079. How to Make Your B2B Website a Demand-Gen Engine

Good morning.

Welcome back to another episode of DemandGen Studio. And we can finally say a nice warm morning, at least here in South Carolina, compared to what we've had. Definitely. As always, my name's Miranda Jenkins and I'm with Foundify, and I'm joined by Emilio Garcia. How's it going, Emilio?

How are you, Miranda? Doing great.

Good. Enjoying the sun. Um, so today we're going to be talking about how to make your website a demand gen engine for B2B companies. I feel like this is going to be a very prevalent topic and hopefully helpful for a lot of listeners. So to get us started, if we can just talk through Um, how to kind of look at some common symptoms or like telltale signs that maybe your B2B website is struggling to generate demand, if you want to kind of share your thoughts on that.

Yeah, as you said, it's a very prevalent conversation because all the changes from AI are shifting what a demand-generating website should be, right? And it's happening as we speak. And to be honest, I don't think any marketer right now should say that they have a clear target to what websites for B2B companies will become. I think that would be presumptuous because we don't know exactly what's going to happen. So I want— I would love to— for us to break down that recommendation in two pieces. What it meant for the past up to the point of ChatGPT, it might mean in the future. So for the past, I think it's pretty clear for those of you that are on a day-to-day as marketers on their websites, you know that the biggest challenge that most B2B companies had in the past is that they have for the longest time treated their website as a brochure. Rather than a source of sales and marketing and positioning for the companies. That's the biggest problem, right? It's like I treat my website as collateral rather than a, rather than another channel that can reach to prospective buyers and can actually do some of the sales in terms of qualification, even proactively prospecting in some situations. So I think that's a big issue and we can focus there on what are the telltale of when you are treating your website as a brochure versus, versus a lead or demand generation engine. And we can shift from there to the things that are changing with AI about websites. Yeah, I think that the biggest one is ignoring the fact that you're going to have so many kinds of visitors. That's the first one, right? As websites, sometimes we always— and just like marketing in general, we think about it from the company's perspective. This is what we want to say rather than from the visitor itself. This is what I will learn or know about. Right. So if you just shift your perspective and say, what will my customer expect to see, or I want them to learn from us when they visit our website, how you present yourself changes completely. Because to start with, your buyer will— the first question they will ask is, what is it that you do? What kind of problems do you solve? We usually as companies start with the solutions we provide, right? With the products and services, which is very tempting rather than with the, if you have these issues, these problems, then we can help, right? We are here to help these kind of person, this kind of company. So I think the first telltale is that if you go to your website and you focus more explaining who you are rather than the problems you solve, that you are treating your website as a brochure. The second one is that you stop at explaining that without detailing, you know, how are you different and why should you trust, should be trusted. So the other big impact is that if you put it from the buyer's perspective, I want to know, okay, so you solve this problem, but you are not the only one. Rarely you are the only one. How are you different? Right. They're not necessarily better. I want to stress out that part. Definitely you should be better than your competition for the things that you care about. But from a buyer's perspective, it's more important to know how you're different than how you're better, because better is a claim that is very easy to do and different. You have to put something on the stake too. When you say we focus on this, then you are saying no to a lot of stuff. And that's the difficult. So how you're different, what is your point of view, it's another telltale. And finally, that social proof that we— is so hard to get and do properly, but is who do you have worked with in the past? What do they tell about you? Is your website the only place where I can learn about people that have worked with you in the past? So those are the other areas that are ignored when you just present what you do without providing answers to the questions that a buyer will have, which is, yeah, okay, it's clear to me what do you do, who you have worked with in the past, can I trust you? What is your team made of or your company made of? What are the— what is the infrastructure you have to support your claims, right? You want to get a sense of your capabilities and the ability to deliver what you promise. And finally, Miranda, before, you know, if you have questions here, is, and when you have someone that is interested, do you have a supported and staff— and it doesn't have to be with humans, but staff path for someone to take action, right? That's the other big issue, that if you're not treating your website as a demand generation source, then you will have a phone number that never gets answered or taken care of. You will have a shared inbox email that no one actually actively follows up with, or a form submission offer there that, you know, there's no clear owner, there's no qualification process, there is an expectation about what will happen when someone actually makes an inquiry. And, and it has not gotten better over time because websites unfortunately have been game for a long time, right? Now we have spam in every available channel to a company, right? And so it is hard, but it's necessary because if you don't do that, then your website will never be a meaningful source of business for your company.

