Here at JSA Interactive, we often conduct user testing studies wherein we have random, anonymous users take a good look at a website and answer a few questions about their experience. One of the more common complaints we see in analyzing their responses is also one of the easiest B2B marketing ideas that you can implement quickly and painlessly for your business: contact information that makes getting in touch simple.

B2B Marketing Ideas: Your Contact Information

There are many different components to a good business website, but your contact information is one that you absolutely cannot mess up. When a user visits your website, they should be able to easily and quickly identify how to get in touch with your business – if they can’t figure out how to contact you, then you simply won’t be contacted, and that will, in effect, render a lot of your online marketing efforts completely useless. If they have to dig around to figure out how to contact you, they will lose interest and be less likely to actually get in touch. This is definitely a basic concept, but it’s also one that many sites seem to have trouble with, most likely because it’s easy to let this aspect take a back seat when you’re busy trying to make everything else work like it should.

Fortunately, it’s also an easy problem to fix, and here are some tips you can use to make sure that you are always within reach:

• Don’t stick to just the “Contact Us” page. A “Contact Us” page is absolutely necessary, but this should not be the only part of your website where a user can find out how to contact you. Put your phone number in a conspicuous place on your homepage, as well as every other page on your website. It can be in the header at the very top, or in an attractive graphic in the sidebar, or wherever else you can fit it in that looks nice and is easy to see. You should also have your contact information in the footer of your website, but that is not as conspicuous to users, so it’s better to use the footer in conjunction with more visible contact info.

• Provide more than one way for people to contact you. Phone numbers are great for people that like to get in touch instantly. Providing email addresses will appeal to those that prefer not to talk on the phone. Making a contact form available for various specific inquiries will catch everyone else, and including links to your social media profiles provides even further contact avenues. The more ways people have to get in touch, the more often they will do it.

• Go easy on the form fields. When you have a contact form, it’s tempting to want to require the user to provide a ton of information, but a form that requires too much may make people lose interest halfway through – and then you lose that potential lead. Limit your form fields to only those that are absolutely necessary. Collecting the really in-depth information can wait until after they’ve gotten in touch.

• Make sure that your contact information is readily available in other places, as well. Social media profiles, newsletters, emails you send to your lists, direct mail creatives, whitepapers, landing pages, and more – anything that you put in front of a user with an eye toward selling them on your business should have conspicuous contact information so people can always find out how to get in touch simply and easily.

The Bottom Line

Communication is essential to successful online marketing, and you need to make sure that the channels are as open as possible at all times, so you can catch everyone when they want to get in touch. As far as B2B marketing ideas go, this is one of the easiest, but it’s still often overlooked. If you haven’t thought about your contact information lately, then now is a great time to take what you’ve read here and look at your website and other materials with a new eye.

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Categories

• B2B Marketing
• General Internet Marketing