Training Your B2B Website’s Guide Dog

You have a wealth of information on your website. You have amassed a rich archive of helpful content and calls-to-action on your website over the years. Yet, your website visitors are not downloading nor sharing your content as much as you would like them to. Why? The answer is often as simple as the conversion paths (or lack thereof) you’ve laid down to navigate around your site.

People habitually tend to skim paragraph text and wander around a website without a clear motive – stopping only when something grabs their attention or they find that nugget of information they were looking for.

Let’s stop them from aimlessly wandering through our pages like a blindfolded person. Let’s assist them. Let’s direct them to the pages we don’t wan’t them to miss. Let’s give them a purpose. How do we lead them through the twists and turns of our website and keep them on the right track?

We need to employ the services of a figurative ‘guide dog’ on our B2B websites. Your visitors will be accompanied by the well-trained guide dog every step of the way. He will nudge and pull them in the right direction – leading them to the remarkable content they desire. Without a trained guide dog, you are essentially leading your website visitors into a room, turning out the lights and saying “good luck” finding what you need.

Think about it. We are trying to assist our visitors in helping them have the best experience possible on our website. To do that, we need to have direct and clear paths in and out of our various content. Say you write a great blog article about the benefits of LinkedIn. A visitor to your site reads your entire blog article, finds it very useful and even goes so far as to tweet it and share it with her LinkedIn network. That’s awesome! But there is a potential for a richer experience ahead and to get there we need the assistance of our trusty guide-dog.

Perhaps you want to add a trackable call-to-action to the end of this blog article. This call-to-action is perhaps to download a free eBook that details tips and tricks for getting the most out of your LinkedIn account. The guide dog’s ears perk up – he knows that content of this type could prove very useful to his master. The dog pulls his master toward the call-to-action and guides her on through the door to a landing page to download the eBook.

Give the dog a pat on his head because he has just provided quite the service! He took the visitor from a short blog post on a specific topic to a relevant content offer based on the fact that she read that blog post.

But the loyal guide-dog knows there is there still more to see…

Upon submitting the form to download the eBook – the website visitor is presented with a thank-you page. On this page the dog sniffs out some more links: maybe one is to your extensive resource center page full of similar eBooks and perhaps another links to another blog post about LinkedIn.

What the guide dog has done now is closed the loop and it’s quite the trick. Instead of rolling over to sleep after leading the visitor to the relevant eBook offer – he has gone even further and suggested some additional resources for his master to enjoy.

Don’t leave your potential customers in the dark. Lead and direct them safely around your websites like a good dog.