Yeah. Yeah, it's the same. Um, you know, you talking through the, the type of the thought process around the copy on your website, it's the same as, um, like building out awareness versus consideration versus decision ad campaign copy. It's, you never know what stage of the funnel the person could be in, you know, when they're visiting your website, and you need to preemptively have Be prepared for that and have buyer journeys for each stage that they could be in and set up on the website.

And I forgot to say something like I started and just skip it is, but you reminded me of it, is your website, especially if you're a larger organization, will have multiple stakeholders visiting it and you need to build these journeys for them. Just because ideally your website is a source of demand generation, a source of commercial interest, doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about the other stakeholders that will visit your website and build a path for them to make it easy for them and to make it easy for you. Because if you have a more of a brochure site, then anyone that is interested in working with you will get no idea what it means to work with you. And a place where they can inquire about that. Anyone that wants to sell you something or provide you something or partner with you or learn about you more about you from a PR perspective will not have a path engaging with your company. And that strains that shared inbox email address or that form because now you have to figure out all of that after the fact. Rather, they have dedicated pages and paths for those inquiries. So I think that's the other thing that sometimes gets forgotten is you have multiple stakeholders visiting your website and ideally you have built paths for them to act.

Are there any like metrics or like symptoms that someone could look at to see like the bounce rate on the website or something like that that they could see? If there's a need to change some things on their website?

Yes, that's a fantastic question. And again, it's becoming more and more relevant with AI, and I will now dive a little bit into that, into that distinction. In the early days of, uh, you know, the web, we were almost 100% sure that visitors were basically humans, right? So a lot of the metrics that we've built are assuming that your visitor is a human.

Yeah.

And so I will throw them all there, but I want to make a caveat in the minds of everyone that now that's not true, that actually it doesn't have to be nefarious, right?

Yeah.

That probably a half, in some cases more than a half of your visitors are actually machines or bots or scripts between crawlers and search engines and now AIs. All of your content is being consumed by non-humans. And so these metrics, if you just focus on the quantitative part of it, will skew you to take, to take actions that make no sense because you don't, you're not engaging also in evaluating the quality of the visitor, right? Or the, the nuance of what is it that person is trying to accomplish. So from a just metrics perspective, usually raw numbers like the number of people that visit the page, the time that they spent on the page or the website and the number of pages that they consume are great indicators of the ability of your site to generate demand in the early stages, right? When you have no information about conversion rates, having information about engagement is fantastic, right? And that bounce rate basically means that someone visit a page and take no action and just drops from the visit. And it's an early indication that unless you have a page that actually just gives a very brief information and then that's the whole goal, that your site is not providing a lot of value to the visitor. But again, not necessarily, right? If you have a page which is only intention is to answer a question, then a high bounce rate is— there's nothing wrong with it. Again, it's just a way of measuring. So all those 3, 4 metrics allowed you to evaluate engagement in the early stages. Truly to evaluate the ability of the site to generate commercial interest, you need to measure conversions and conversion rates, right? So out of 100 visitors, how many of them ask for commercial information or ask for information in general, whatever paths you have available? So your conversion numbers, right? Right, number of people that have filled out the forms, and your conversion rates are relevant. I want to say here that for all these numerical things, don't fall prey to just using benchmark numbers without context, right? If you just compare against averages but you don't consider your industry, your company size, the strength of your brand, things that will give you some context, then you will be in a losing battle because what even your competitors are doing really matters what's their positioning, how big they are and things like that. I think it's better to benchmark against your previous performance. That's for me, just like with personal things, like how well you did in the past and are you improving upon those numbers and improving to numbers that matter to you. Now, the part that is get missed is that if you just spend your time on Google Analytics or whatever tool you have looking at this, this, it's and you never evaluate the sessions themselves, you never go and extract samples, examples of actual engagement, you're gonna miss a lot of things that analytics will never tell you, right? The simplest thing, and you know, we do this for clients, is install a tool that allows you to see sessions, right? It can be Hotjar, it can be Clarity, there's plenty of them, look for them, and start recording sessions. Start paying attention to what happens because you will discover that, oh, we didn't think about the mobile experience as much as we have dedicated time to the desktop experience. We thought that people would like engaging a ton when in reality they were just struggling to click on our button or they couldn't find things because we have these very engaging, different navigation experience that we have developed, but people struggling to understand what to do with the website. So there's no way that qual— quantitative data will give you insights into those little nuances. You need to actually go and see sessions and see what people are struggling with and evaluating. If I'm putting a form there with 20 fields and then you have another one that has like steps and less fields and less questions, especially on mobile, you will see the difference. So the other big recommendation is that you record sessions for more advanced implementations. I've seen that actually there are little surveys that you can set up there, right? Is, do you find what you were looking for? That's a great question to ask, right? Is there something that is missing here that you would like to learn or see on our website? So you can inquire your visitors about their experience on your website. I think that makes a lot of sense for larger brands, I have a ton of visitors. So I, I will say that with that knowledge is what you can do, really do a lot of improvements. And it's a prerequisite, or at least should go in tandem, when you're starting to pay for traffic, right?

