If you want your business to look fresh and on top of industry changes, you need to redesign your website from time to time. Although there are many ways to embark on a redesign, the journey is different for every business. For business-to-business (B2B) companies, the focus should be more on making the experience the best it can be for the business user.
In a recent study of B2B buyers, researchers found B2Bs are savvier than in the past and expect more of an experience from their B2B suppliers. About 40% of B2B companies are working hard to develop a 360-degree view of their customers to better serve them.
As you start your site redesign, think about the various needs of your different customers and how well your website meets those needs. What can you do better or differently? Here are 12 elements to look at that will take your business to the next level and help you stand out from the competition.
- Keep It Simple
While there are new trends and tech each year, not everyone is ready to jump on the technology bandwagon. If you make your website too complicated or use nontraditional design, you may risk losing your site visitors. Remember that your B2B buyers will be from all different generations and walks of life. You may have a tech-savvy IT buyer and one who barely knows how to use a computer. Keep your site as easy to use as possible.
- Address the Needs of BuyersKeep It Simple
If you’ve studied the needs of your buyers and have a 360-degree view, it is much easier to incorporate solutions into your web redesign. Know what their pain points are — what problems are they trying to solve by seeking out your page? Once you know the answer to this question, you can offer solutions from the minute your site loads.
Miracle Recreation does an excellent job of showing the solutions to a variety of problems their target audience might face. Notice the focus on topics such as safety, budget and planning. The company knows what their target audience is looking for, and they created content to fit the needs of their most likely buyers.
- Use Case Studies
In a recent survey by Marketing Charts, researchers found case studies were 73% more effective at helping B2B companies convert leads toward later stages of the sales funnel. Look at your current customers and choose a few that stand out as particularly challenging or successful examples of what you do. Highlighting a few case studies may strike a chord with other businesses facing the same dilemma. Case studies should follow a pattern of presenting what the problem was, the solution you came up with for the client and the result.
- Improve Lead-Generation Mechanism
Does your website do everything it can to capture site visitors and turn them into leads? You can offer a free quote, complimentary whitepaper or some other “magnet” to draw people in and get them to share their information. However, what you provide needs to be highly relevant to your business model and solving your customer’s pain points. An free e-book is a good start, but how else can you show customers what you’re capable of and entice them to do business with you?
For your website redesign, make sure your forms are simple to fill out and make it clear what happens when the person shares their details. What do they receive in return? What happens with the information they provide?
FreeConferenceCall.com makes it clear what they offer if you give them your information and sign up for a free account. They explain the best things in life are free. However, they also have a dedicated page exclusively for their B2B clients. They offer a platform to have online meetings and present the benefits of their system, as well as clear pricing models. All their information is upfront, so users are more likely to trust them and share contact information.
- Implement Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) grows in popularity each year, and not only enhances what businesses can do, but takes over some of the more menial tasks that once ate up time. For example, if you’d like to offer a chatbot on your site, you can implement AI to collect some basic information from the customer and direct them to the right sales agent with the specific information they need. AI is going to be one of the top investments businesses make in the coming years, so look at how you might incorporate it into your site’s redesign and even use it on the backend after you collect information from leads.
- Redefine Your Value Proposition
What is your unique value proposition (UVP) as a business? What do you offer that your competitors don’t, and how does that benefit your customers? Many businesses fail to clearly define what their UVP is for the user, but ideally, you should have your UVP laid out on the front page of your website, so visitors know exactly what you do and why you do it best.
MixRank offers their UVP right at the top of their page, showing B2B visitors the advantage of using their platform. They state it as “MixRank tracks your customers so you don’t miss an opportunity.” It’s pretty clear how they help businesses with customer data. They allow you to find your next lead faster by showing you where hidden opportunities are in your customer database.
- Use Action Words
Some words are more powerful than others. Look at each word on your page, particularly the headers and subheaders, and see if you can say the same thing more concisely or powerfully. Action words indicate the user should make a move, so you might add subheaders with words such as “Click,” “Save” or “Swipe” to help the user engage with your site.
- Drop Names
Don’t be afraid to drop the names of your biggest clients into your conversation. People often look for testimonials and reviews as a trust indicator. They want to know other business owners have found success using your product or services. If you have a big-name corporate client, add a video testimonial or share a link to their site as one of your top clients.
Bitly uses some space just above their footer to highlight their big-name clients. You’ll see familiar brands such as Disney, Amazon, Nike, Bose and ESPN. Seeing familiar names helps smaller businesses feel secure that you know what you’re doing if larger companies trust you. Just under their name drop, they offer to let you get started for free and try the service out.
- Update Your Content
Spend time looking through the content on your site and make sure it’s current. If you shared a report from 2001 about the state of your industry, that is now hopelessly outdated. Take some time to gather new content or prepare a new report. It’s almost worse to have extremely dated content on your landing page than nothing at all. Your customers must know they can get not only reliable, but current, information from your brand.
- Play With Your Calls to Action
Are your calls to action (CTAs) performing at maximum capacity? Do some split testing to see how well they are converting. If you aren’t thrilled with the results, tweak the language of the CTA, create a new offer or even try a different color button or a different placement on the page. Your CTAs are what drive site visitors into becoming leads, so they are worth some extra time as you revamp your site.
- Replace Images
One trend in recent years has been a move away from stock photos that don’t relate to your business and fewer, but more personalized, images of your products and services. It would be better to hire a photographer to come up with a few exciting photos of your business in action than to pay less money for dozens of stock photos that pop up on other sites all around the internet.
- Go Mobile-Responsive
If your site isn’t already mobile-responsive, concentrate on making it so. A look at a variety of reports shows a sudden surge in mobile device usage at a rate of 1 million new users each day. More and more people are using their smartphones to access the internet. Your website needs to be adaptable to smaller screen sizes. When a business owner has a sudden thought to search for your product type and pulls out their phone between meetings, you want your site to be the first thing they see and for the experience to be seamless.
- Improve Year-Round
Revamping your website shouldn’t be something you do every once in a while and then forget it for a year or two. To truly capture as many potential customers as possible, you should continually improve your site. When you notice something trending or a customer complains they had an issue with your website, assign someone to fix the problem as soon as possible. Conduct regular A/B tests and try different techniques to get your conversion rates as high as possible. Refine your sales funnel until your lead conversion rate is where you’d like it to be. Redesigning your online presence is a vital part of keeping up with the competition and staying relevant in a crowded marketplace.
