Olivia Atkinson
You may be in a position where you want more leads from your website or the amount of leads you've been receiving have slowly dropped off. No matter what your marketing strategy is, your website is always used as a reference point.
Many building product websites come across as brochures rather than lead generation sites. Although it's a good idea to have product information on your website, it's wise to structure and segment it to make it easier to understand.
When people visit your website they will be at different stages of the buyers journey, your content needs to be appropriate for all 3 stages - awareness, consideration and the decision stage.
Is Your Website Costing You B2B Leads?
1. Your Website Takes Too Long To Load
Even now after years of using the internet, people aren’t optimising their website for page load times.
It’s vital for visitor retention as we’re constantly been advertised too by internet providers on speed. So when we visit a site that doesn’t load instantly, we get impatient and leave.
Not only does it frustrate the visitor but by affecting page abandonment it adversely affects your Google rankings too.
There may be a number of causes for slow lead times, so the first step is to identify them.
Google provides a free Page Speed Test to determine if your page is too slow for the average web browser.
Remember that half of the web traffic comes from mobile devices to ensure your website is fast on all platforms.
Google found that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load.
2. Users Keep Getting Distracted
Your websites design, layout, look and feel is key to keeping visitors online and following the intended path of capturing their information.
Sometimes even slick looking websites can be distracting to users as it counters the mission of catching clients.
Examples of things that could be distracting users are your design, colour scheme, too many images, garish colours or fonts that are hard to read. If you don’t have an aesthetically pleasing page it will look unprofessional and it may cause users to stop paying attention to your message.
People exiting your page quickly will lead to an increase in bounce rates, leading onto a likely fall in search engine rankings.
If you’ve received comments or complaints about your website then it might be time to get in touch with a web design professional to improve your user experience.
Your website is your shopfront and represents your company’s values, service and commitment to delivering a great product.
3. Poorly Written Content
If you’ve addressed other possibilities and you’re still struggling to understand the issue, it might be that your content hasn’t been written correctly for your market.
Whether your target market is made up of professionals, architects, specifiers, interior designers or installers, they expect you to speak their language.
Your content may even be informative and written well enough to get your page ranked, but it doesn’t mean the business decision makers who read your content find it trustworthy enough to convert from viewers to clients.
You first need to identify who your buyer personas are.
Specifically, in the construction and building products industry, most companies have very technical products, so ensure you use the terminology that your visitors are expecting.
Content marketing is slowly starting to be seen as an essential tactic to reach your audience and rank highly in search terms. It’s a trend that started in the US and is now been taken on by thought leaders.
The majority of companies are guilty of talking about themselves and their company rather than how they can help the customer. Content marketing tools such as blogging allows you to present yourself as a helpful resource.
Remember that people don’t like being sold too so start educating them on the product or service you provide instead, then they can make their own mind up.
4. Lead Capture Process Isn’t Working
A lot of websites don’t use basic lead capture tools, or they use them incorrectly.
For example a form is a great way to capture information, however, if your form has 8 fields to fill in then people won’t bother. By asking for too much you create friction and people put up a barrier.
Ideally, 1 or 2 fields in a form are more likely to have submissions. By using a CRM system such as HubSpot you get a lot more information than the visitor thinks.
Someone entering an email would give you access to information such as pages they’ve visited on your website, how many times they’ve been on your website, how long they’ve been visiting your website (could be months before they entered their email), their name, the company they’re from, contact information and so much more.
As a minimum, your website should include call to actions (CTA) and sign up forms. Your CTA’s can’t be vague or weakly worded as they need to compel a decision maker to act.
Another thing to consider is mobile users, if your form is more than one click from the content or its difficult to fill out on mobile then people will leave and find the content elsewhere.
5. Not Enough Visual Content
Many companies struggle to provide information in bulk without presenting it as chunky blocks of text. Large blocks of text look intimidating and boring, which can cause your reader to bounce from your site.
Just like a page that’s too busy, having unbroken blocks of text can also cause a visitor to leave.
Your content should be structured with clear headers and sub-headers so if someone was skimming the page they could find what they’re looking for.
Your content should also be supported by visuals such as images, videos and info-graphics.
Conclusion
Your website is the most important representation of your business, it’s the first place anyone interested in your business will look. It continues to provide consistent information to every visitor and is there to answer questions when you can’t be.
Insynth researched 300 UK building product brands websites to understand trends across the board. The State Of Building Product Digital Marketing report reveals a lot of pain points including the fact that 80% of companies didn’t respond to a customer enquiry.
We offer a free website audit to help you identify opportunities, improvements and quick wins. You can also get an insight to how many people are searching within your specific sector for your solution.
People that you might be missing out on.
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.