TRENDS & TECHNOLOGY
Too Many Anonymous Website Visitors. Now What? BY BRIAN BLUFF, SITE-SEEKER, INC.
I Brian Bluff is the president and cofounder of Site-Seeker, Inc., an Internet marketing firm specializing in SEO, SEM, social media and web development, with a strong focus on the B2B manufacturing and distribution arena. Together with his brother, Eddie Bluff, vice president of key accounts, Brian has grown the company into a successful source of search engine and social media marketing solutions.
n this article, I will focus on solutions to these two problems.
1. On average, prospects are 57% of the way through the buyer’s journey before they engage with you or your sales reps? 1 2. 97% of website visitors leave your website before contacting you, even if your product or service can solve their problem. 2 Put simply, prospects don’t want to talk to you. Why should they? For the most part, they can gather information and make decisions about which products and services are best for them just by searching online. Your job as a marketer is to change that. Here’s how.
and answers to important questions. • How they prefer to consume information mobile devices, laptops, tablets. • What type of content they prefer - articles, case studies, tables, infographics, video, etc. • What information you want them to know about your company or offering at each stage of the buying process. We develop B2B buyer personas utilizing surveys and interview-style meetings. Participants in the process normally include your customer-facing staff, channel partners, and actual customers, if available. The interviewer will pose a series of questions to the group and document and organize answers to tell a story about that particular buyer persona.
INCREASE CONVERSION RATE - ALIGN WEBSITE CONTENT WITH AUDIENCE NEEDS
WHY ARE BUYER PERSONAS IMPORTANT?
To keep your company in contention for new business opportunities, you need to convince prospects to engage with you while or after they consume your website content; and the earlier in their buying process, the better off you are. To do this, it is critical to understand the needs of potential buyers. The marketing tool that documents these needs is called a buyer persona. Buyer personas are fictitious archetypes representing the most common characteristics of the people that buy from you. In the B2B world, they are typically described by job title – Purchasing Agents, Operations Manager, Welders, etc. Buyer personas document your understanding of these groups of buyers including: • Their goals as they consume your website content including the information they need
Buyer personas provide you a competitive advantage by maturing your content approach to include input from those people most knowledgeable about your customers and prospects. They make the difference between a poor conversion rate (i.e., the percentage of website visitors filling out a form, initiating a chat session, or calling you) and a website that performs as a lead-generating machine. Beyond the direct impact on your website’s performance, buyer personas can positively impact all aspects of your marketing program including: • SEO - by anticipating important content subjects and providing you the opportunity to add this content to your website. • Landing pages to support digital advertising (including Google search ads where great content means a higher quality score and Summer 2021 • 93
