B2B Web Design
Best Practices of a B2B Website Design
When designing a B2B website, it should be clear, attractive, easy to navigate and should offer detailed information about your business. The needs of a business and that of a consumer are different. They are different from the sales cycle to lead funnel. Therefore the amount of details and the design needs should be different on a b2b website design.
You need a different approach when marketing your products and services to another business. Your b2b website design should focus on meeting the needs of your industry and attaining the results. You, therefore, need to provide your client with the information they need to do business with you. Most clients want a solution to their problem; hence your B2B website should be on point.
Research shows that it only takes about 15 seconds to capture the attention of your web visitors. Out of those who visit and find it lacking, only a 12% return.
So, how do you make your web visitors interested in your brand? You can achieve this through a clean and effective B2B website.
Not sure how to go about this? Keep reading, and you will get all the answers.
First, let us understand what a B2B website and the differences between B2B website and B2C website.
What is a B2B Website?
A B2B (business to business) website is purposely designed to sell products and services to other businesses and not consumers. I know this can be confusing especially if you have come across the term ‘B2C website’.
Before we discuss in depth about B2B website design, let us look at the differences between B2B website design and B2C website design.
Differences between B2B and B2C website
Goals
The main goal of a B2C website is making an immediate sale while a B2B website is focused on creating a relationship with the buyer. Therefore things like branding, valuable resources, and contact information are important in a B2B website.
The Journey of the Buyer
The journey of a B2B buyer is longer than that of a B2C buyer. In the end, the journey of a B2C buyer it ends in the shopping cart, while that of a B2B buyer ends up in filling out a form and contacting sales representatives. For this reason, It is important to highlight your call-to-action, contact information, and relevant educational resources and materials.
Product Price
The price of a B2C product or service is lower than that of a B2B product or service. Due to this reason, the customer purchasing products from a B2B website will need more guidance and direction than a B2C customer.
B2B website designs should focus on bringing results. You need to look for a B2B web design agency to help your design the best B2B website for you. A B2B website should;
- Rank well in all Search Engines.
- Have Meta descriptions that encourage visitors to click through the website.
- Easy to navigate.
- Have strong calls-to-action on their landing page to encourage conversion.
Your primary goal when creating your 2B we design is building it around your targeted niches. You should keep in mind that people visiting your website are not customers. They are just prospects.
You can get business leads from SEO or AdWords, but the actual measurement of successful B2B website design is conversion.
Your Website is the Best Sales Person
B2B consumers never make impulse buying. Let us look at this realistically. No one will visit a SaaS website, and what they on the website make them end up making a large purchase.
Most likely what they are buying is an investment to their business, and making a wrong decision is a big risk. Therefore, most customers find it necessary to speak to a sales representative before committing. This does not mean that your B2B website should look like a brochure.
Today, most buyers will contact a sales representative down at the sales funnel than they could years back. This means that the way your B2B website looks and its contents speak more than your sales team. Instead of the buyer contacting your sales team, they can read through your website and get answers.
Most importantly, your B2B website should meet your clients’ needs. You cannot design your website just because you need to be designed. It is important to understand that all businesses are not the same, nor their websites. You need to have it custom designed depending on what you do. Here are things to consider before having a B2B website development.
- Products and services you sell
- Your business location
- Your client base
- The unique services you offer your customers that others do not.
It is important to give your B2B website design service provider all the information about your business. Work with a B2B website designer that will 100% custom design your website. Doing this will make your website unique.
Top B2B website Design Tips That Attract the Attention of Buyers
Did you know that about 94% of buyers do research online before making the purchases? If you want to increase your sales, you need to design a B2B website for those customers.
Imagine having a conversation with a person who isn’t attentive, or having a conversation where you have lost interest and wish the other party could just shut up.
Where do you think the disconnect is coming from?
There might be two reasons;
- You may be interrupted by something else
- You are not interested in what the other person is talking about.
The same case happens to your website. If the way you have presented it is not pleasing enough, most potential buyers will pass and move on to the next. Here are things you should consider to make your B2B website effective.
- Your website must instantly give your visitors a reason to stay. Most internet users click from one site to another in search of answers. If your website does not give value in the first 10 seconds, the visitor will leave.
