Improving the B2B Form-Fill Game, What Can B2B Marketers do?

Form-filling is a tedious task, whether it be legal contracts, medical paperwork, website forms, or any other form. However, forms are highly important when it comes to B2B websites. Almost all web-based leads fill in a form at some point in their buyer journey. This renders it a top source for data collection. Hence, forms deserve more consideration than they usually receive. Compared to the time we put into each element of the lead generation campaign, the opt-in forms get attention as an afterthought. And that’s strange because gathering information to know your customer is the whole point of the form campaign. As long as the rest of the campaign works, you can consider default forms. However, advertising is getting expensive. Thus, we’re expected to deliver better and more leads continuously in order to up the business game. In case you’ve reached a stage where no more budget would be allocated to you, but you need to produce better results, and you’ve made necessary optimizations from your side, it’s time to turn your attention to optimizing lead generation forms. Now how can you do it: Well, here are some ways to help you do it. Read on!

Top Lead Generating Form Strategies

1. Two-Step Forms:

These are deceptively straightforward. You show your customer what looks like a CTA button instead of showing an opt-in form. A two-step form can work better compared to regular opt-ins. That’s because the visitor has invested more in the process/ Just a little click of theirs is a slight investment of effort and focus. So, it is enough to compel people to completely fill up the form, as humans prefer closure.

2. No Forms, Optional Forms, and Forms:

Consider your larger goals and place them in front of every valuable content piece. This can generate leads. However, often, you need to remove the gate to allow people to know the kind of content you’re offering. Now, which content should you ungate? Well, ungating top-of-the-funnel content is a smarter thing to do. David Meerman Scotts says that ungated content receives 20 to 50 times higher downloads as opposed to gated ones. Even if you’re focused on leads alone, consider this step. Many companies have eliminated opt-in forms and claim that the step has increased their leads by about 15% and helped them get more business.

3. Forms Within Interactive Content:

Forms need not just protect text-based docs or email sequences. In reality, they also have a place in your site’s interactive content, which can be one of the choicest lead gen tools accessible to B2B marketers. Such forms can be quizzes, polls, or assessments. When interactive have an ungated part, they even work better, that’s because visitors can deploy interactive tools to procure some fundamental information. However, if they want to get more information, they must provide their contact details.

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Examples of Brands That Do It Right

 1. Uber:

The brand faces the challenge of segmenting two types of leads, passengers and drivers. Uber does it right when it asks the users outright why they’re on the application. With this approach, instant lead segmentation happens, which enables the company to provide one of the two forms to every type of prospect. So, the brands that deal with two aspects of the same service need to procure segment lead types with the initial interaction only.

2. Lemonade:

Lemonade eliminates the pain from the process of finding insurance by including a multi-step personalized form that has a conversational tone intended to enhance customer experience. Additionally and importantly, it renders the process all about you, the customer, by mentioning you in all the key questions.

3. Medium:

The platform has the easiest sign-up procedure, which only entails a couple of clicks when you do it with Google or Facebook. Email sign-ups are buttery smooth, but social sign-ups aren’t quite innovative. On medium, all you need to do is, type the email address, input the verification code, and voila!

4. BrokerNotes:

The site’s forms convey a lesson that your forms shouldn’t look like forms at all. Instead, find a way that the user feels excited to fill out details in the sections you’ve placed. By using large clickable images, toggle sliders, and a non-standard user interface, the form gets more fun. And yes, the data gathered at the end is similar to the information you capture with traditional forms. In addition to this, conditional logic is another tactic to ask better questions you can use to capture more details about users.

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So, you see, forms need not be intrusive, snoopy, or painful. They can be fun at times. Just making a shift in the design and approaching it wisely in accordance with the user behavior and cognitive biases can help you a lot. Focus on the user first, and you can decide matters in a way that has a measurable effect on your lead-capturing processes.