No matter how much traffic their website receives, traffic by itself is of little use to most B2B businesses without conversions. In order to be commercially valuable traffic, a significant percentage of those visitors need to make a purchase or reach out to sales. The website must be both targeting the right audience (which falls into the realm of marketing strategy and is outside the scope of this article) and be optimized to encourage visitors to convert into actual leads or sales.
In this article, we’ll share 5 best practices for conversion rate optimization (CRO) on B2B business websites. Before we do though, we should discuss the basic fundamentals of CRO as a whole and understand the basic motivations behind B2B visitor behavior:
- B2B visitors are particularly interested in practical value, whether it’s a tool or concept brand new to their business, or an explanation or known solution that is presented in a clearer way than they’ve seen before.
- B2B decision makers who visit your website are busy, and as a result, connect more with pages that get to the point quickly. If your content or your website bores, confuses, or overwhelms them, they will leave your site quickly.
- B2B visitors are even more avoidant of ads than consumers, and intrusive website elements that are clearly placed to grab their attention from their typical reading pattern will cause them to leave your site.
- Business decision-makers don’t mind being “sold to” at the right time if they think your product or service is truly the right fit for their needs. Well placed calls-to-action (CTAs) help as well—it allows them to proceed quickly once they’ve made a decision.
Understanding these principles helps you align your website’s content, tone, and layout with visitor needs, building trust and increasing the chances that they’ll reach out—and more importantly, that they’ll convert into a closed sale. With these principles in place, we’ll next turn to the 5 best practices of B2B CRO:
- Create comprehensive B2B customer personas
- Earn attention all the way down the page
- Use graphics and tables to maintain interest
- Track user progress toward conversion
- Audit results and adapt accordingly
We’ll examine each in further detail below.
B2B CRO Best Practice #1: Create Comprehensive B2B Customer Personas
The lynchpin of CRO is understanding who your audience is. Creating audience personas is the most effective way to outline these backgrounds in a way that is easy to refer to later.
Each customer persona should include:
- Their job title and work responsibility
- Metrics their performance is evaluated by
- What makes them feel successful in their company role
- The issues that make their job harder
To make it easier to relate to your audience, draft each persona like a character. Include a story, a headshot, and the answers to each of the key questions above.
Here is an example of a good customer persona:
 | Mike is the marketing director at a mid-sized fintech firm, and his primary responsibility is to drive more leads to the company’s website for the sales team to close. He is judged by the ROI of the marketing campaigns that he invests in throughout the year, as well as his ability to consistently generate leads while staying within his company’s budget. Mike is also judged on the accuracy of his lead generation and ROI forecasts at the beginning of the year. Mike feels successful when his ideas provide results for which his higher-ups credit him, when his team members trust his judgment, and when he feels like he is providing material value to his firm. |
Once you understand the type and title of business decision-makers that you’re targeting, you are better prepared to craft content that is valuable to them. Your product can’t solve every problem they have at work, but by understanding their KPIs, you can present the most valuable possible use cases of your product for their specific role.
After you’ve considered every way that your product could add value to the businesses of your personas, you’ll need to articulate that value in a few readable sentences. As you write, remember that your page should feel like it’s written for your specific personas, with your product only appearing because of its unique value to them.
B2B CRO Best Practice #2: Earn attention all the way down the page
The science of CRO comes down to continuously earning your users’ attention from the top of the page until one of the CTAs brings them to the next step in your marketing funnel. Attention is best earned by demonstrating how you can help them without wasting time with fluff or marketing slogans.
Below is an example of how to structure a website so it maintains your audience’s attention:
B2B CRO Best Practice #3: Use Graphics and Tables to Maintain Interest
If you’re a decision-maker at your company, you likely rarely read business articles that only contain text. Large blocks of uninterrupted text make an article seem longer and give no clear indication if there is relevant information on the page, or where it is. By contrast, breaking up that text with tables, graphics, and formatting helps quickly convey complex information, thereby establishing your credibility with readers. This is true for both blog articles and sales-oriented landing pages: note how both pages below are arranged so that no more than 2-3 paragraphs are unbroken by other elements:
Remember that business decision makers aren’t likely to convert on the first bit of content they consume, but consistently respecting their needs in this way establishes the rapport necessary to make your company the go-to option for them when it does come time for them to purchase a product or service like yours. If you don’t have the means or expertise to create bespoke graphics, simple tables can serve the exact same purpose in most cases.