- It is important for your website to load fast in your visitors’ browsers — any second delay make you lose your potential customers to your competitors.
- Your website should be easy to navigate. Many visitors have zero tolerance for complex websites.
- All products and services should be clearly described.
Tips for Creating an Effective B2B Website
The way your website looks like it plays a big role in the purchasing power of customers. Research shows that most customers research for products online and later purchase them from stores. Therefore, it is important that companies should take web and digital marketing seriously. They are the main medium for communicating about their brand. Here are tips that will help your be B2B website become effective and increase impact.
Know Your Target Audience
When building your website, you need to know who you are talking to. Understand their needs and get to know what brings them to your website. Most of the time, when customers land on your website means they are looking for information and not necessarily making a purchase.
To make your visitors stay a little more on your website or make them come back again, you need to know their history or the products and services they purchase. Take time to understand their strengths and weaknesses and anything that keeps them awake at night or anything that contributes to their headache.
When you fully understand your target audience, you will not play a guessing game with your content. Creating a strong first impression is your first opportunity to gain business.
Optimize for SEO
Once you get to know who your target audience, you can now start developing your website. SEO is a great method of reaching your target audience. The people you reach will most likely end up being your potential customer.
You can break SEO in three categories;
- Keyword research: You can research words and phrases that will lead you to your target customers.
- Offline optimization: This is where you link back to your site through social media prompts for events and giveaways.
- Online optimization: Here, you optimize your site using online elements like meta description, title and anchor words.
Focus on Quality Design and Content
When designing your website, it should contain colors and imagery that align with your brand. Your branding should have both primary and secondary colors that are used on the background and fonts. You need to know the tone to use for your business. Is your business all professional or light and fun?
Using the right tone for your website is important. Similarly, you should engage your audience with a similar tone when handling and answering their queries. It will be so unusual when your website is professional, but your sales representatives are handling your clients casually.
Above all, make sure your website design and writing is clear and concise so that your audience can get your message within seconds.
Build a User-friendly Site
By ‘user-friendly’ we mean a website that is easy to use. Attracting visitors with keywords is not enough. Your business website should attract visitors and give them a reason to revisit. A website that is not navigatable makes visitors leave your website and never to return. Therefore, it is important to invest in the best B2B technology web design to give your visitors a positive user experience that motivates them to make purchases.
Don’t concentrate on creating a visually attractive website. Create a website that meets your clients’ needs. If you need to communicate with existing customers, you can have pages that are designed for page submission, inquiries or even pages that are password protected for sensitive information.
Communication is the key thing to keep your customers. You can either send out newsletters or do email campaigns to keep in touch with your customers.
Visible call-to-action
It doesn’t matter how great your website is, if you do not have a visible call to action, then the time spent to create them to create a great design is a waste of time.
First, get to know the goals of your website.
Do you want to get more business leads?
Drive awareness or sell a specific product?
Always use call-to-actions that has the power to move your visitors through your website and make it easy for them to complete your offer.
You can have the best B2B website design, but with poor marketing skills, getting your potential customers can still be a problem. Next, we will go through the marketing strategies that will take your B2B website to the next level.
The Best Marketing Strategies for Your B2B Business
It is every business owners wish to have their return on investment. Today, B2B marketing has evolved fast thanks to the changing expectations of the new generation buyer and the application of artificial technology.
To get the most of your marketing costs, you need to know the latest trends of B2B business to get a return on your investment.
Most people believe that you have to do everything to get business. Is this true? What are the best marketing techniques you can use to attract your potential customer? We have compiled some of the best marketing techniques for your B2B business.
Conversational Selling
Back then, selling was done one-to-one. Sellers talked to buyers and got what they wanted and later offered a solution. Unfortunately, this kind of selling was not scalable, and the process of nurturing relationships using the old school method was costly to many businesses.
Today, it is still possible to use conversational selling to strike a deal thanks to technology. Sellers can use chat technology like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger to apply conversational selling strategies without spending anything or hiring a salesman.
You can convert any visitor and make them a lead with conversational selling. It is possible to follow up previous interactions, make new relationships, connect potential customers to your sales team and improve customer retention by providing timely product support.
Conversational selling can only be successful if you provide your potential customers with relevant and helpful information in real time.
