Of course, we all want our ideal prospects to visit our website and convert into paying customers. However, we know that this is not the majority of our visitors. A well-performing B2B SaaS website can expect a conversion rate of 1-2%. That means, conservatively, 98% of our visitors either aren’t a good fit or aren’t ready to commit. So, how do we support these visitors?
Let’s put our visitors into three buckets:
- Prospects (Potential Customers)
The crown jewel of visitors. Let us roll out the red carpet for them! - Non-prospects
They like our content and our brand, but aren’t the right fit (for now). - Solicitors
They keep ringing our doorbell!
Prospects
Determining the path for our ideal customers can be the easiest to build. We know their pains and what matters to them, and we want to show our expertise by engaging with them in our common language. However, we often become overly focused on them and create unnecessary hurdles for most of our other users.
Non-Prospects
In our Digital Growth program, we promote the creation of content that has a broad interest. We look for high-volume (500+ searches a month) keywords a website already ranks for and build content around it. It does not always fit the interests of a ready-to-buy user. In fact, it rarely does. We find that this strategy does very well for boosting organic traffic, but if the site is not ready to support these types of users, it will not perform to its potential.
Solicitors
Solicitors (aka spammers) are highly motivated users. They will jump through many hoops just to get into your inbox. Often, our instinctual handling of these users is to make it harder for them by using Captcha or other spam-control technologies, creating form fields that provide no options, or honey potting them with hidden elements. My opinion is to welcome them… with open arms.
As an example, on our site, in the contact form, we have options that all users must choose before a form is shown. One of those options is to “tell us about your amazing service or product.” This has been a game changer for us in our ability to filter out solicitors and encourage them to engage with us. We do mark them as potential spam in our CRM, and they are marked as spam if they submit more than once… but we intend to encourage them to connect with us. Now, if you saw these options and you were trying to sell us outsourced IT services… which option would you choose? If that option wasn’t there, which one would you choose?
Consensus
For B2B marketers, it’s never easy laying out the paths you want your users to take. For most of us, we know the first visit is probably not the one that’s going to lead to a contact form submission. We also know there’s an average of 5.6 stakeholders on a buying team that will most likely be visiting our site before our initial introduction call. Being too pushy about “connecting with us” is probably not doing yourself any favors. They will connect when they’re ready… and that will be a better position for you.
At a high level, we believe that more traffic and search visibility lead to more opportunities for engagement, regardless of the user type. Speaking to your most valuable users is a priority, but ignoring the other 98% is not a strategy we believe in. The wider the net, the more chances of catching the whale!
