An online presence is necessary for B2B businesses to succeed today. Studies have shown that most people research businesses online. Social media is, by far, the most utilised medium for people to conduct research on businesses. It is therefore very important for businesses to be active on social media. However, a hub for information about your business is necessary.
A B2B website provides you with a formal way of presenting the ideas and services of your business. Funneling customers into your website will somewhat ensure that no matter how your business is found, customers will have a more homogenous experience with your business that you can carefully curate.
But, having a website is not enough. Yes, many people will want to interact with your business through an official platform, but a bad website experience may deter potential customers. Simply put, a B2B website has to be an easy platform for customers to find information and contact you.
Your B2B website should be easy to navigate
Your site should include a great deal of information, but that information should be easily accessible and read. Messy web pages filled with word salads and walls of unnecessary text are quite hard to read and any information contained in them are hard to remember. Concise information is the way to go, but at the same time the information on your website should be extensive. How do we go about doing this?
Information does not have to be all on the same page. This information does need to be intuitively accessible though. Endless menus create a maze of webpages which makes it difficult to find the right information, but too little menus results in fewer separations of information. Remember, not everybody will want to know every single detail about your business. Reasonably categorise information on your site to make it easier for customers.
Keep the website clean. Navigation bars should be neatly confined to a single place where people can always expect to find them. Streamline information such that only that which customers want to know will be shown to them.
Streamline your conversion pathway
While your site should be easy to navigate around, your ultimate goal is a call-to-action. The ultimate goal of your B2B website is to attract prospects and lead them to you. If a customer arrives at your website and does not know where to proceed from there, they will most likely just leave.
Create an intuitive tour of your business’s services and products. Treat it like a sales pitch. Get potential prospects interested in what you have to offer and add more and more relevant and enticing information as it is pertinent at that point in their reading.
All the while, a call-to-action should be within reach. A call-to-action could be anything ranging from going to your E-commerce site or sending contact details to you. It should not be hidden. Highlight it, in fact. Make it doubly known how prospects can proceed when they are ready or interested.
Utilise customer-oriented language
Customer-oriented language frames your business in terms of the customers’ needs. Customers are less interested in whether your business is the best at what it does than they are in how well your business can solve the problems that they have. This is why intuitive navigation is important. Customers need to be able to easily find the information that is relevant to them.
Design for the customers that you want to appeal to. Many B2B websites take an egocentric approach. Yes, accolades and achievements work well as a pre-first impression, but unless your customers are only choosing between you and various other businesses that do the exact same thing that your business does, being the best business in the B2B industry carries little weight.
Potential customers want to know what it is that you bring to the table. “We offer the best accounting software” says little about how your product helps customers compared to “Our accounting software helps businesses stay organised and saves time on managing hundreds of invoices”.
Keep it mobile-friendly
Think about it, not everyone is at their desktop or laptop when going through your website. Quite possibly, the majority of people are browsing your website on-the-go. This means that they are either on their phones or on their tablets.
Mobile devices have different screen proportions which means that how your B2B website looks on your laptop is highly unlikely to look exactly the same on a smartphone. All previous principles about streamlining your site still hold here, however.
Google also keeps track of which websites are mobile-friendly and penalises those that are not. You want more traffic to come to your site and so popping up first on search results related to what you do is important. Thus, not only is the majority of B2B customers browsing on their phones, but Google is also recommending websites based on how mobile-friendly they are.
Improve SEO
Improving traffic to your website will result in more prospects interacting with your business. Search Engine Optimisation is a set of processes that cause your website to rank higher on search engine results. Most people don’t even look past the first page of Google’s search results. If you want people to find you while searching for businesses that offer solutions to their problems, then you want to improve your B2B website’s SEO.
If you would want to know how to do just that, see our article on on-page SEO.