Yeah.

When you are getting it for free or from sources that are not costing you money, it's not that it's good that you're being wasteful, but at least it's not costing you a ton. When you're paying for traffic, it's a whole different game because now you're sending visitors that will struggle to engage with your content and you pay for it. So that's one big point. And before I jump to the AI portion, I don't know if you have comments there.

Yeah, definitely. And it's another thing that we use Clarity a lot on for that's helpful too, is seeing like you're talking about paid traffic is if you have keywords on Google Ads that you're not sure about the intent level, you know, you're not sure if they're keywords that should be included in a high-intent campaign, it can be helpful to look at the website sessions coming from those search terms to see the level of intent that they are.

Yeah, and I forgot the other thing that I mean by quantitative evaluation is actually the quality of the traffic itself. Right, is if you are getting traffic from multiple sources and you can pinpoint the sources, it is— there is a big difference from, especially for B2B, what kind of companies are visiting our website, something that you can learn from a website without issues with privacy that is harder to do with B2C. So what kind of companies are visiting our website? Do they match our industry? The company size that we're targeting to, the locations, that's an important one, right? It's like, if I want visitors from the East Coast, am I getting them from there or from other parts of the country? So understanding the demographics and firmographics of your traffic will also inform you about the things that you need to change on your site and if it matches what you were intending to. So Now I want to shift, if that's okay, Miranda, to the difference now with bots, right? So the first impact on website is that most of us have experienced is that how do you build sites that are useful to humans, but also the high probability of ranking on search engines? So the first experience that brands had with building websites for bots as well, or for non-humans as well, is with search engine crawlers. So that's where you technical part gets in, right? All the data that a human usually will not look at, like the title of the page and the meta description and the composition of the keywords and the kind of content that you provide has been historically used to build out authority for search engines. So you can be referenced when someone searches for the products and categories that you offer. But AI have changed that a lot because now those crawlers are not searching your content for indexing purposes only. They're searching or they're reading or consuming your content for providing answers. And in that sense, you need to think about them more like literally the word, right? Agents that are doing a job rather than just crawlers that are trying to parse your content and put it in buckets. They're trying to answer the question of a human. That has changed the landscape. And again, I don't know where that's going, but definitely we might run into a situation that our future sites will primarily serve agents rather than humans. I don't know, that's wild, but it's a possibility.

From what you've seen so far from the like more recent changes, Is there anywhere that, um, you, you're starting to see like a bit of a disconnect between optimizing for user experience versus like the AI bots for like how you structure your content or anything like that?

Yeah, I think there's always been a tension there. It's not new. It's been going on since the times of more traditional SEO and optimizing for search engines. And people have concealed, and I don't want to say trick, but tried to conceal the, or trying to get both optimizations at the same time as much as possible. Like, for example, putting keywords that you wanted to rank for in a font that will not be shown by humans. So that way you can say more things to crawlers than what you actually needed to say to humans. I think we are going through some of those stages again with AI. Because Google and other search engines with this last 20 years have learned a ton about how sites can be gamified to, to rank without actually being helpful to humans. And I think AIs are relearning all of those things, right? The game is changing because here you are not looking for indexing, you're looking here for an answer. And so the answer is slightly different every time. And can change depending on what's being thrown out there. I think that tension will always exist. Some interesting implementations I've seen is people that is creating dedicated pages to bots, right? Like actually says, right here, this is just for AIs or for language models. And even the equivalent to the robots.txt file that explain what pages should you visit or which one you shouldn't consider. I'm starting to see recommendations about building something similar for AIs. So again, I'm not sure where is it going. The only thing that I know is that as long as a fraction of your visitors continues to be humans, you need to think about them as much as you think about crawlers, right? That's the only thing that I probably wanna highlight. Just that we are thinking in the same perspective with customer support or customer agents is yes, probably now more and more of the support will come from AI and more and more of the inquiries will come from an agent. But I don't think that we will go to a stage where 100% of the requests will come from bots and 100% of the answers should come from AI only. I think you need to build a path where two humans can talk, right? And I think the same will be for the website, right? Is for inquiries that are very informational, transactional, where not a human is needed to get involved, you should provide all the information and do it in a format that is geared toward agents. But whenever you have a human that is asking for a human, You need to ask, you need to provide a path for that.

