Often when looking for information about how to build a website for your business the information is geared to those in the business to consumer realm. There are very few articles that discuss how to build a B2B website. While many of the tips and tricks that are given to B2C websites are useful to B2B companies, often the information just isn’t applicable to business to business companies.
82 percent of B2B buyers will first look at the company’s website to determine if they are worthy of their business. If you are a company looking to sell goods and services to other companies and don’t have a well-designed, responsive website yet, you could be losing sales to your internet-savvy competitors.
Having a business to business website is key to informing potential customers about everything that you can offer. When you don’t follow the B2B best practices you risk turning off customers. For example, it takes just 50 milliseconds for your potential clients to form an opinion of you from your website.
Don’t let your B2B website be the pain point in your marketing plan, follow the B2B website best practices outlined in this blog to improve your chances at success.
Top 10 B2B Website Best Practices
While the following tips will work for B2C and B2B businesses. They are extremely helpful for helping B2B websites move their potential customers down the sales funnel to a purchase decision more often and more quickly than they have in the past.
1. Know What Customers Want
When you are building or redesigning your B2B website, you need to create your website to prioritize your customer’s wants and needs. You should create your website to be a destination where customer questions are answered.
When making your B2B website, make sure that your website clearly details the products and services that your company offers and easily explains how those products or services can help the client to achieve their goals.
One way in which you can make sure that your customers are equipped with the information that they need is to include a FAQ or frequently asked questions section on your website. Having a comprehensive FAQ section makes it 115 percent more likely that your visitors will recommend your site to others.
Clearly, by ensuring that your customer has all the information they need in an easy to find manner, you are setting your company and its website up for success. To improve your buyer’s journey to purchase, make sure the website answers their questions quickly and easily.
2. Provide a Positive User Experience
While many people will say the second most important feature of a B2B website is having a case study, it actually is user experience. When you are building your website with a web developer, make sure that you focus on including features that enhance user experience.
Often, a company will focus too much of its time on having the most unique design while neglecting the customer’s experience with navigating and using the site. When you neglect the customer’s ability to easily navigate and use your site, you will push them to a competitor.
When a customer encounters a website that is difficult to use and navigate, they are 86 percent more likely to leave your website and check out the competition. If you want your users to stay with you make sure that you work with a web developer that will build a website that’s easy to use by anyone.
3. Ensure a Fast Page Load Speed
If you want to ensure that your visitors stay on your site to make a purchase, you need to make sure that you create a B2B website that loads quickly. Aside from having a hard to navigate website, the quickest way to get your customer to move on to a competitor is for your website to load slowly.
If your website loads slowly, you are risking losing 40 percent of your visitors, as many people will leave if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. You could stand to lose 7 percent of your conversions for every additional 1-second delay. This could mean millions of dollars in revenue loss, annually.
If your website is slow to load on either mobile devices or desktops, you may need to contact a web developer to get them to help you with improving the speed of your website. Neglecting to do so, could spell disaster for your business.
4. Create Compelling Web Copy
Your website is like a salesperson. If you’re not creating quality web copy for your website, you could be losing valuable customers. 59 percent of customers will avoid doing business with a company if their website has grammar or spelling mistakes.
While it is important to avoid grammar and spelling mistakes, it is also important to ensure that your website has compelling headlines or headers. 8 out of 10 of your website visitors will only read your headlines, so it’s important to make them stick.
5. Use Calls to Action
While we’re on the subject of writing compelling copy, make sure that your website includes multiple, effective calls to action. While 80 percent of your visitors will only read your headline, 90 percent of those visitors will read your call to action.
70 percent of small B2B brands don’t use calls to action, of those brands that do use calls to action on anchor text, they notice a 121 percent increase in conversions. If you want your B2B company to be a success make sure that your website includes calls to action.
Calls to action, if you have never heard of them before, are quick phrases like “subscribe now” or “call today” that instruct your readers to take an action before leaving your website. They can be extremely valuable in increasing sales, so make sure that you include them when building your B2B website.
6. Create a Minimal but Attractive Design
As mentioned earlier in this article, it takes less than a second for a customer to create an opinion about your brand and that is based primarily on your company’s website design. If you want to capture the most customers, make sure that you have a minimal but attractive design.
95 percent of website visitors base their first impression of your brand on the design of the website. Since most of your customer’s opinions about your business are going to be based on the design of your website it will be important to hire a web development agency that has in-house designers that can make sure your design is attractive and user-friendly.
7. Highlight Your Social Media
60 percent of customers will check out your social media before they make a purchase. Furthermore, by including social media follow and share buttons on your website, you can improve your customer base by at least 2.5 percent.
When you create a website for your B2B company, make sure that you include ways for customers to both follow you on your company’s social media profiles and to share your blogs and other content on social media. Doing so can help you to reach new customers that would never have thought of you before. This can positively improve your sales if you do it right.
8. Use Consistent Branding
Branding your business and website is important. When you use effective and consistent branding you can see a 33 percent increase in your revenue. While you may think of branding as just your logo and color choices, it does go deeper.
Branding includes not only your logo and website color choices but also includes the voice and tone of all the writing on your website. Make sure that when you create your B2B website, that the writing, logos, and color choices all reflect the same image. This will ensure your continued success.
9. Be Mobile-Friendly
Over 50 percent of website traffic comes from mobile devices. This means that your customers are more than likely to view your website on their smartphone or tablet. If you want to be sure to capture those customers, make sure that you work with a web developer that can not only build you a custom website but also build you a website that is mobile responsive.
According to research, 74 percent of mobile users will return to a site if it is mobile-friendly. Additionally, it was found that if a website is not mobile-friendly 61 percent of customers will leave the site never to return. However, if your website is mobile responsive, 67 percent of people are more likely to make a purchase.
If you want your B2B business to succeed make sure that your website provides a workable, responsive, user-friendly experience to your customers on all of their devices not just their desktop.
10. Use Lead Generators
Lead Generators come in a number of forms. You can include eBooks and other downloadable content, like case studies, on your website to improve customer information capture or you can use trial information like free demos and limited-time trials. The option you choose will be best guided by the type of product or service that you sell.
Only 4 percent of customers come to a website ready to buy. However, by using email after capturing customer information, B2B companies are able to generate $42 dollars for every dollar spent on email marketing. This makes including lead generators on your website an important tactic in improving your sales.
Why You Need a B2B Company Website
While 40 percent of businesses don’t have a website, this can be disastrous if you want your business to succeed. Building a new website or redesigning an old website can have a powerful bring you more customers and sales. When you build or redesign your company website you can receive:
- Improved visibility on search engines like Google and Bing
- Low-cost marketing and advertising
- Increased engagement with current and future clients
- Around the clock sales generation
- Improved brand credibility
- Increased reputation within your industry
- Better avenues of market research
- Simpler customer service options
- Enhanced ability to find new talent
- Improved sales tactic
If you want to improve your business’ chances of success, you need to contact a web development agency today. Click the link to work with Orange County web development agency, Idea Maker today.
B2B Website Best Practices for 2020 Infographic
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