We have found that many B2B companies believe that all their website needs is a simply a redesign. Many companies make the mistake of rushing into designing a new website without taking the time to plan. This can often lead to problems down the road.
Your website’s design is important, but it won’t generate leads effectively if it’s not easy for users to do what they need to do and find information quickly.
B2B sites need to be informative and credible in order to be successful. Creating a site that can do both takes careful planning and execution. You need to consider what your audience wants to know and how you can present that information in a way that is both accurate and trustworthy. Additionally, your site should be designed in a way that is consistent with the overall look and feel of your online presence. With a little thought and effort, you can create a B2B website that will help you build credibility and reach your target audience.
If you want to be successful, here are fifteen things you should consider doing.
1. Showcase Educational Content
It is important to have all of your content in one place that is easily accessible from the homepage. This should be a top-level page that is prominently featured in the site navigation. On the library page, users should be able to organize the content by topic or format type.
This is not the place for promotion; rather, it is a hub for educational resources like how-to guides, whitepapers, research studies, and webinars. Your content should be professional and demonstrate your firm’s relevant expertise. The writing and design should bolster your credibility, not detract from it.
If you’re going to create content, you need to be consistent with it and always update your library page so it doesn’t become stagnant. This will show your dedication to education and your engagement with the industry.
2. Highlight Premium Content To Generate Leads
An educational eBook is a more in-depth, “premium” form of content than a blog post. A blog post is designed to be freely accessible to anyone in order to draw visitors, while an eBook may require useful information such as a visitor’s email address before allowing them to download it.
This strategy, called “gating” content, requires a form submission of some type. If you ask for too many personal details, visitors will be discouraged. However, they are usually willing to exchange their names and email addresses for valuable content. This is some of the most useful information you can collect.
This data will allow you to continue to attract and engage your target audience through content that is relevant to each stage of their journey. Creating content that is designed to convert is a powerful and essential lead generation strategy.
3. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
An increasing number of people are using mobile devices to access B2B websites. These screens are smaller, so site designs that look good and work well on a laptop or desktop computer may appear confused and difficult to use on a mobile phone or tablet.
To ensure that visitors have a good experience on your website, it is important to design it to be mobile-friendly. If visitors have a bad experience trying to access your site on a mobile device, they will likely leave and not come back. Through a recent algorithm update, “Mobilegeddon,” Google is now taking mobile-friendliness into account when ranking websites and is displaying “mobile-friendly” tags next to mobile-friendly results in search results. With this update, it is evident that how easy a website is to use on a mobile device has a significant effect on the website’s overall visibility.
4. Optimize Your Site For Search Engine Indexing
While effective search engine optimization (or SEO) is a massive topic, some of the most essential SEO best practices include:
- Be sure that your pages have unique titles and “meta” descriptions, so Google (and searchers) can tell exactly what each page is about.
- Use the “image alt” HTML tag to give context to images on your site. This will both improve accessibility for users and help Google understand the content of your images.
- Include relevant keyword phrases. Which phrases do folks search for when they’re looking for expertise like yours? Include these phrases in both your site copy and metadata. Don’t go overboard trying to cram in keyword phrases, though. Instead, use only the most natural and relevant ones.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools (Google Search Console) to monitor your site’s performance, leveraging the data to increase traffic and produce more relevant content. If visitors are flocking to blogs on a particular topic, this may be a good area for you to focus on.
Make your website more appealing to search engines by including relevant keywords and phrases, using meta tags, banners, customer testimonials, and calls to action.
Your website’s design is important because it effectively communicates your brand and enables you to achieve your website’s ultimate goal – getting the right information to the right people so that they’re converted into buyers. Use these tips to create an effective B2B website design that will keep users coming back.
It is especially important to stay up-to-date with SEO techniques for online marketing, as they are always changing. Ensure that your team is capable of keeping up with these changes so that your strategy does not fall behind.
5. Create Clear Calls-To-Action
If you want visitors to your website to explore your services or learn more about your business, you need to make it easy for them to know what to do next. If they can’t figure out how to contact you, they will move on to another website.
It is crucial to have conspicuous and enticing calls-to-action on your website that guide visitors to carry out a specific action, with a button usually taking the form of a bright, explicit description. As you plan your website, you should make a point of creating an offer strategy that details which calls-to-action will be on what page, and the reasoning behind it. Imagine this as setting out a plan for the target personas your website is attempting to reach.
The “call to action” button on your B2B website is the most important element on the site, because it is the final step in getting visitors to take the action you want them to take.
Every page on a great B2B website has a call to action. You never have to wonder what you’re supposed to do next, and it’s easy to get in touch with a sales representative. As you’re creating your website, you should also create an offer strategy that outlines which calls to action will go on each page and why.
Calls-to-action should be easily noticeable and simple to understand, no matter where they are on the page. The text accompanying the call-to-action should be descriptive and specific, using active language such as “Get my free evaluation” instead of something vague like “Submit.”
