Website's Influence on Buying Decisions

On Wednesday Hubspot put up a blog post/chart (below) about a new survey released by RainToday.com. 97% of survey respondents (which included more than 200 buyers of professional services) stated that websites had at least some measure of influence over their ultimate buying decisions. 97%.

This hopefully tells you something you've known for some time, that nearly all confirmed buyers will eventually make their way to your website (or your competitors) to gather information to help inform their buying decision. And that's not just product-specific data.

We know from analysis of the marketing and sales funnels that at the beginning of this journey, these prospects are first looking for educational content and thought leadership that first speaks to an understanding of business challenges, how that relates to their specific needs and then provides answers that help solve these challenges. Not until those questions have been satisfied do these prospects seek specific information on the vendor solutions that support these ideas.

This blog has spoken often about the need to have a website that provides compelling (and easily obtainable) content to prospects for each stage of the funnel they are in, as well as for their specific roles/pain points relative to their responsibilities to the overall decision chain. This only further supports that.

If you feel your website is not sufficiently content-optimized, it's not too big an elephant to start the changes needed right now. I'm sure you have sufficient content already in your site copy, your campaign offers and assets, etc. The keys are to get that content organized, updated and targeted, and get it on the site (and searchable). Simple SEO, such as keyword development and creating meta tags for your page titles, descriptions and keywords can be done in a few days. Paid search that supports those keywords can be done in minutes. Create a landing page/s that provide a path for prospects to gain further information from you while exchanging some of their personal data. Ensure that your blog is liked to your site and pump a steady stream of your brilliance into it. Link those posts to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. It's not difficult. There are prospects who are waiting to hear from you right now...

High-Performance Landing Pages

As part of an overall lead nurturing strategy, there's been increasing talk about the use of what are commonly being referred to as high-performance landing pages (HPLPs). Marketing Profs will be presenting a webinar on HPLPs later this week. Companies like Ion Interactive offer software for HPLP development.

The idea behind HPLPs is simple -- better segmenting practices help you construct more targeted landing pages (LPs) with custom messaging and offers that more accurately speak to the interests and needs of targets in the decision chain. As marketeers continue to search for ways to boost conversions and make their content more relevant, I think the idea of customizing and super-charging your landing page optimization is well founded.

Some software apps (like the aforementioned Ion) can automate the process of building these pages -- helping to improve page layouts, dynamic page editing, adding/testing page elements such as Flash and flexible forms, bringing in logic/business rules to provide unique pathing based upon prior behaviors and advanced reporting capabilities.

Even if your budget won't permit the use of a landing page optimization software app, it's good practice to seek to manually create LPs that are specifically targeted to individual members of the decision chain (C-level, VP-level, Dir-level, Analyst-level) rather than one size fits all. Usually each of those targets has different responsibilities relative to the decision process, and thus would likely better respond to more relevant (and compelling) messaging and offers.