It’s crucial for every business to have an online presence today. Your website is the place potential customers land, find out more about you, and decide if they want to invest in your services or someone else’s.
For B2B oil and gas companies, it provides the opportunity to explain what you offer and how you can help solve the biggest challenges your customers might face.
But it’s not enough to put up a pretty website and hope for the best. If you want to consistently generate leads and funnel website visitors to the consideration phase of the buyer journey, you have to create a site that’s geared toward conversions.
This means that instead of just arriving on your site and leaving without a backward glance, visitors have the chance to move through the sales funnel through helpful content, gated content, and nurturing techniques.
Why a High-Converting Website is Crucial for Oil and Gas Companies
A high-converting website isn’t just about turning leads into buyers. It builds trust, establishes your expertise, and makes it easy for customers to invest in you.
The sales funnel for oil and gas companies is particularly long. Operations managers will likely be eyeing up a few different options and, because oil and gas investments are often big, they will take their time to make sure they’re making the right decision.
As such, it’s important that you use the time visitors spend on your website wisely to accurately portray what you offer, answer any potential objections, and generally make the sales funnel as slick as possible.
By implementing conversion optimization techniques, you can shorten the lengthy sales cycle and generate a consistent flow of new clients pretty much on autopilot.
How to Create a High-Converting Website
Now that you know why a high-converting website is key in the oil and gas industry, here’s how you can make sure your website is doing everything it can to take visitors from browsers to buyers.
Incorporate Clear Call-To-Actions
Call-to-actions (CTAs) tell website visitors what step to take next. It’s not always immediately obvious and, if someone can’t find what they’re looking for straight away, they’re likely to go somewhere they can.
And CTAs are powerful – in fact, they can boost conversion rates by up to 121%. But if you want to make the most out of them, there are some best practices you can follow:
- Personalizing CTAs can convert 42% more visitors into leads
- Making CTAs look like buttons can boost clicks by 45%
- Eliminating clutter around your CTAs can improve conversion rates by 232%
- Explaining the key benefits next to your CTA can increase conversions by 34%
CTAs essentially drive visitors through the sales cycle by providing them with touchpoints like “subscribe to our email list”, “sign up today”, or “download now”. You should also provide plenty of places where visitors can get in touch with you.
As you can see in the example above, EEXCOM uses bright orange CTAs to attract the attention of website visitors.
Run A/B Testing
It’s difficult to know what website features your visitors prefer and react to without testing them out. This is where A/B testing (or split-testing) comes into play. It basically involves tweaking different elements of your site to see which version returns the best results.
For example, you might include a CTA above the fold in one version and below the fold underneath product information in another. Track the movements of visitors for each to determine which one they’re more likely to respond to.
Here are some things you can A/B test on your website:
- Headings and subheads
- Text placement and structure
- CTAs
- Free offers and downloads
- Colors and button styles
Simplify the Customer Journey
You want to make it as easy as possible for website visitors to move through the sales cycle. This is particularly important in the oil and gas industry, where the cycle is often longer than most.
Instead of throwing all the information, you have at leads all in one go, decide what key points they need to make a decision to move to the next step.
This also means creating a clear and easy-to-use navigation system that doesn’t try to get creative or pack lots of subpages under main pages.
Consider the usual route customers take. It might look something like this:
When you understand the information the majority of customers need to make it through the journey, you can prioritize that information on your website.
Provide a Variety of Content for Different Stages of the Funnel
Leads need different information at different stages of the funnel. Someone who has just landed on your site and isn’t aware they might have a problem that needs solving just yet requires very different information than someone who knows exactly what they need and is in the process of weighing up their options.
To tackle this, create content for different stages of the funnel and populate your site with it.
Here’s what this might look like in action:
- Blog posts and articles to target people who are at the top of the funnel and just discovering they have a problem
- Downloadables, product pages, and guides for people who know what product or solution they need
- Case studies, testimonials, and demos for people who are ready to buy and are checking out their options
USS Tubular, for example, provides an entire resources page full of performance data, certifications, and more for people at different stages of the sales cycle.
Convert More Customers With Your Website
Your website is your digital storefront. By providing customers with the information they need at the right time, and making it easy for them to move through the sales cycle, you’ll land more customers and increase your revenue.
Start by populating your site with compelling CTAs, creating an intuitive navigation system, A/B testing different elements, and building out content resources that help different prospects at different points in the sales cycle.
Elevation was recently listed as one of the top web design companies in Phoenix! Contact us to find out how we can help you create a high converting oil and gas website.
