A Comprehensive Look At B2B Website Design and Special Practices You Should Consider Before Uploading Your Page
A lot goes into a B2B website design and platform. Everything has a start and a finish. Below you will find a few tips on how to begin your journey.
Four Beginning Tips
1) Who is the end customer? That is the person(s) who will benefit from your product and B2B website. You are selling to him or her. That means you have to take their feelings and opinions into consideration at all times.
You need to ask the tough questions, including what they liked and dislikes the most and how well does the product serves their needs.
You might not want to because you are afraid of what they might say. However, you need to get to the truth if your B2B website is going to succeed beyond a few days or weeks.
You should also find out who decided to buy the item. Is the buyer using it? Did they buy it for someone else? Those answers will help shed light on who your core audience is going to be(in part).
2) You need to talk to your sales and personnel team too. Many of them might be spending more time on the front lines, attending to the customers. You might be in the back making all the tough choices. Both sides do the necessary work.
Your personnel team might know things about your core customer base you do not. That is why you need to consider everything they have to tell you. It might not be what you want to hear, but this is not about you.
3) You need to develop a different persona than the one you come to work with. You need to have a “buyer’s person”. Part of having a B2B site is to think and act like a buyer.
How does your buyer think? What does he or she like? What do they shy away from? How much do they buy and when? Once you can answer most(if not all) of these questions, you have developed a buyer’s persona.
Try to understand the customer’s language and integrate that into the site. Reinterpreting your customer’s need is not going to get you to the finish line. Their needs have to be spelled out simply and plainly.
You can also track your results on social media. Everything s person does and says on social media gives you a window into who the person is( from a psychological point of view). There is a psychology to the B2B website design. Social media is a good resource to help you see into the minds of your customers. Connecting the two will help benefit conversion ratios.
4) The last thing you have to understand(for this blog) is you cannot separate the sales and marketing process. The two are interwoven to create the buyer’s process. What your site does is part of the equation. Your site will fall apart if you start to separate the two.
Now that you have your beginning, we are now moving onto the final four parts on how to achieve success with your B2B site.
The Four Must-Follow Words of Wisdom
1) You have to have a value proposition(that is the core promise and statement defining what you offer). You need to tell your audience how you intend to stand out from the crowd. After all, there could be several B2B sites doing the same as you. What makes you different? Why should customers pick you over all the others?
That is what you need to define in your value proposition. One word of advice: the value proposition is not intended to be used to discuss your features. Your customers can find that elsewhere. You need to tell your customers about the benefits of using you. Once again, it comes down to “why should they pick you over everyone else”?
Your B2B website and design cannot exist without one.
2) Your quality needs to be more than just “good or okay”. Your content needs to be top-shelf(as the UK calls it) content or you cannot expect to succeed.
The other thing about the content for B2B sites is that it needs to be gated. That means your customers will only have access to it once they fill out the required forms. Gated, high-quality content is going to set you apart from everyone else. It is like being invited into an exclusive club that only a select few garners an invitation.
B2B website design is different compared to traditional website design. That is why you need to make it count.
Top-of-the-funnel gated content includes things like ebooks, webinars, blogs, and how-to videos.
3) The value has to be in more than just your content. The overall feel of your site has to add value. It has to be clean and crisp. It has to be simple and easy to follow. B2B website design is design with a purpose, including helping other businesses achieve their goals.
4) Your B2B site has to focus on performance. All it takes is one second for your customers to leave you. They will go find another site that does not have performance issues.
You also have to include your mobile device outline. Include things on the mobile device that visitors cannot find on their PC. Your mobile and PC sites have to be similar, but different, in many respects.
Most users today do not have the patience to deal with slow or poor performance. High-quality speed and performance value are going to increase the value of your B2B generation leads.
Sites with the best performance bring in the top business talent and loyal customer base. Otherwise, you might be facing a lifetime of bottom feeders, and you do not want that.