Creating an inbound marketing website isn’t just about making your digital shop window look good or promising the earth to customers. Your website should be talking to the target audience on an emotional level and enlightening them about your products or services.
What is it?
First things first. What is an inbound marketing-ready website? In simple terms, your website content acts as guide lights, a trail for potential prospects to follow deeper into your ecosystem until they make a purchase. The “content” in this context can be anything from your SEO, website structure, and design along with blogs, videos, or long-form pieces of content.
An inbound marketing-ready website can reduce the cost per lead by 80%. With fine-tuning and some patience, you’ll have a tip-top website that is inbound ready.
Next question then. How do you get there? Well, fear not, as experienced tech B2B content marketers, cooking up inbound lead generation is our specialty dish. In this blog, we’ll be explaining several key ingredients that turn your website into a staple of inbound success.
First impressions count
With so many other tech B2B companies competing for attention, it’s little wonder website users spend an average of 5.59 seconds per page consuming written content. If they can’t find answers quickly and efficiently on your website then they will simply move on.
Review the structure of your website and how content currently sits. For a website, less is more. Focus on content that is truly important and educational for prospects, wherever they are on the purchasing journey. Make sure to give your target audience ample opportunity to click a CTA, whether it’s to book a demo with your sales team or send them an email. Live chat or bot chats are also a great opportunity for leads to find out more about you and what you do.
This is especially important as many B2B buyers still prefer these approaches, especially in complex, technical sales scenarios – par for the course in tech B2B.
Ready, steady, SEO!
Underpinning any effective website, inbound ready or not, is effective SEO. 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine – Google brings in a staggering 93% of global traffic. To make a website inbound ready, you should have well optimised pages that backlink to other high-performing external websites and also link internally to other blogs, videos, and other forms of content.
Remember to ensure your website pages and content are aligned with your bank of SEO keywords too. So too does mapping keywords to the customer journey. For example, a top-of-funnel keyword for a VR training company might simply be “VR training”. Further down the funnel at the consideration phase, they might use “best VR training company” as a keyword. Combined, these two focus areas will help form a winning SEO strategy. Investing in good website hosting also counts in making website inbound ready and will also benefit your SEO strategy.
Cooking up some content
Creating valuable content for your target audience takes time and dedication. But the results are worth the effort. Last year, 78% of tech B2B marketers found that the best way to generate leads was through content such as emails, blogs, and social media. From gated long-form assets to social posts, every content type played a role in their success.
What story do you want your content to tell? Think about it like this, if you were a potential buyer looking at your website, what questions would you ask that would lead to clicking on a CTA or booking in a demo? Successful content unlocks these answers without having to contact you first. But it draws them in, makes them want to find out more. Analytics provide us with the insight to put accurately tailored content in front of leads throughout their journey. Remember, use analytics to pre-empt their thought process and journey. This will gently support them through the sales funnel and eventually leads to conversion.
Final thoughts
Building an inbound ready website is easy in theory but difficult to justify or employ in practice. As a general rule, outbound marketing achieves quicker results but costs more while inbound marketing takes time as you build a bank of content and rise through the ranks of search results. Not an easy approach in a fast-paced, long sales-cycle sector like tech B2B.
However, the inbound marketing approach, while slower, pays dividends further down the road and at a significantly reduced cost per lead. It’s a sustainable approach and, more importantly, effective at reaching your intended audience on a personal, emotional level. Put simply, your content is more likeable and will better resonate, leading to more conversions.