And I'll say, just shout out a previous episode we did. I'll make sure it's linked in the show notes, but we have an episode called The Clarity Framework with Tim Lowry, and he's with Tip Top Search and Marketing here in Greenville, and he sat down with us and went through The Clarity Framework, which each letter is a step of how you can evaluate your company and your brand's visibility to AI and what AI knows about your brand and some great insights and tips into how to start to have control over that and shape the way AI is viewing your brand. Um, so definitely check out that episode, um, if that's all new. I know it was very eye-opening for me even just recording it with him, so I'll make sure that's linked. Um, but with that in mind, with AI using our website— websites for answers and all that— are there any, um, kind of measure measurements that you you can look at to see what AI is able to pull from your website?

Yes, that area is emerging, right? It's, it's again new. I think indicators are being built as we speak. I'm not sure if they're going to stay, but looks like right now is most of these tools that used to offer solutions for SEO like Semrush and Ahrefs that have this concept of the overall authority of your domain or your site and the number of queries that are answered by pages from your site, you can extrapolate that or transfer that idea to how often are you being mentioned or cited when an AI is providing answers. And the way they're doing it right now is I will just ask about some topics. Again, it's different now because he's more— it's topical rather than just specific keywords. And you will not get the same answer all the time. And you were not getting that on search engines anyway nowadays. But is I want to know for the prompts or the topics that I care about if I'm being cited or mentioned by the answers. And right, so basically that's the equivalent of your more traditional, where do you rank and your visibility. And that will give you a sense of, well, we want to be known about these topics and be cited or mentioned by AIs for these topics. And when people ask in these locations, these type of questions, and if you are being part of the answer, Then that's a way that you know that your content is, you're being sourced for that. Again, I don't think that it will only depend on you providing the answer or you being a reasonable answer because there's going to be a lot of potential sites that will provide answers as well. I think there's going to be an authority component of it and a reputation component of it for sure, similar to backlinks and if you want to call it mentions from other sites or other sources of authority. I don't know exactly how that's gonna pan out, but I feel that's the beginning, right? Definitely try to test it on your own AIs, but again, be mindful that just like with search in general, the answers you get will be different from the answers that anybody else will get. So use them as an indication. After evaluating that, the actual metrics on the site itself will not change that much. Probably the profile of the visitors will be different from a human perspective. I envision, and we have seen it multiple times, that you are getting more branded search from humans rather than these more questions that used to be answered by blog content or content in general. But after you, after you get them from brand search, the behavior will be similar, right? Is this still a human visiting a site? And we'll try to learn more about you and your, your structure should answer these questions. What is it that you do? What problems do you solve? Why should I trust you? Who else says the same?

Yeah. Well, maybe we'll, uh, this plant, you know, same time next year, do a follow-up at the zone and see.

That would be fantastic.

See what's changed, see what the status is, or maybe 6 months from now. A year might be too long.

Yeah.

I think we might have too much to follow up on. Awesome.

Yeah. I wanna, I want, there's something that what you said is like, it might be completely different. There's one variable that we might be missing from here that we can learn from social media. Which is we run the risk of a website being even inconsequential for demand generation if AIs do the same that social media platforms has been doing for a while, which is keeping the user there. I don't know if that's gonna happen, but I get a sense that eventually, unfortunately, especially if they add advertising, they will have an incentive to keep people in the platform, in the AI, right? Like keep asking questions, keep learning more from us. And if that becomes an incentive, usually advertising is the reason for that in general consumption, then we might shift to a scenario where your website presence is something that lives inside the chat or inside the AI itself rather than a place where you go and consume content. We, we are seeing inklings of that on the way that your business is presented on Google, right? Your Google Business Profile will be typically the one that will have the highest ranking when someone is looking for your brand. The only thing that goes better than that is your set, your own site. But if you think about it, right, if especially if you have something that's more local, He has everything for, for someone to answer questions. He has photos, he has reviews, your phone, your, you can set up a meeting there. So I think that's Google trying to even source the information about your business without sending anyone to a site. That's something that could happen eventually for brands, for B2B brands on the future. And as you said, we might explore that in a year.

Very good. Awesome. All right. Well, any last closing thoughts or anything to close with?

No, I will say, as I said in others, is that if you want to improve the chances that your site becomes a demand generation engine for you, testing for me is the most important one, right? Really drill down on those metrics related to leading indicators. But especially the qualitative ones. Who is this? Who is actually visiting your website and what is it that they're doing? Are they struggling with understanding what you offer? And that requires testing, that requires looking at paying attention to the sessions themselves rather than just looking at raw numbers.

Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you. And until next time, everybody.

Bye. Next time.