Ways B2B Startups Streamline Their Conversion Strategies

The prime objective of any content marketing campaign is to generate conversions. Of course, B2B companies are no exception, except that their conversion goals may vary depending on the nature of their campaign.

B2B companies that spend a sizeable portion of their marketing budget on content marketing always seek out better ways to optimize their sales funnel and, thus, their conversion rates.

Whether you’re a small start-up or a larger business, the following tips will help you optimize your lead conversion strategies and, in turn, boost your sales.

Track Your Conversion Rates

To boost your B2B sales, you need to optimize your sales funnel. But, first, you need to measure your current conversion rates. By measuring your current conversion rate, you will be able to determine the percentage of leads that convert to paying customers. Every B2B company is unique, as is their sales funnel. Therefore, depending on the nature and size of your content marketing campaign, you may need specific processes and tools to track conversions correctly.

Tracking conversions will show you:

#1 — where the paying customers are coming from?

#2 — which strategies are most effective?

#3 — whether to double-down or cut costs on dependable channels.

Analyze the Steps in Your Sales Process

Sales, as a whole, can be very complex.

B2B content marketers often ignore or undermine its role in the conversion growth.

However, you need to fragment down the sales process step by step and explore the strengths and weaknesses of each step.

A closer look at your sales process will manifest:

# 1: which actions lead to the most profitable deals?

#2: which steps result in a bottleneck in your sales funnel?

#3: which parts of the sales funnel needs optimization?

The most effective aspect of analyzing your sales process is that you can then discover the specific sales processes that your team needs to replicate for more conversions.

Revise Messaging to Attract Better Leads

Messaging-prospect mismatch is a great concern for B2B marketers. If you spend much of your time educating the wrong prospects, you’ll have little time for your qualified leads.

But why and how does this happen?

Poor collaboration between marketing and sales teams is a common challenge many B2B companies face, which affects the quality of your lead generation. As a result, you will end up wasting valuable marketing dollars catering to low-quality leads.

In order to fine-tune your messaging, you should:

#1 — Properly Define MQLs and SQLs

#2 — Conduct Regular Sales-Marketing Meetings

#3 — Encourage Your Teams to Socialize More Often

#4 — Have Marketing Engage on Sales Calls

#5 — Have Sales Help with Content Brainstorming

Interview Your Best Customers

Even as you have streamlined your lead scoring mechanism and gathered critical insights into your prospects, you still need to take this final step to build an ideal customer profile. Get in touch with your existing customers and capture more insights into your leads before creating content.

Here are a few things that you need to ask your existing customers.

#1 — where did they hear about your products?

#2 — what are their pain points, and how does your product solve them?

#3 — what type of research they conducted before purchasing your products?

#4 — what convinced them to choose you over your competitors?

Interacting with your best customers will reveal critical information you can leverage to target your leads better.

Improve Lead Quality with AI

In B2B marketing, your ability to identify a lead correctly cannot only help it convert faster but saves tons of time as well. Although this is much easier said than done due to the overwhelming heap of data, marketers analyze every day. Luckily, there’s a more accessible alternative using a lead scoring system. A lead scoring system is a system that allows you to quantify how likely a lead is to convert.

When done manually, it involves assigning numerical values to different actions a lead takes, such as downloading an eBook, signing up for a platform, asking a question, and so on. However, today, B2B content marketers can automate lead scoring and content scoring process, due to several AI-driven platforms.

Here’s how AI platforms help create better leads:

#1 — they tell you which MQLs are and which are SQLs.

#2 — they help you place leads to appropriate funnel and nurture them with relevant content.

#3 — they help you create better content for faster conversion.

Benefits of An AI-led Content Creation Process

In one way or another, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is becoming more and more mainstream in the content marketing world.

Let’s face it — embracing AI-driven content creation platforms doesn’t necessarily replace your human writers altogether. However, it makes their life easier, helping your organization produce better content at scale, and boost your content marketing ROI. So, how does employing AI benefit your content creation process?

Let’s take a look:

Analyzing Customer Data

Understanding and segmenting customer data can help you accurately create more targeted content for your prospects. By employing AI-driven platforms such as HubSpot, you can turn your data into actionable insights to create content your prospects are more likely to engage with.

Improving Content Accuracy

No matter how good you are at proofreading, handing a huge bulk of the content is always challenging. Moreover, when you’re dealing with professionally written content, you can’t really take chances with proofing it manually. It’s time-consuming and fraught with risk as well.

Performing Routine Tasks

Content marketing is a complex operation, especially when you factor in the number of tasks involved in the process. Indeed, the process entails many manual and routine tasks that are better left for automation.

From keyword research to customer data analysis to generate the content, there is AI-powered software to help you automate the process.

Overcoming Human Limitations

One of the biggest and most obvious advantages of using the AI is overcoming limitations inherent to manual processes.

Unlike humans, your AI-platforms will work tirelessly at a rapid pace, without missing any deadlines. When the content marketing staff works together with the AI platforms, they feel more empowered, happy, and motivated.

For example, News Tracer, Reuter’s algorithmic tool helps journalists gauge the integrity of a tweet, thereby establishing the credibility and newsworthiness of an emerging story in real-time. Similarly, Wibbitz, the AI-driven production software used by USA Today, can condense news articles to create short videos for social media followers. Certainly, these tasks would require a great deal of time for human journalists to create manually. However, with the help of the AI-enabled platforms, these tasks become much easier.

Boosting Content Marketing ROI

With a traditional approach, many content marketing campaigns fall below expectations. With poor strategy and inaccurate targeting, their marketing dollars simply go down the drain. By incorporating an AI-platform into their content creation processes, they can avoid those potential pitfalls, improving their success. From identifying the right content for specific audience segments to expanding outreach, the AI-led content creation process can help you improve your performance and boost your content marketing ROI.

Final Thoughts

Regardless of the current health of your sales funnel, you should always continue to optimize it to sustain the flow of your lead conversions and expand your customer base. More importantly, you will develop a great understanding of your prospective audience, which will transform the way you project your brand through content marketing.

Author: Vicki Lezama