Put yourself in your prospects' shoes and ask: what are they going to be worried about? Is it implementation? Price? A missing feature? How can you assuage those fears and engage them without risk. Then watch your leads and conversion rates grow.
People often think that business-to-business (B2B) marketing is cut-and-dried while business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is a fundamentally personal and emotional experience.
The truth is that we’re emotional people regardless of whether we’re buying at work or for ourselves, it’s just that the emotions are different.
In its fantastic BuyerSphere research, Enquiro documented that B2B marketing is very emotional, but the emotion is to mitigate risk. Essentially, the research says that in business decisions, people perceive there is disproportionately more to lose by making the wrong decision vs. the potential gain of making the right decision. Thus, buyers look for signals that they’re making the right choice.
There are some tried-and-true strategies for mitigating risk that can help you increase conversion rates and generate more B2B leads.
Instead of trying to convert every visitor into a demo or a sales call, ask for less. Instead, try to establish any kind of relationship.
The least you can ask for is time, usually to read a blog post or article. From there everything you ask for has to have an increasing amount of value to the reader.
Want an email address, name, and phone number? You better be giving away a great e-book or webinar.
Want a credit card, even if it won’t be charged? Your trial better be worth it.
The more you want, the more you have to offer. Create multiple ways into your brand all the way from free to paid customer.
Trying to get people to agree to a sales demo? Want to convince someone to share lots of detailed information about their buying stage and needs? Sometimes a little incentive can go a long way.
Incentives can take many forms:
Your incentive should be relative to the value of the person you’re targeting and the known or estimated conversion rate from that stage of the pipeline (e.g., demo) to a closed sale.
You don’t have to just market whitepapers and webinars. In many cases you can attract a different audience or get a response from a hard-to-reach prospect if you plan something fun and social.
Here are a few easy-to-execute options:
When your brand is unfamiliar, you can draft off third-party credibility to relate your company to a trusted source.
Quotes and reviews from news sources are great tools for landing pages, home pages, and collateral. Generally, the first time someone interacts with your company is the time they’re most likely to ask “Who is this company and why should I care?” When you can quickly relate your brand to better known sources, you engender immediate trust.
Similarly, you can leverage awards and other aspects of market leadership. If you’re the largest company, the fastest growing company, or the most dominant in a sector, these can all be a part of the way you establish your authority.
Awards can often work particularly well for new companies with disruptive technology. They play into your newness and the fact that your solution is different than the market leaders.
Claims are nice, praise is good, but results are best. The more you can point to the actual return-on-investment (ROI) that your customers can expect from your product, the better.
The easiest way to do this short of guaranteeing results is to solicit testimonials and case studies from your customers. Generally, the more specific and quantitative the results, the more convincing the proof.
In addition to simply asking customers, here are a few tricks to help shortcut the effort:
Put yourself in your prospects’ shoes and ask: what are they going to be worried about? Is it implementation? Price? A missing feature? Then ask yourself how you can assuage those fears and engage them without risk.
The more you can get prospects to like and trust you, the more leads you can get.