micro conversions:
On-site Search
On-site search data is a great B2B micro conversion because it provides information about your customers’ experience on your website. Understanding what your customers are looking for not only tell you what content you should optimize, but it also helps you understand what content you are missing and should expand on.
Try to search on your website on both desktop and mobile to see how the experience feels. Investigate a few keywords to see exactly how people view your site when they use your on-site search function.In the world of B2B marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) is a powerful channel to acquire quality clicks and drive more traffic to your site. However, you need to have a consistent message between the
Paid Search
In the world of B2B marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) is a powerful channel to acquire quality clicks and drive more traffic to your site. However, you need to have a consistent message between the PPC ads and the landing page that people go to when they click on the ad.
Review the performance of your PPC ads to see how relevant and enticing your ads to your audience. Then evaluate the conversion rate, Time On Page, and CTR of your landing pages when people come through PPC ads. This information will help you understand the effectiveness of your PPC and landing pages on a holistic view.
Download Files
Downloadable PDFs are a staple for B2B marketers because they are effective ways to share vital information about complex products and services. Downloadable PDFs are efficient ways to build trust and authority with your B2B buyers. You can place PDFs behind a gated landing page, where your customers need to exchange their email address before downloading the content.
However, you can test different types of content as eBooks to gauge the demand for your market. Whether you place downloadable content behind a gated landing or as free to download you want to set Event Tracking on each download so you can review the amount of downloads of each piece of content.
Optimized Micro Conversions To Impact Macro Conversions
When creating your conversion rate optimization strategy, remember to optimize for those things that produce leads, sales, and revenue. Optimizing your digital marketing strategy for micro conversions will allow you to improve your customer engagement in several ways, including:
- Create valuable content based on the needs of your clients.
- Personalize content to match your customers on a granular level.
- Optimize your content for a mobile-first world.
- Identify areas where customers are falling off the sales journey.
You can also use micro conversions to perform iterative testing across your marketing channels quickly. This type of fast-paced testing will help you understand your customer based on a deeper level.
Use micro conversions to help direct your efforts and allocate resources to the areas of your business with the most need. Once you map out the sales journey with the appropriate micro conversions, your business will be able to optimize and increase sales across your entire business!