How to use website social proof: strategies and examples that work
Nov 27, 2024
Searching the internet plays a huge part in new product discovery, so marketing success and website performance are closely linked.
With so much emphasis on digital product discovery, your website needs to be good. If it isn’t, potential customers won’t find you, stay on your site, and convert into opportunities.
Your goals should cover a broad range of essentials. For example, you shouldn’t just look at having the best B2B website design. Websites need to be discoverable, give users a good experience, and have engaging and informative copy, too. It’s combining website strategy, creativity and technology.
Websites should tick all these boxes to:
Your website can be a powerful marketing tool. So, what should you achieve with yours? Here are some goals to think about.
Buyers don’t purchase on a whim. Instead, they’ll go through a process before making a final decision. This is called the buyer journey, which is divided into five stages.
1. Unaware. The buyer is unaware they're experiencing a problem, so they are not yet looking for a solution.
2. Awareness. The buyer starts to experience a problem or symptoms of pain and they want to alleviate it.
3. Consideration. The buyer identifies the problem and considers options to solve it.
4. Evaluation. The buyer finds several solutions that can solve their problem and evaluates which one is best.
5. Decision. The buyer decides of the right provider to administer the solution.
Your website needs to cater to visitors at all stages of the buyer journey. It’s crucial to put the buyer first on every page and in every decision you make.
Your website needs to be discoverable in search, whether that’s paid, organic, or a combination of the two. To do this effectively, you’ll benefit from:
Paid search is useful for seeing results quickly. But it can be expensive, and as soon as your campaign ends, you won’t rank for your chosen keywords anymore.
With organic search, it can take 18 months before you start to see a return on investment. But it provides long-term value because good content can drive traffic and generate leads for years after publication. All you need to do is invest a little time into reviewing and updating your content every so often, to keep it fresh and relevant.
Explore using other channels that’ll help you drive traffic to your site too, like social media.
This seems obvious, but it’s difficult to master. You need to make sure you’re giving visitors the information they need about your products or services so they can properly evaluate the solution to asses if it could be right for them. That means clearly and succinctly defining and describing what you do and how it can help them to solve their problem. You’ll need to showcase the benefits and features, and sometimes it’ll be useful to compare and contrast parts of the service to make various service levels clear.
Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal buyer. Is your offering clear and easy to understand? Do you showcase how you deliver value to them? If not, you need to rethink the copy on your web pages.
As well as informing visitors about your offering, you should add extra value through educational content that meets their needs at each stage of the buyer journey. For example, you can write blogs on relevant industry topics. Featuring case studies with happy customers can also help build credibility and authority. You want visitors to come to your site because they see it as a trustworthy source of information.
It’s important to know what brand affinity is and how you can build it for your business. Brand awareness is good, but brand affinity is a sign that your prospective customers resonate with your message and see you as a preferred supplier.
Building brand affinity takes time and from a website perspective means showing that you know your audience, keeping them engaged, and providing an excellent customer experience.
With software like HubSpot Content Hub, you should track and report on metrics that help you to gauge what’s working well and what needs refining. Whatever solution you use, it should be easy to see and aggregate this kind of data.
If your website isn’t generating enough traffic, it’s not going to generate as many potential customers as it could. Your traffic will peak and trough over time, but not too much. You should look for steady growth and stabilisation in the number of visitors. Most visitors will find your website through search engines, so it’s important to make sure search engines can discover your site. A good way to do this is through SEO.
Looking at your keyword positions can tell you how visible you are in search engines, if people in awareness and consideration phases can find you, and where you rank against competitors for specific search terms. It’s a good idea to think about brand searches, buyer intent keywords, and informational keywords. This will tell you how many people are searching for your brand directly, how many visitors are searching with the intent to buy your service or a related service, and how many visitors are looking for high-quality educational content.
If you have an inbound demand generation strategy, you’re unlikely to have forms on your site that aren’t high-intent. That’s a good thing, as it means when someone does submit a form they’re likely further along on the buyer journey. Generally, they’ll be asking to talk to sales or for a product demo. Reporting on the number of high-intent form submissions indicates that your marketing efforts and website copy are working as they’re converting visitors.
You want your website to be a healthy source of opportunities for your sales team. Measure how many opportunities in your pipeline come from marketing sources. This is a good indication that you’re attracting the right people to your site with content that engages and informs them enough to consider a purchase.
As your website is a marketing asset that you invest in, it should generate ROI for your business. If you can measure and report on how much revenue has come from your site, you can show the impact of your marketing strategy.
One last goal is for your website to help your sales team.
Yes, a website is a marketing tool and is primarily for your ideal buyers and customers. But, it should also help your colleagues in sales to give prospects what they need as they’re making a purchasing decision. Think of product and service comparisons, technical information, and other useful resources that you can provide. You can refine the messaging and content so prospects get a consistent experience with sales.
Armed with our goals for a successful B2B website, you can start to think about your own goals. Remember, it can take time to see results, but setting goals is the first step to achieving them!
