Three B2B landing pages and how they were improved

Business-to-business pay per click can be a very different beast to business-to-customer. You’re working with complex purchases, long lead times and a different content approach.

While best practices may apply to your landing pages, each case is unique and often driven by the wants of the client who is usually very short on time to implement recommendations. 

Today, we’ll take a look at three unique cases of B2B landing pages, the challenges, the recommended solutions and what happened. 

As you’ll see, sometimes ‘best practices’ work, and sometimes they’re thrown out the window altogether.

This landing page has too many CTAs but surprisingly gets results…

Having multiple calls to action on a landing page is traditionally a no-no when it comes to best practice. This client had three of ‘em: request a demo, contact us and free trial.

Things became crowded after we recommended changing the CTA to include a form on the landing page, but the developer didn’t take the other options down.  

One would think all those CTAs would be confusing to the user. In an effort to clean up the page, we advised the client to omit the top two to focus on the simple form.

The client moved slow with implementing our suggestions (mostly because they liked having all three options on the page), and in the interim, we saw leads increase by 200% within a week. We were just as surprised as you might be to see those results.

Looking further into the data, we found that more people completed the free trial form despite the other call to actions on the page. 

A follow-up for this type of scenario would be to do some more formal testing on the landing page to refine results (content experiments via Google Analytics is one way to do so.)

The moral of this story? Sometimes best practices don’t always apply, but testing can help us gain more clarity.

This site swapped out a phone number for social media icons…

As a B2B, sometimes the most important call to action is your company’s phone number. This client decided to do a redesign of their website, and swapped out the phone number in the upper corner (this is prime real estate) with social buttons.

The client had good intentions. They wanted to get more involved in their social media profiles and their designer thought this would be a good way to boost their presence.

We were perplexed because the client actually didn’t have a healthy presence on social yet. With the social buttons, it would be more likely people would be taken off the site and perhaps not call or request a quote.

After a brief conversation with the client about whether social followers were more important than calls to the business, the client decided to put the phone number back on to the page and move the social buttons. The client wanted to do this without testing.

The moral of this story? Help businesses better understand why they came to any one decision on their site in the first place. 

This landing page doesn’t have any trust signals…

Incorporating some trust signals is usually a best practice for landing pages. After all, most people landing on your page after clicking through an ad likely don’t have a clue who you are yet.

This landing page is for training from an accredited organization, although that information is kind of buried in all the distractions on the page, including giving a lot of attention to social media buttons. 

We recommended focusing on the trust signals first, like adding testimonials and making the accreditation front and center.  

After a discussion with the client, we ultimately decided to use a landing page template from Unbounce, since everything coming from there would be tested, and we’re pretty confident in their recommendations. 

The moral of this story? Ask certain questions like: what do you think your user is going to care about when they land on the page? When in doubt, use tried-and-true resources from trusted experts.

In a B2B PPC world, we often have to take a very customized approach to advertising and how we communicate with prospects once they land on our site. 

Sometimes best practices work well and sometimes we’re surprised when they don’t. Sometimes clients love our suggestions, and sometimes they like their own better. The bottom line is that there will always be outliers, and the one constant should always be testing.