Calls-to-action are more effective when they are part of a detailed plan. A/B testing can be used to compare visitors’ responses to different versions of calls-to-action, experimenting with different text, colors, etc to increase click and conversion rates.
6. Demonstrate Your Firm’s Expertise
Your expertise is the key to your success. Marketing cannot replace it. Your expertise should be the foundation of everything you do online.
Your design and copy should make it clear that you are an expert in your field and that you know how to help your target audience. Your credibility should be reinforced with images and language that resonates with them.
Provide visitors with detailed bios of the people in your firm, including their pictures, background, experience, recent projects, professional associations, and any other relevant information. Video features and firm overviews are another way to engage in a “face-to-face” introduction to your organization, its people, and its culture. Depending on your firm’s culture and comfort level with social media, including links to social connections is useful and helps staff seem more approachable.
7. Make Your Site Easy To Navigate
Your website should provide plenty of detailed information in an easily navigable format. If it is difficult to navigate or locate the desired information, visitors may become frustrated or never find what they are looking for.
The website navigation architecture (information architecture) on a B2B website shouldn’t be unnecessarily complicated as it will only frustrate visitors and cause them to leave the site.
Design your navigation menus so that there are no more than six top-level categories. You can guide users to more specific subsets of pages through dropdown menus. Make sure these menus are easy to find, and use font that is large and legible.
8. Your Site Design Has To Be Good
It is essential that your site provides great navigation and a user-friendly experience so that buyers can easily find what they are looking for. Every page on your site should have a clear purpose.
9. Consider Your Audience
If you want to sell a product or service to only one decision maker, make sure you know who your audience is. However, if you’re selling something that requires multiple decisions, consider how many people are involved in the decision-making process.
10. Set Clear Site Goals
It is important to always have a clearly defined goal, as this will generally involve getting the user to take some kind of desired action (such as signing up for a newsletter, trying out a demo, requesting a quote, etc).
The more trustworthy your B2B website appears, the more new leads and conversions you’ll get. But even more importantly, you’ll also gain loyal repeat customers who have come to rely on your site as the best place to buy a product or service. To boost your online credibility and build your brand, be sure to use the following strategies.
11. Creating An Inspiring About Us Page
The About Us page is always the first page that your buyers go to when they want to know more about your company. There are 3 groups of people who are interested in your ‘About Us’ page:
Prospects
Your prospective customers want to know more about you before they buy your product or service. The “About Us” page should tell them your business story and answer any critical questions they have.
Job Seekers
The best job candidates will look at your “About Us” page before applying to your company. If you want to attract the best candidates, show off your company’s culture.
Competitors and potential partners
A strong ‘About Us’ page demonstrates your credibility.
The purpose of your About Us page should be to build trust in your buyers. It’s the place on your website that they can go to when they have questions about:
- Who You Are
- What Exactly You Do
- Introduce Your Team
- The Health Of Your Company
- Your Business Philosophy
- Your Culture
- Accolades and Achievements
- Where the Company is Going
- Current Job Openings
- Clients
We advise our clients to showcase results that illustrate your organization’s influence and story. Examples include:
- References to organizations, memberships, and industry affiliations
- Customer testimonials and press coverage
- Media assets such as executive interviews and product demonstrations
- Sponsorships, community participation, speaking engagements, and industry thought leadership
- Links to company social media assets
12. Offer High-Quality Content To Your Leads And Become A Thought Leader
Creating high-quality content that provides educational information and addresses the pain points of your leads is the most effective way to build trust as a company on your B2B website.
Having a content strategy is an important part of a B2B marketer’s job. A content strategy is a plan that outlines how a company will create and share content. This includes all written communication, such as tweets, posts, and comments. Having a strategy helps a company to organize and present its content in a way that is most effective.
13. Mobile Responsiveness – Optimize Your Website
As more and more people use mobile devices to access B2B websites, it is important to design the websites to be optimized for whatever device is being used. This will give visitors the best possible experience.
You can ensure your site is mobile-friendly by using responsive design. This will make your site look good and work well on any size screen, from a small iPad to a large Samsung tablet.
14. Stay Fresh
When you visit a website and see that the most recent blog post is from three years ago, it’s frustrating. It’s even worse when you click on a link and find that the page no longer exists.
Quality content is essential to the success of any website. It is what drives traffic, establishes thought leadership, and provides value to customers.
Use content to grow awareness about your product, drive customers to consider your product, and generate sales. Learning centers, content hubs, and blogs rich with experiences and case studies all help build engagement with potential customers.
15. Make It Easy To Share
You’ve put effort into making your website’s pages full of great content. To make sure people can share it, put social media buttons in an easy-to-find spot on your homepage, like the top, bottom, or down the side.
If you want potential clients to use your business, it is important to make sure your social media presence is strong. Posting content on your profiles shows that you are active and engaged, and thus more likely to be a reliable business partner.
Conclusion
Your website’s structure and design are important because they help you get the right information to the right people and convert visitors into buyers.
Make sure the goals and best practices above are a priority when considering a new site or renovation. By following these guidelines, you will be in a good position to stand out from the competition.
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