Your website is your first impression, and it can make or break your relationship with the client. A bad website can minimize a potential client’s trust, make it difficult for them to find information, and reduce the chance that they’ll reach out to you.
The team behind WebEnertia has been building and designing websites for decades. They started their work at the beginning of the dot-com explosion, and they’ve been leading the market ever since. They bridge a unique gap in the market by catering to B2B businesses, helping them engineer compelling brand stories and websites that generate traffic and sales.
But B2C web design and development looks immensely different from B2B design. Today, the team at WebEnertia shares its top tips for building a compelling B2B website that converts.
Understand the difference between B2B and B2C design needs
Your website is the most powerful digital marketing tool at your disposal. It works to increase your brand’s visibility and generate sales for your organization, providing a direct connection to customers and driving the business forward. A decade ago, it may have been enough to simply be online (in whatever capacity, with whatever tools you could manage) to take part in digital marketing.
In 2021, this won’t cut it. Now, in order to strategically use digital marketing, brands need a deep understanding of their industries, markets, competition, and users. Every B2B company leader needs to understand what sets B2C design apart from B2B design.
A B2C website focuses on creating urgency for a single customer to purchase using a checkout process based on impulse, emotion, or a personal need. A B2B website, on the other hand, is designed to sell higher price point solutions with a broad organizational impact that require longer sales cycles, education, and buy-in of multiple buyer personas.
These nuances are critical in the design process.
B2B companies need to define their brand
In a very competitive B2B climate with marginal differences in offerings between brands, it’s not enough to have a great product or go-to-market strategy. You also need a great brand to provide the framework for your customer education and storytelling. And for B2B companies, your website is one of the most profound representations of your brand. Establishing an ownable and authentic brand is the best way to ensure that your site stands apart from your competition and connects more meaningfully with your visitors.
- Brand Positioning: Define your brand’s DNA by asking “what,” “why,” and “how.” The answers to those questions will provide the positioning and purpose pillars needed to build the foundation for creating any brand experience, like your website. The hero space on your home page is a great place to establish your positioning.
- Brand Visual Identity: Your logo, imagery, iconography, typography, colors, infographics, illustrations, and other design patterns need to be an authentic representation of who you are. They work hand-in-hand with your positioning and purpose to tell the right message story and differentiate you from the competition. The use of your brand’s visual identity elements should be deliberate and consistent throughout the website.
- Brand Voice & Messaging: Establish a tone that reflects your brand personality and creates a complete expression of who you are. Voice and visual style are two sides of the same coin. Your audience personas should heavily influence your messaging. What is your prospective customer’s pain point? How does your solution or product solve it? All of this should be crystal-clear in your website copy.
Understand the buyer personas in B2B marketing
When it comes to B2B purchases that cost thousands or even millions of dollars, it’s not as simple as putting a product into a cart. Successful selling in this space often requires content marketing, product trials, demo requests, ROI calculators, and sales calls that generate leads and then prompt negotiations around the purchase. Understanding your personas—ranging from C-suite decision-makers to technical users—is the first step in supporting this long and complex purchase funnel.
A single brand’s audience might consist of dozens of individual roles, but each falls into one of three major categories:
- Decision Makers: It’s easy to get hung up on this persona, but remember this: decision-makers mostly need to understand the benefits of your solution and why it works for their company. Create relatable content that answers these questions, and provide clear calls to action so they can take the next steps.
- Recommenders: Recommenders help narrow down the shortlist of products being evaluated. These customers are often most interested in ROI calculators, support pages, customer success stories, competitive comparison charts, and in-depth articles and blog posts.
- Users: Their mandate is to dive deep into the nuances of your products and solutions to understand how they work. This is the group for whom you are helping solve problems, so be sure to position your product detail pages, whitepapers, and case studies with their specific needs and questions in mind.
Set Up for Successful Lead Generation
A B2B organization must build a meaningful pipeline of interest in the product or service it is offering. Here are some of our favorite tools to help generate leads.
- CTAs: Whether you’re offering a free demo or asking for contact information, sticky calls to action are an excellent method to promote engagement. These are buttons or forms that follow website visitors throughout the site and can always be visible.
- Content Gating: Content gating—when users input information to gain access—is a powerful tool that helps build a database of credible, qualified leads. You ensure only serious candidates will download by gating content, cutting straight to the cream of the audience crop.
- Interactive Content: Demo videos, ROI calculators, and animated infographics are great examples of high-engagement content that should be in place for any serious B2B website lead generation strategy.
Web design is a huge investment for any business. Whether you’re starting your first website or revamping an existing one, know that these strategies will help you get the best ROI and create a website that reaches your customers from the first impression.
