Your website serves a variety of roles. If you’ve done your marketing properly to drive innovation for your brand, your site should attract a good deal of traffic. This, in turn, gets your brand in front of new prospective clients.
Essentially, your website is your digital command center—your headquarters, of sorts. It’s the base for all of your various digital marketing activities. If you’re a B2B company, your website helps you generate leads at different stages of the funnel and should ultimately help you convert leads into potential clients.
Your website is a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal and should be treated as such. But here’s what many B2B marketers miss… you may be leaving a massive opportunity on the table without even realizing it.
Your website should drive innovation for your brand and your business.
The harsh reality is that waiting too long to think about the future can destroy a business. The flip side is that focusing on innovation can lead to massive growth. Wipro started out by selling vegetable oil, and is now an $8 billion IT consulting business. Amazon began by selling books online. It now sells just about any consumer product, offers industrial supplies, delivers digital streaming services, manufactures e-readers, and boasts a cloud hosting business that alone generates $25.7 billion annually (more than even McDonald’s!).
In case after case, it’s clear that innovation fuels growth. This is where your website becomes so critical. It can serve as the petri dish — the testing ground, if you will —to drive innovation for your brand, thereby helping to ensure future success.
So how do you use your website to drive innovation for your brand? Here are 10 ways to get you started.
1. Test Different Products and See What Resonates with Your Customers
Don’t just stick with your standard product offerings. Undoubtedly, there are numerous additional products and services that your customers would love if only you offered them. Test out different products, services, bundles, cross-sells, and related offers, and see what resonates with your customers.
2. Experiment with Different Messaging
The truth is that your messaging may make sense to you, but it may not be maximizing conversions among your audience members. Conduct A/B tests of the messaging in your website and see how that affects your conversion rates. A/B testing software you can use includes VWO, Optimizely, and Nelio.
3. Test Different Headlines
The headlines in your blog draw visitors in and should make them want to scroll down the page. Try implementing different types of headlines in your blog to see what drives the most clicks. Use behavioral analytics software such as MouseFlow, Hotjar, or Decibel to assess any changes in your site visitors’ digital body language and actions.
4. Offer Webinars, Tools, and Other New Resources
A big part of moving leads down the funnel and eventually converting them is education. The leads need to be educated on the benefits of what you offer before they’ll convert. One way to more effectively convert site visitors is to offer new, valuable resources, such as webinars, white papers, interactive tools, etc. Offer these resources and evaluate the overall response to them.
5. Test Targeting New Audience Segments
Innovation often involves finding new audiences who will resonate with your products and services. Create self-segmented areas of your website for specific audience segments, and pack these areas with segment-specific content, case studies and testimonials. For those segments where the response is significant, double down to spur revenue growth. (And ditch/replace the losers so that you can uncover additional profitable segments.)
6. Try New Content Formats
A content format (video, webinar, blog post, survey, infographic, presentation, etc.) that resonates with one audience may fall flat with another audience. In order to attract more leads, try innovating with different content formats. If you’ve primarily focused on video, experiment with different types of video, but then also test completely new media such as podcasts, for example. A new content format can attract a new audience that you never would have attracted otherwise.
7. Deploy Onsite Surveys to Capture Voice of the Customer (VoC)
Using onsite surveys is an outstanding way to determine what matters most to your customers. Through surveys, you can get a feel for their site objectives and any pain points they experience. Using this data, you can then adjust your approach accordingly. This can lead to a significantly higher conversion rate. Onsite survey software options include Qualaroo and Survicate.
8. Use Onsite Chat and Chatbots to Get Real-Time Feedback
More and more, customers want to be able to voice their problems in real-time. They don’t want to call a customer service number and be put on hold for 20 minutes. By using onsite chat and chatbots like Drift and Intercom, you can gather real-time feedback from your site visitors and uncover direct funnels to products, information, and answers that you should add to your website.
9. Test New Conversion Funnels
Your conversion funnel can always be improved, and your website is a great place to test variations of your funnel and calls-to-action. By creating new paths to conversion and new CTAs along the way, you have the opportunity to significantly improve your site’s conversion rates. Tools like MouseFlow and Hotjarenable you to define and track the performance of conversion funnels through your website.
10. Marry Conversion Triggers to Onsite Behavior
Based on the specific behavior displayed by your site visitors, you can test different CTAs in different formats. For example, if someone scrolls 80% down a blog post, show a dialog that offers them a related whitepaper or asks them to sign up for your mailing list. If they check out a series of product pages, suggest they use your ROI calculator. You can even segment these triggers based on user location or on whether it’s a first-time visit or returning visitor. Tools like OptinMonster and Thrive Leads make it easy for you to test many different conversion triggers based on the behavior of your site visitors.
The Sky Is the Limit
There are so many different ways to innovate through your site, as outlined above. Continually test different aspects of your site and use your website to drive innovation for your brand.
If there’s one key takeaway, it’s that you shouldn’t wait to innovate. Markets and audience expectations are zigging and zagging faster than ever. Innovate today so that you’ll experience greater success tomorrow.