Effective web design is crucial for most modern B2B businesses. You need a professional, slick web presence to draw traffic to your sales funnels and convince potential buyers that your business is worth working with.
Failing to regularly update your website design can be costly, too. Some estimates posit that a poorly designed, slow-loading website will turn 10% of customers away. This can result in massive losses over the course of a year and will derail your marketing plan.
Successful redesign can support growth and help you better understand the market. A well-designed site will capture large data sets that AI-driven algorithms can break down for you. This will empower your marketing team to make more proactive SEO decisions and help you streamline your online presence.
Researching Your Audience
Before you can start redesigning your website, you need to know who will be interacting with your online presence. This is crucial, as a good understanding of your audience will drive design choices that have ramifications for years to come. Fortunately, your current web presence should give you a pretty good understanding of who is buying from your website. At a minimum, take into account factors like:
- Traffic Sources: Do you receive a high volume of traffic from social media or search engines? If so, which traffic source is more likely to convert? Answering these questions will tell you which type of traffic you most want to cater to.
- Exit Rate: At what point does your audience navigate away from your web page? If you notice a particularly high exit rate when folks see your prices, you may want to rethink the way you broadcast your business to the world.
- Device: Are you experiencing a high volume of mobile users or PC users? Partitioning traffic by devices can help you figure out how to design omnichannel marketing moments later on.
- Demographics: Who are your B2B buyers? Are they from a particular location or market segment? Do they typically represent large businesses or smaller ones?
Answering these questions will help you form a better understanding of the need that your site should serve. Properly filtering your site traffic helps you ignore irrelevant viewership, like traffic from folks who do not represent a business and, therefore, would never buy your product or service. This can empower your design team to make the most of website design principles.
B2B Website Design Principles
Redesigning your website to meet the needs of modern buyers should be a top priority for your marketing team. A successful redesign can completely change the fortunes of your business and help you grow in the months and years to come. However, B2B website design principles differ slightly from generic design principles. To make the most of your redesign, you must:
- Foreground the importance of omnichannel marketing, as many of your buyers will purchase expensive goods and services directly from your website via a phone, tablet, laptop, or kiosk in your lobby.
- Embrace non-linear B2B buyer journeys by providing relevant information on every page of your site. This addresses pain points and succinctly answers FAQs that may otherwise put buyers off.
- Evaluate your SEO strategy before redesigning your site to optimize keyword research and design elements.
- Pay attention to aesthetics, as these play a pivotal role in creating your brand image. This means you want to keep pages simple and should make it easier for folks to navigate your site.
- Consider integrating AI functions like chatbots and personalized recommendations.
These design principles will bring you up to date with current industry standards. Just remember to consider your holistic marketing plan when drafting new web pages and setting aside room for blog content. This will create a cohesive brand presence that impresses potential buyers and helps you position your business as a serious contender in the market.
Source: Unsplash
Testing
Before your site can go live, you’ll need to test it thoroughly to make sure it is up to scratch. This usually means that you will receive access to an “alpha” version of the site before the public gets to interact with your new website. Ideally, your website development team will take care of the heavy lifting during the testing process and will look out for issues like:
- Slow loading times
- Compatibility issues (to ensure the site runs correctly on different browsers and devices)
- Security testing to ensure your site will not be targeted by malicious actors
- SEO testing using tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights
Depending on the agreement you come to with a website design team, you may need to complete some functional testing yourself. This will typically involve manually testing pages to spot broken links and identify design element issues. You’ll also need to ensure your website is accessible by using WCAG guidelines to assess your content. This will reduce the risk of users landing on broken pages and help your audience access and operate all your content.
You’ll also want to simulate some downtime during the alpha testing phase. This protects your business's profitability during a disaster and helps users access the site even when something has gone awry.
You can implement a high-availability network that uses redundant and diverse internet connectivity. This improves business continuity by ensuring that your servers can always access some form of reliable internet, even if a storm or wildfire knocks out your normal service provider. Redundant internet gives your servers an alternative method to access the web via ISPs, while diverse routing gives your site a chance to access reliable internet through different paths.
Even if you don’t understand the intricacies of internet connectivity, testing during the alpha phase can improve your business resilience and give you the confidence to go all-in on your website redesign.
Embedding SEO tactics
Search engine optimization (SEO) should be at the forefront of your mind while redesigning your website. Effectively leveraging SEO will secure the long-term growth of your web presence and help you build reliable web traffic. This is crucial to the success of your digital presence and will bring forward your break-even point for your site redesign.
You can improve your B2B SEO strategy by mastering your on-page SEO. This means you’ll need to invest some serious time into keyword research and should create a robust link-building strategy. You’ll also need to optimize your meta descriptions and title tags to appropriately describe the content on any given page.
Take your on-page SEO to the next level by crafting high-quality content that audiences will authentically enjoy. As a B2B company, you may want to share industry insights like “how-to” guides and behind-the-scenes looks at your operations. This will keep folks on your blog pages for longer, convince Google’s algorithms that your site is reputable, and draw more traffic to your site.
Depending on the scope of your business, you may need to utilize some local SEO principles, too. Local SEO helps folks who live or work close to your business find your company and ensures that you will rank well when audiences return search queries like “product X near me”. You can give your local SEO strategy a boost by registering for Google My Business and engaging with other local businesses with relevant links for your site to use.
Source: Shutterstock
Promotion Opportunities
A well-designed, SEO-optimized website will, in effect, promote itself. However, if you want to maximize potential traffic and make the most of your redesign, you’ll need to proactively promote your B2B website online. You can do this by:
- PPC: Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will rocket your site to the top of a certain search query. This is effective if you predict a high order volume and need to leapfrog the competition quickly.
- Social Media: Your socials are the perfect place to broadcast your new business website. You can share strategic screen captures on sites like Instagram and increase social traffic with high-quality social content that takes advantage of current trends.
- Job Boards: Sites like LinkedIn are a goldmine for B2B marketers. That’s because much of your success comes from networking with fellow businesses and raising the profile of the firm among fellow professionals.
These digital marketing tactics will bring highly qualified leads to your site and boost your traffic. Just be sure to analyze your inbound traffic properly, as you may find that some tactics increase profitability while others simply raise your average cost of customer acquisition. If you do decide to invest in paid social posts, ensure that the content is high quality and authentically reflects your brand.
Conclusion
Redesigning a B2B site is a major undertaking that has the potential to change the fortunes of your firm. Get started on the right foot by researching your audience to determine who currently uses your site. This will give your choices direction and streamline the design process.
Be sure to test your new site thoroughly during the pre-launch alpha and beta stages. This will catch any broken links and ensure your site is accessible and easy to use. When you do launch, consider investing in some paid advertising to leapfrog the competition and draw traffic to your new site.
To stay up to date on the latest digital marketing news, check out our blog. To schedule an appointment, call 866-208-3095 or contact us here.