Online reviews
Today, the new generation buyers mostly rely on online reviews, recommendations, and social media content to make their decision. Having a section on your website that displays product review and recommendations can be of great help to get more leads.
Also, you can also make use of third-party review sites to get in front of most of your competitors. Also, you can use social media to your advantage. Use it strategically to engage your audience and create a good image.
For B2B companies, LinkedIn can be the best platform for connecting with the right prospects, sharing your products news and adding value.
SEO
About 89% of B2B buyers use the internet when doing their research. Therefore, it is important to appear on the top first page of the search engine results to attract new potential customers.
However, you cannot rank with a keyword strategy that you used years ago. Google changes its algorithm and businesses that focus on creating relevant content will rank better.
Here are some SEO tactics that will help you rank on search engines.
- Local SEO
If you offer your services to a certain geographical area or have a local store, it is important to optimize for local search. Doing this will help you rank in the local pack. Your website will always appear on top of the relevant search results.
- Mobile Responsive B2B Website
More than half of the internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Google rank better mobile optimized websites in the search results. Many B2B buyers have turned their mobile phone to their main research medium and also conduct their businesses there. It is therefore important for your B2B website to be first on mobile to help increase dwell time, decrease bounce rate and reduce loading time- positive ranking signals on Google.
- Longtail Keywords
About 70% of search traffic comes from long tail keywords. Therefore, websites that use them have a higher chance of ranking higher on the search engines and getting more business leads.
You can optimize each your web pages with a different keyword to increase the chance of your website of appearing on most of the relevant searches.
- LSI( Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords
LSI keywords help Google to understand your content and help you rank better accurately.
- Visual Content and Videos
Use of visual content helps increase the level of engagement, improves dwell time and encourages sharing. This are all positive signals of ranking in Google and will help you rank.
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence
For a long time, marketers have been collecting a large amount of data without an idea of how to fully utilize it to get actionable insights. Thanks to artificial intelligence marketing technologies, buyers can use the information collected to analyze the behavior of customers and create personalized content to increase conversion rates.
For example, you can use data-driven marketing strategies to deliver personalized information to customers during their purchasing stages. First, they get attracted to your website and get them to fill forms. During this stage, you get to nature relationships by sending them emails and chatting with them in real time to accelerate the sales pipeline. At this stage, you clearly identify your target customers and engage them with personalized campaigns that lead to new opportunities.
Conversion Rate Optimization
If you have a B2B website that cannot convert web traffic into visitors, then you are wasting your dollars for nothing. Conversion rate optimization helps increase your return on investment and also an increase in revenue.
Here are ways you can increase your customer conversion rate and improve the experience your customers get when interacting with your website.
- Improve your services and product page by writing clear and concise product descriptions. Also, make sure your images and demo videos are of high quality. It is important to have a call to action that can be quickly located when the website is viewed on a mobile device.
- Make it easy for customers to reorder items they had already bought. Business to Business customers tend to order the same products repeatedly.
- Make sure your checkout process is simple with less procedure to prevent cart abandonment and improve customer retention.
- Automate cart abandonment emails to win customers who did not finish purchasing.
How to Hire a B2B website Design Expert
Hiring a web designer is not an easy task. Many companies and agencies claim that they can do a perfect job. But, how do you know who to trust? A great B2B website designer will concentrate on not only the visual aspect but also the growth of the business. Here are things your B2B website designer should consider when designing your website.
Automation and integration
Time is a precious asset to every business. You need to hire a B2B website design that includes a high level of integration and automation. A design that can capture leads in a database and send automates responses for further engagement. Also, a design that can generate reports to keep track of leads and conversions. A great design will seamlessly integrate all your marketing strategies and focus on reaching your targeted customers and getting business leads.
A Design that meets its Purpose and Function
By now, we all understand the reason behind B2B web designs, leads, and conversions. However, if it is not well developed, it will never achieve its goals. It is therefore important that a B2B website should have a technical foundation. It should fast and secure for its users.
Also, it is important that your B2B website is mobile friendly. The faster it loads on mobile devices, the more it ranks in the search engines.
It is important for businesses that market to other businesses to show high levels of professionalism. This is the reason why Thomas Digital strives to make all B2B web designs of high caliber.
