Lead Capture for SMBs: Positioning & Messaging

April 8th, 2011 by Sean Dwyer

Picking up from a recent post on Lead Capture, I would now like to cover Positioning & Messaging – Being Relevant to Buyers.

Establishing relevance during the first impression you make on prospects is critical. For you to be relevant, they must understand what you sell and whether it might be advantageous to them. This must be communicated plainly and directly:

  • On your home page, or they will not navigate into your website
  • In the subject line of your prospecting email, or they will not open it
  • In your 95-character Google Ad or they will not click it
  • In the headline of your tradeshow booth signage or they will not stop to talk

Remember, B2B prospects are paid to buy products like yours; it’s part of their job function. Help them do their job by plainly communicating:

  • What you sell
  • Who it’s for (or who uses it)
  • How it helps
  • And in some cases, how much it costs

Best Practices:

Describe your product plainly and simply – Avoid soft-selling, jargon, and dense prose, all of which can obscure your relevance.

Make it easy to find a description of what you sell – (that’s what people are coming to your site to figure out). For many companies, the Product Overview page is the 2nd most heavily visited page on the site (with home page being the busiest), and it’s not atypical for it to be 10 times more trafficked than the 3rd busiest page. If web traffic analytics reveal that your product overview page isn’t the 2nd-most visited page, it might be because people are having trouble finding it. Consider adding a top-level menu item called “Products” or “What is <Product Name>” to change traffic flow.

Cater to different lead types on your website – If you have well-defined lead types, create obvious paths for them to navigate into your website. The home page of the following LoopFuse customer is a good example of how to establish relevance:

  • What StarView offers is spelled out plainly in the main banner
  • Value propositions and website navigation paths are provided for specific lead types—wholesalers, white label distributor and channel partners

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