As a final note, the job of making your pages eye-catching should fall on more than one person’s shoulders. In our own marketing campaigns for clients, we separate out the tasks of conceiving a page’s layout from writing the actual page between editors and writers, since they require different thought processes.
B2B CRO Best Practice #4: Track User Progress Toward Conversion
While sales conversions are important, they aren’t the only valuable forms of conversion. Actions liek form fills, newsletter sign-ups, and demo requests all represent “micro-conversions” that map out different steps of your sales funnel, and tracking those behaviors can help you find out where in the funnel leads get lost. This is vital to not only conversion optimization, but to every marketing campaign and sales process in your company.
Some common examples of micro-conversions are:
| Micro Conversion | Relevance | Conversion Confidence Score | Brand EngagementScore | Overall Score(1-10) |
| 2 visits within 30 days, including at least one Product, Service, or About page | Leaving a website and coming back to it later proves that the site was memorable, and buying intent is established by the requirement of visiting a sales-oriented page. | 9 | 8 | 8.75 |
| Webinar sign up | Volunteering to watch an hour+ presentation indicates a real interest in the subject matter; although some percentage typically don’t show up | 7 | 8 | 7.25 |
| Download eBook | Downloading long-form content shows a strong interest in the subject and creates an opportunity for deep engagement with your brand. | 7 | 8 | 7.25 |
| Visit contact page | There aren’t many reasons to visit a Contact page if you’re not thinking of engaging with the business in some way; although some ultimately abandon the page after thinking further, this action demonstrates clear interest. | 8 | 5 | 7.25 |
| Visit 5+ pages | When a visitor clicks through 5 pages or more on your site, they feel that your company is trustworthy and providing them with something of value. | 7 | 7 | 7.0 |
Even though none of these actions result in a new customer or MQL on their own, tracking them gives you higher-resolution insight into your website’s conversion funnel.
For example, you may notice that your website receives a high volume of traffic through a single blog post that ranks highly on Google, and visitors who read that blog post will often go on to read your product pages. After doing so, however, very few of those visitors fill out a contact form to get in touch with your company. This would tell you one of two things. Either:
- The initial blog post isn’t well-targeted, and is attracting readers who are not interested in your services. This means that you should reevaluate the personas you’ve created in Best Practice #1, and ensure that the post speaks primarily to decision makers and isn’t appealing to those simply researching your field for their own education or to report on your industry.
- The product pages themselves are not effectively encouraging visitors to fill out a form. This indicates that those pages are failing to deliver relevant information in a clear and tangible way, or do not have clear calls to action.
Tracking a wider variety of conversion behaviors is useful for more than just troubleshooting; it can also help you tailor your ongoing strategy to better serve decision makers in your industry. While more in-depth data-focused articles (like ours on SaaS Customer Acquisition by the Numbers and SEO Strategy for SaaS) can be more engaging for experts to write, their performance tends to pale in comparison to more direct company or product/service comparison pages. By tracking micro-conversion behaviors, it becomes clearer what pages are leasing to the conversion behaviors that move your leads along the funnel, and the final step is far easier.
B2B CRO Best Practice #5: Audit Results and Adapt Accordingly
In theory, following the previous four B2B CRO best practices should result in more conversions, but real-world results can vary quite a bit. By tracking the above conversion behaviors and constantly testing different CTA placements, page designs, and copy, firms can better adapt their CRO strategy to get more of their leads to close.
Interventions that can help improve your CRO include:
- A/B testing changes by presenting revised pages to a significant portion of your audience to compare it against the original page
- Refreshing pages that rely on data that is updated over time
- Including clear and concise CTAs to the bottom of all pages, and the middle/sidebar of longer pages
- Adding tables and graphics to pages without them, or simplifying more complicated ones
- Gating longer and more in-depth industry pieces behind a contact form
By collecting information to determine which pages need updating, and what intervention could work best, businesses can equip themselves to better serve their B2B readers and close more often.
Conversion Optimizing Your B2B Business’s Website
At this point, you have a strong foundation of knowledge about optimizing conversion from a B2B audience. The next step is to apply this knowledge by implementing each of these best practices, starting with persona creation and setting up visitor tracking before moving on to design updates.
Another option is to work with a specialized marketing agency with expertise in conversion rate optimization. CRO consulting is a core part of what we do at First Page Sage. If you’d like to schedule a time to discuss your needs, or ask more questions about B2B conversion rate optimization best practices, you can do so here.
