Written by Dan Konstantinovsky
Strategic Marketing, RH Blake

For many industrial and manufacturing firms, a qualified prospect visiting a relevant page is a highly-valued opportunity – especially when you consider the lifetime value of your customers and strategic implications to other aspects of your portfolio. Whether you sell industrial components or consulting services, putting your best foot forward in converting visitors into leads can be a significant opportunity to grow faster than your competitors.

A major challenge with creating a landing page that converts for B2B manufacturing and industrial firms is that your typical customer isn’t a single person. Frequently, industrial sales are resource-intensive, complex and collaborative. This is why your customers typically are a team of influencers and decision makers from different departments, each with distinct professional and personal objectives – yet all looking to make the best informed decision and feel confident about it.

But that is where many industrial marketers fall flat. They create a basic landing page with all the right components (clear call to action, headline that clearly communicates the product benefit, intuitive layout, proof of trust with testimonials, etc.) but they haven’t used a strategic B2B approach. To help, here are three key steps to help improve your industrial marketing landing pages:

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  Align landing pages to different stages of the industrial sales journey

  The first step is to identify the distinct steps your target customers follow in their sales journey. In general, there are 3 key phases of a sales journey: Awareness (learning more about their problem or symptoms); Consideration (evaluating solutions to their needs); Decision (identifying the right solution for them – which can be to not do anything at all).

  Each phase of the sales journey offers industrial marketers an opportunity to capture a lead or a sale with the support of an effectively executed landing page. The goal for each landing page is simple – guide your prospect at least one step further down the path to becoming a customer. This goal should help you crystalize your landing page including offer, layout and content. It’s enticing, especially during this step, to focus only on the sale – but this will undoubtedly return less than desired lead and conversion results.

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  Develop industrial landing pages that engage different stakeholders

  Once you’ve identified the different steps your target customers follow in their sales process, create landing pages for each of your target customer personas. For example, a Plant Manager typically has different buying criteria than a Purchasing Manager or Safety Manager. As a result, you should identify content and create a landing page that’s of value for each segment.

  A content and headline formula that tends to work is ‘We do X for Y so they can Z’. As an example, if you’re an engineering firm, this could translate to ‘We provide engineering solutions for [target title/industry] so they can [enter key benefit].

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  Leverage video/images to educate on complex ideas and value propositions

  As an industrial or manufacturing firm, your product or solution can often be better explained with an engaging video or infographic. Not only will this help your target customer better understand how you can help them, but engaging imagery is proven to increase conversion rates (up to 80%!).

Identifying the key target personas and your value proposition directed to each of them in each phase of the buying cycle will produce a roadmap for you to follow for landing page and supporting content development.

P.S. Don’t make a telephone number a required field in your lead capture form as only 33% of buyers are open to providing it.