What B2B lessons can be learned from Google’s B2C marketing experts?
The guys in Google certainly understand marketing. They are also encouraged to be creative as their daily doodles well illustrate. It therefore came as no surprise that the research giant chose to present a new marketing guide as if it had been accidentally leaked to the net.
Regardless of whether this is just another marketing stunt or a genuine mistake, the guide, entitled UX Playbook for Lead Gen, provides an interesting read for those interested in web marketing and lead generation.
Despite the fact that the playbook is primarily focused on B2C, marketing professionals specializing in B2B can also benefit from it. In order to help them in doing so, we have translated some of the info provided by Google to e-commerce sites into B2B language.
Here are what, we believe, are the five most beneficial tips included in the guide that B2B companies should adopt:
- Build trust – If you wish to convert your site visitor from a person who is looking for information into a potential buyer, you should be trustworthy. Google recommends, for example, to use social prof to gain users’ trust. In the B2B world, this could be translated into placing testimonials and using cases which will illustrate your capabilities and assure the potential buyer that you have gained enough experience to help him or her as well.
- Clear your value proposition – The focus should be on solving your client’s problems. Your potential customer should understand right away what your company is offering and how he/she can benefit from using your services or products. Instead of emphasizing what you see as your greatest added value, try to think of what your customer’s most urgent problem is, and how you can help him/her solve it. In most cases, what you believe is your strength and what your client thinks are two different things.
- Improve usability – While building landing pages for your website, try different options and see what works best for your site visitors. Make sure that your “calls for action” are clear and that they encourage prospects to spend extra time on your site and eventually get in touch with you. Make your “contact us” forms shorter and refrain from adding unnecessary fields, such as job title, country, size of organization, and so on. Despite the fact that your sales team will always push to add fields so they can know the potential customer better, a cumbersome registration process deters people from completing the registration.
- Answer questions – Your site should provide answers to questions users might have before they feel comfortable enough to get in touch. You should address the main questions users have. This could be done by creating an FAQ page, writing blog posts that answer specific questions or by providing well-written content that addresses the most common questions previous customers have asked.
- Be mobile friendly – We all have lengthy stories we want to tell, but site visitors using mobile devices have limited patience. Even more important, mobile users have limited ability to click on navigation dropdown lists and other features that can be easily clicked on while browsing the site from a PC. Make sure that your website is responsive and that your messages don’t get lost on small mobile devices’ screens.
Although this is not said anywhere, the bottom line of the playbook document is that web marketers should do all they can to “keep it simple.” We don’t need Google’s marketing experts to know that, but a reminder from the search giant’s top pros should serve as wake-up call for all those marketers who fail to put the user in first place.
