Before I even start this article properly, let me tell you this: your B2B website is your path to success in this 21st century. You must realize that there is much more than a company logo and contact information that goes into a complete and successful website. Your website needs to speak to your customers, it needs to be part of your sales proposition. Whether it’s a product or service buyers buy directly from your website, or you’re selling software or consulting projects, understand that your buyers are researching online in any scenario.
Therefore, the more complex your services or products are, the more you will require your website to work for you because today, buyers want to shop online.
Again, since B2B businesses are more complex than typical B2C businesses, they actually need much better user interfaces. B2B websites should put more emphasis on usability because this will help users to perform more advanced tasks on the website.
That said, rushing straight into B2B website design can lead to disaster.
These are the things that you and/or a professional web design company in Noida should take care of before the design:
1. Ask the end customer
The key to a successful website is to remember that your website is more about your prospects than it is about you. Your prospects or end customers are the ones who will buy the product or service from your website. Therefore, taking their feedback into account before you start designing your B2B website can save you a lot of additional cost and time.
You can start this by directly asking your customers the following questions:
- How did you get to our website?
- How long did it take to load the website?
- Were you able to figure out the website menu?
- Was the description of our products/services sufficient?
- How was the display image of the product? Does it seem of good quality?
- Did our FAQ section solve your doubts?
- Describe in detail your purchasing process?
- According to you, what is the most important thing when evaluating the options?
2. Ask your sales and marketing team
Since they are the ones who are in regular contact with your customers and clients, their opinions play an important role in deciding what your B2B website should look like. Your customers generally want valuable information, pricing information, quick response, and a quick solution to their needs. In the meantime, you as a business want more leads, more conversions, and more loyalty from your customers.
To maintain a balance between what you want and what your customers want, you need to ask your sales and marketing team the following questions:
- How do you want your brand to be perceived?
- Why do your customers notice you and not your competition?
- What are our advantages according to you?
- What are the problems that usually occur in our products/services?
- Who are all our big clients, what is the number of clients that we have served?
- According to the sales and marketing team, what are the main objectives that the website must meet in order to be successful?
3. Think of a Buyer Persona
While many B2B companies tend not to think of it as an important step, having a Buyer Persona ready can help you better understand your business environment, what types of customers typically buy your products, and what time they shop.
To create an effective buyer persona, consider these factors:
- Interview your clients/clients
- Interview your sales and marketing team
- Conduct a survey for your prospects
- Mining your internal database to understand the qualities of the best and worst customers
- Check your web analytics report
- Interview with your customer service team
- Use keywords to recognize topics of interest
- Track your social media activities and monitor engagements with your connections
4. Map the purchase process of your customers
There are three stages in a buying process:
1. Awareness: Here, the buyer does some initial research, makes sense of the problem for which he seeks solutions (later), recognizes the opportunities, changes his priorities.
2. Evaluation: Here, the buyer discovers the product/service that can help him solve the problems. He researches and educates himself on the solution. Later, he reviews the other evaluation options, such as checking the other alternative solutions.
3. Decision: Finally, at this stage, the buyer is already leaning towards an option, either yours or your competitors. They are just looking for ways to justify their eventual decision.
Your website is a sales tool for you, and for your buyers, it’s a tool to help them make a better decision. Analyzing your customers’ buying process will help you think about the content and site architecture that will work best for you, your customers, and future buyers.
The following are the type of questions you should consider answering before you start building your website:
- What role will your website play in supporting each of the 3 stages of your buyer’s buying process?
- What questions need to be answered, where?
- How should your website be structured so that each piece of information is in accordance with the personality of the buyer?
- What questions need to be answered and in what flow will they be answered?
- What are the various types of content that should be on your website: blog articles, ebooks, webinars, newsletters, etc.?
- What important role will customer testimonials play and how will you present them on your B2B website?
5. Create the content and conversion plan
Since there are different stages in a buyer’s buying process, your content should be such that your buyers understand what they need to know and what they need to know at each stage and convert.
In the awareness stage, you need to make your buyer aware of the fact that your business has a problem or problem. This is the top stage of the funnel. At this stage, the buyer will expect blog posts, e-books, videos, tip sheets, etc. high value.
In the next stage, that is, the evaluation stage, your buyer has clearly identified the problem with your business and is now collecting a large amount of information. This is the middle stage of the funnel where the buyer will expect webinars, seminars, podcasts, case studies, comparison charts, etc. of you.
Finally, in the last stage, that is, the decision stage, your buyer is ready to make the purchase after identifying the solutions. This is the lower stage of the funnel where the buyer expects things like a free trial, a live demo, a discount coupon (if applicable).
6. Identify the Target User of the website
Being a B2B company, your most important goal is to identify and understand the user’s objective or your website and get them to accept the most sought after call to action. A call to action can be anything from getting them to sign up for an email newsletter or provide their personal details, to calling your salespeople to discuss offers in detail.
7. Audit your current website and its content
This involves figuring out which content and web page are working for your website and which aren’t, what your buyers are looking at when they visit your website, which web page on your website is converting the most and which page isn’t.
Consider Clarity, Distraction, User Confidence and FUD i.e. Fear of Uncertainty and Doubt while auditing your website and its content.
One of the most important aspects of the audit is to emphasize content marketing. To be successful with your B2B website, you need to attract visitors to your website with amazing content: a blog, a video, or anything else that is of great value. That said, if your website is full of broken links and pages, stock images, and old-school design, you’re not going to be able to do it right.
When conducting a site audit, you should focus on the following:
1. happy – What pages are your buyers looking at? How do your buyers navigate from one web page to another? Where does your traffic come from?
2. Metrics – What are the current conversion rates, how well are your website pages optimized?
3. Messaging, focus and usability – Is your content easy to understand and understand? Is there a single flow to the action or are there many distractions? Do users trust the information on your website, do they feel this is the information they need, or are there sources of friction present on the website?
8. Clarify user flows
User flow is the path a user will follow on your website to achieve what you are trying to achieve. To ensure that your buyers have a good user experience, you need to be as knowledgeable about the exact steps that buyers typically take on your website. At the end of a buyer’s user stream, they must believe that your company truly understands their needs.
9. Create and test wireframes
A Wireframe is the model of a website that defines the following things for each page of the website:
- Information on the page
- design
- Key messages and flow
- Placing the call to action
- Navigation
- User Interface Notes
With the help of the wireframe, you can see the different elements without any hindrance. If you decide all these elements while designing the website without wireframing first, it would get really confusing and you will soon start spending a lot of time arguing with your team about what should go where on the website.
10. Explain what you expect from your new website
Lastly, you need to clearly define the guidelines that designers and copywriters need to follow to develop your website. Clearly define site copy, tone of voice, layout, design, structure, and graphics.
Define the following before you start designing a website:
- Voice tone
- copy length
- Clarity and hierarchy of awards
- Readability
- call to action
- user trust
conclusion
There is a difference between a B2C website and a B2B website. You need to put a lot of thought into your B2B website before you start the actual design process. These days, with the best web design services, you get the benefit of all this research process with the actual design part of the website. These days, India’s leading website design company can offer you services to research and figure everything out before you start with the actual design process. For B2B businesses, the customer-centric website approach becomes of utmost importance because you get a specific website and design that makes a lot of sense to your buyers instead of random embellishments.
All the steps mentioned above are only part of ensuring a successful B2B website. The other part includes continuous monitoring of the website while minor improvements are made over a period of time and takes care of the SEO part to ensure that it is correctly included in the search engine results page.
Remember that your website should be considered as a sales tool/sales representative that will draw your prospects to you and get conversions.
