By Marie Wiese | President of Marketing CoPilot

The world has changed. When B2B buyers had to move completely online, it changed the dynamic for all companies in all industries. We are not going back any time soon. The power of your website sales velocity is now the only metric a B2B company should be measuring. 

When you acknowledge this strategically, you realize your Marketing Team should own a number for marketing qualified leads (MQLs) every quarter because this path to conversion aligns with how B2B buyers buy today. If your website isn’t your most effective source of lead generation and lead nurturing, then something is wrong.  

5 Myths We Want to Dispel

1. Volume

There are not thousands of online prospects out there just waiting to buy from you if you could only do a better job of SEO and pay-per-click. For the small and medium-sized business, your best source of lead generation is likely to come from existing clients, referrals, or channel partners. 

2. Quality

You should be checking your website weekly to determine the quality of traffic on your website. Vanity metrics like traffic volume or followers on social media mean nothing if this traffic is not interested in starting a relationship with you. 

3. Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate in not always a bad thing. Sometimes you want people to leave quickly if they aren’t the right prospect. For most B2B websites, a bounce rate is a clear indicator of content quality and should be viewed accordingly. 

4. Value Proposition

Business owners and CEOs underestimate the value of a compelling buyer statement. You have six seconds or less to engage a visitor around their needs. This statement is not a tagline or logo statement. This is a compelling statement about why someone should choose you and if it is not done correctly, everything else goes out the window. 

5. Audience

The right audience does matter. Tracking and ensuring the right people are on your website is paramount to your sales success. So, if some SEO company tells you, “its okay that 30% of your traffic is from India,” a market you don’t even serve, it is not. You would rather have 30% less traffic from the right audience than fake traffic that adds no value to the buyer journey. The pages people choose after hitting your website matter to Google and how long they stay and what they do there. 

The Fix

I like to say that a poorly organized and constructed website is like throwing a party and having everyone arrive at your front door and not letting them in. I have seen too many companies spend thousands of dollars on driving traffic to their sites but spending no time, money or resources on understanding what happens when people get there. Here are three important items you need to consider to understand if your website has the promise of stickiness. 

1. Your website needs to make sense to the buyer.

No one deserves to be confused when they go to your website. We don’t do it intentionally, but we often cram too much information on the home page, create a navigation that is not reflective of buyer questions or the buying process, or we present product information that has no bearing on what the customer/prospect is trying to do. A website must be for your customer, not a dumping ground for product information or a vague conversation with slogans and buzz words. You know who you want as customers so make the visitor experience as specific and useful as possible when people hit your website.

2. Don’t bury the lead.

Why should someone buy from you and not the million other choices they have to solve the exact same problem? If I go to one more Managed Service Provider (MSP) or Value-Added Reseller (VAR) website and see a collection of “managed services, cloud services, hosted services, cyber security products,” I am going to pull my hair out. Every website is saying the same thing with the same collection of industry jargon. How do you expect to stand out in a sea of “same” and get someone to choose you? A value proposition is arguably the most important element of your marketing message. Don’t bury your value prop in buzzwords or what you do. Make it matter and make it the foundation of the content you serve up. 

3. Create metrics that matter.

Most companies only think about getting “more top of funnel pipeline” (names on list) or closing deals (people ready to buy right now). But CEOs who have survived the pandemic realize the future of their business and their sales is in the hands of the people who already know you, trust you and buy from you. Therefore, your list and the value of the “middle of the funnel” matters today more than ever. 

• Look at your contact list and determine how many people are real or connected in that list 
• Determine engagement of the list 
• Determine value of the list (where are your next sales in six to 12 months?) 

Everything you do in your web presence needs to tie back to revenue. All activity should be a measure of creating either a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and where that contact record is in their personal buying journey. 

If you are still struggling with whether your web presence is performing or not, Marketing CoPilot offers a Web Presence Health Check for B2B companies to measure and analyze key metrics that determine sales success.