Easy to Maintain
You do not need any IT personnel to post and edit any content on your website. This is why you need to hire B2B website design services that will train you on how to maintain and edit your website. Hire a website designer who is readily available when you need to make changes on your website.
Thomas digital is a San Francisco web design agency that will help you with all your web development and marketing needs. We are readily available to handle all your B2B web design needs from planning, implementation to maintenance. We aim at creating a B2B website design that attracts, converts and retains customers.
PORTFOLIO
100% Custom Design. We never use pre-made template. Ever.
Afresh Technologies
Single Cell Technology
McQueen & Mackin
Testable
Cavallo Ventures
GreenBlock Capital
OneClick Solutions
CloudLeaf
Commdex
RLS
Tracker Corp
AgCode
Orbital Sidekick
Mosaic Events
Alpha Video Surveillance
Next Steps
Ready to take the next steps? I’ve got good news. Unlike with other web design firms, you’ll actually get to see exactly what your new website will look like before you sign or pay for anything. Sound too good to be true? Click below to read more about our Free Mockup Offer.
FREE CUSTOM MOCKUP
OF YOUR NEW WEBSITE DELIVERED IN 7 DAYS
We’re so confident you’ll love our new design for your website that we will design you a custom mockup of your new website before you sign or pay anything.
If you like the design, we can then move forward in working together.
If not, there are no hard feelings and no further obligations.
Keep reading to find out exactly how it works.
HOW IT WORKS
1 FILL OUT CONTACT FORM
The process starts when you fill out our contact form at the bottom of this page. You will receive a response email within 1 business day requesting that we schedule a call to learn more about your needs. We’ll need to have a brief phone conversation to get a sense of your project’s scope to be able to give you a proper quote.
2 INITIAL PHONE CALL
Our initial call will take 15-30 minutes. We will ask you a series of questions to determine your goals for the website, key functional requirements you have, your timeline and other important considerations that will affect the scope of the project.
3 WE SEND YOU A PROPOSAL
Within 2-3 business days we will email you a proposal for the project. This will include a detailed list of all the services and features provided as well as a timeline for the project and a quote for the project cost.
If the scope and budget of the proposal works for you, then we can move forward with the Free Mockup offer. At this point nothing has been signed and no money has exchanged hands.
4 WEBSITE QUESTIONNAIRE
We will send you a detailed questionnaire to get a sense of the vision you have for the new website’s design.
This will include links to other websites you like the look and feel of, as well as fonts, colors and other visual elements you would like to include.
5RECEIVE YOUR MOCKUP
After receiving your input from the questionnaire we will then have a Photoshop Mockup of the homepage of your new website within 4 business days.
This mockup is just a preliminary draft and should we work together you will have ample opportunity to revise the design until it is just as you like it.
6 CONTRACT
If you like the mockup and want to move forward in working together, we will then sign a contract with the same terms outlined in the proposal.
7 NO HARD FEELINGS
If the mockups wasn’t quite what you were looking for, then there is no obligation and no hard feelings. You owe us nothing and have gained a better sense of what you’re looking for in a website.
The only caveat is that you would have no legal right to the mockup design we made and could not use it for your website without full compensation.
OUR SERVICES
Custom Website Design
All of our designs are made from scratch in Photoshop, designed specifically for you and your company’s unique needs.
Custom Wordpress Development
We never use pre-made templates. Ever. All of our sites are 100% custom developed to be super easy to update and edit on your own without having to know how to code.
Mobile Responsive Design
On average over 20% of all website visitors view sites on a mobile device and that number is only rising. All of our sites are developed with fully mobile responsive designs that adapt for the iPhone, iPad and all other mobile devices.
Marketing Design Strategy
We don’t ‘just’ design pretty websites, we strategize a design and user interface focused on marketing and conversion. We use the psychological ‘weapons of influence’ as outlined in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence to stack the deck in favor.
Search Engine Optimization
We provide on page Search Engine Optimization for the sites we develop. We research the most relevant keywords and tag and structure the site to rank for those keywords. We also practice what we preach. If you Google ‘San Francisco Web Design’ or ‘Hire a Web Designer’ we’re the #1 result.
User Interface / User Experience
We identify the various user types visiting your website and then create a clear path for each user allowing them to easily find what it is they are looking for.