In the B2B market, companies face various business challenges in promoting and selling their products or services to decision-makers who are responsible for making purchases for other businesses. The majority of these potential customers conduct their research, including product and price comparisons, online. Therefore, effective content marketing and a well-designed website can be critical factors in differentiating one B2B website and brand from its competitors and communicating its unique value proposition.
A recent survey by Top Design Firms of 500 B2B customers reveals that 50% believe that B2B website design is crucial to a business’s overall brand. However, a Digital.com study has shown that 24% of small retail businesses don’t have a B2B website, because they simply do not know how to create or run one.
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This emphasises the need for business organisations in the B2B sector to seek professional help in designing and maintaining great websites that generate quality leads and convert visitors organically from leads to actual buyers and loyal customers.
Here are some points to consider when choosing a B2B web design agency that can understand the unique challenges your business faces, and produce a beautifully designed B2B website that meets those challenges.
[Image source: HubSpot Blog]
Choose a B2B Web Design Agency that Can Visually Communicate Your Brand Identity
Optimising for search engines alone cannot guarantee your success. The B2B web design team should be capable of producing a B2B website that has a visual impact on site visitors while enabling customers to instantly identify how your value proposition and product or service offerings meet the needs of your target audience.
In the current web design climate, this means a B2B website with a minimalist design that makes judicious use of colour, white space, calls to action, and text that delivers a clear message. Note that Top Design Firms research suggests that 39% of B2B customers appreciate colour more than any other component of a B2B website design. However, these colours should be carefully selected to align with your company’s products, services, and target audience. The Blake Envelopes website is a great example.
[Image source: Blake Envelopes]
In terms of visual elements, 40% of customers value images, 39% value colour, and 21% value video content on a B2B website.
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[Image source: Top Design Firms]
Insist on Responsive Web Design
Top Design Firms research also indicates that 42% of people will leave a B2B website because of poor functionality. GoodFirms research confirms that 73.1% of web designers believe a non-responsive design is a top reason why visitors leave a website. B2B websites also need to be responsive across a range of media. Your B2B web design agency should therefore be capable of crafting websites that work equally well on desktop systems and mobile devices.
[Image source: GoodFirms]
Establish Clear Lines of Communication
From the outset, when starting your B2B web projects, it is essential to work with a web design agency that provides personal points of contact throughout the budget, planning, architecture, deployment, and monitoring phases of the project. This level of support ensures that your business goals are understood, met, and achieved throughout the project's lifecycle.
You can search review websites, seek customer reviews and testimonials, to perform due diligence in assessing the work ethic and “personal touch” of a B2B web design agency you are considering.
Pick a B2B Website Design Agency that Can Monitor Your Success
Great websites don’t just happen. A great deal of thought and analysis must first go into the web design, the provision of relevant content, and the creation of mechanisms for converting visitors first into quality leads, then into buyers, and ultimately into loyal customers and brand advocates.
Your B2B website design is not static and will require ongoing tweaking and amendments to keep it up-to-date and visually appealing. This includes updating references to new products or services and ensuring that your website is aligned with the latest trends in web design. As your business evolves, a new website may also be necessary to reflect changes in your digital marketing strategy and to better meet your business objectives.
Continually monitoring how your B2B website performs is critical to all of this. We have already observed that 73.1% of web designers are of the opinion that a non-responsive design is a top reason why visitors leave a B2B website. Other factors to consider include how quickly pages load, whether those pages give a clear message that communicates the company's purpose, and whether pages enable visitors to instantly identify what they’re looking for, or how the value proposition of a brand speaks to their particular needs.
In B2B web design, collaboration between the web design and marketing team is crucial for creating effective service pages that speak directly to the target audience's needs. This collaborative approach ensures that the service pages are optimized for search engines and resonate with the audience, resulting in a visually appealing website that communicates the value proposition of the brand effectively.
A good B2B website design agency will provide tools to help grade the functionality and speed of your B2B website. Incisive Edge for example, offers a free website grader tool which looks at page speed, site performance, broken links and other important metrics. The grader generates a report on the performance of your B2B website, which is broken down by technical, search engine optimisation (SEO), mobile, and other categories. The website grader also includes recommendations for next steps.
Putting It All Together
Taking all the above factors into consideration, you should choose a web design agency for your B2B website that makes full use of the latest web design features and digital technologies to create visually appealing websites that effectively communicate a B2B company’s purpose and value proposition. Besides empowering you to showcase your products and services to target buyers from other businesses, the B2B website design they produce should provide a great user experience that helps nurture customer relationships and acts as a powerful lead generation tool for your business.
Here at Incisive Edge, in addition to tracking website performance, our b2b web design team understands the importance of incorporating a strong sales process into your website's success. We work with your marketing team to create websites that not only attract organic traffic but also guide visitors through the sales funnel with effective calls-to-action and service pages. By optimizing your website for both search engines and your target audience, we can help you achieve your business goals and drive revenue through your online presence.
To find out more about the B2B web design and monitoring services we offer, get in touch with us.
