Business Services
BUSINESS SERVICES DON'T ALWAYS BENEFIT FROM EASY READING
Business Services
Business owners tend to ask a lot of questions, and demand proof of concrete results before they’ll convert. (They typically need to have their objections handled carefully and thoroughly, too.) For those marketing business services, landing pages represent a crucial step in meeting their healthy skepticism head-on, whether that’s showing the value of your offer with testimonials or running consultations that help prospects see why your service is essential.
- Business services is a catchall that includes 5 broad subcategories of landing pages, ranging from human resources to shipping solutions.
- The median conversion rate for all business services pages is 2.6%, but the top performers in this industry convert at 21.8% (based on the top 25th percentile).
- The data analyzed for this industry comes from 6,357 landing pages and accounts for 1,611,152 conversions.
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Business Services
Reading ease and word count don't relate to more conversions in the business services industry.
What’s this mean? The analysis of conversion rate and reading ease/word count doesn’t show a trend as pronounced as other industries. Our take is that marketers working in business services shouldn’t be preoccupied with keeping their landing page copywriting simple—but there are a few exceptions to this suggestion we discuss below. See our methodology for more.
Business Services
Offering lead-gen consulting?
Try more sophisticated copy.
(No, really.)
A general rule of thumb for landing pages is to keep your copy simple—we say it throughout this report, and we have the data to back it up—but there are exceptions to every rule. Landing pages for lead-gen consulting and services appear to benefit from using more advanced vocabulary and sentence structure. As in, they perform best if they’re written for college grads.
The graph below compares lead-gen services to both the business services baseline and human resources. For HR, you can see a more typical correlation between easier reading and conversion rates.
Why is this the case? This might have something to do with the heightened importance of perceived expertise in the business services space. These companies help generate leads through consultations or by selling resources like courses or frameworks for finding new leads. If you’re paying for this service, they’d better show off a little credible know-how in some form or another. (You’ve got limited space to do it, though: the sweet spot for converting best is below 300 words.)
Business Services
Business services by the numbers
16%
More Fear on Consultant Pages
Consultants use more fear-related words (think words like disruption, problem, or weakly) than the business services baseline. But the evidence doesn’t suggest a positive relationship between scaring your visitors and getting them to convert, so it might be worth testing in a variant.
2.3X
Conversions from Click-through CTAs
Though forms are more common, click-throughs in this industry perform more than twice as well as the business services baseline. (That’s very good!) At the top of your funnel, don’t use unnecessary lead-gen forms if a click-through is enough. And, even when you need forms, try testing variants that reduce them to the fewest steps and fields possible.
20%
Fewer Conversions from Forms
Forms perform less well on business services landing pages than across all the other industries in this report. Are you asking too much from visitors? Are you providing real value in exchange for contact info? If not, consider trimming your forms.
Business Services
HR pages dial down some emotions (and turn up others).
Business Services
HR pages dial down some emotions (and turn up others).
Human resources sometimes gets a bad rap—nobody knows this more than the people who work in the industry. This unfair reputation may be one reason why our machine learning model found HR landing pages often use plain, positive language (9% more than the B2B baseline) and express feelings like anticipation 18% more often. They also use words linked to anger about half as much as other business services.
Do these emotions lead to better conversion rates? Sorta. Our analysis shows that using anticipation words could relate to improved conversion rates in this industry (see the graph), but other feelings don’t show any reliable results. Positive language actually could relate to slightly lower conversion rates, but nothing too impactful—you may want to scale your positivity back.
Business Services
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