Is Your B2B Website an Asset or Burden? [Research Findings]

B2B Website Efficiency Survey + Results

Is your b2b website an asset or burden? TSG President Leslie Carruthers spoke at Content Marketing World 2018 and got feedback from the audience that most people thought of their b2b website as more of a burden than an asset to their business.

That got us thinking: do most B2B marketers believe that, and why?

The survey targeted:

1. Size: $5M – $300M
2. Function: Marketing
3. Seniority Level: VP, Director, Manager, CXO
4. Industries: B2B

B2B Ecommerce

B2B Ecommerce, short for business-to-business electronic commerce, is the marketing, selling, and distribution of products from one business to another through a website.

The survey began with understanding first if the b2b company was a b2b Ecommerce company (selling or distributing online).

1. Can website visitors place an order or buy products via your website? 

It is visible from the replies that Ecommerce is not yet the majority practice for B2B companies (40% of respondents say there is ecommerce checkout capability on their website). Many b2b companies work with distributors and offer custom ordering through sales departments. This can lead to conversion tracking issues and an unclear return on investment since the sale is not directly contributed to an interaction with the website.

But did you know that B2B customers today progress more than 70% of the way through the decision-making process before ever engaging a sales representative. (source:Forbes). Contacting a sales representative comes halfway down the b2b purchase cycle funnel.

Source: ThinkWithGoogle

We interpret this data that even though most b2b sales transactions are taking place offline, the majority of the prospects’ research begins online. Tracking visitors as soon as they land on your website is key to turning those prospects into customers. With proper tracking and automation in place, you can use your website to place visitors into your sales funnel and push them along from prospect, to lead, to new customer, to loyal customer.

Target Audience

We asked questions about the age of the visitors and the devices visitors come from to the website. For B2B, the target audience is slightly older (only 6% of the respondents declared that more than 50% of their buyers are below 30 years old) and still the majority of the visitors use desktop devices to visit the website (57%). We interpret this data into lowering the importance of the website interaction and prioritizing the human to human interaction via the B2B sales process – either via contacting the sales team or the distributors.

2. Do you know what % of your buyers are below 30 years of age?

3. Do you know which devices your visitors prefer to use when visiting the site?

Channels

Email is the most common channel that B2B companies use (77% of all respondents). Paid Search Engine ads are less popular (64% of respondents use them and only 17% invest more than 50% of their marketing budget in PPC campaigns). The Social media platform that is used by most B2B companies is Linkedin (68%), followed by Facebook (62%).

Email and Social channels are not automatically tracked in Web analytics platforms like Google Analytics, which may lead to not having a correct picture of the effect of these campaigns. This leads back to the need to properly set up conversion tracking for conversions made offline, through distributors and external sites, but which might have started through a digital campaign.

4. Do you use email campaigns?

5. Do you advertise on search engines like Google or Bing?

6. Is your company active (posting at least once per week) on any social media channel? (please select all options that apply)

Are B2B Websites Assets or Burdens?

With this research we tried to identify why a website might not be leading to the expected results for b2b companies. We identified 2 major issues:

1. Conversions are not being tracked properly
2. Sales process is still happening offline and not automated, which leads to diminishing the importance of the website interaction.

Continuing the Research, You Can Help!

The survey is continuous, and more results will be published in the coming quarters. If you’d like to contribute to the research, click the link below to fill in the survey (estimated 7 minutes to complete):

https://thesearchguru.com/b2b-website-asset-or-burden/