If you're interested in launching a website redesign, there is one major thing that you need to consider: is your website your best salesperson?
In the past, our website's main purpose was to tell our story and be the hub of all of our marketing activities. The site was designed to be graphically compelling and informational — it was essentially an online brochure. But as B2B transactions have become increasingly more digital, B2B websites have needed to accomplish more and more.
Your website traffic goals need to map back to your overall business goals. Start off by determining an annual/monthly revenue goal if you haven’t already, and then use that information to circle back to your monthly website goals. For example, you need to know the number of monthly visitors you would like to have and your conversion rate. These metrics will create a baseline that you can use to track your website performance and prove success.
Now, B2B web strategy and design has been elevated to a new level. We've seen an increase in companies redesigning their sites to generate more leads. No longer are their websites just used as a piece of marketing collateral. They are now generating tangible business results and higher returns on investment (ROI).
Here are the top six elements that your B2B website should include to become a lead generation machine:
1. Establish Your Buyer Personas
First things first, know your buyer personas — who do you want on your site that has a high chance of converting? By establishing your buyer personas, you will be able to understand what challenges they face and what content they seek out. In turn, this allows you to address their pain points in the content you’re creating and publishing to draw them to your website.
2. Create The Content
If you want your site to generate leads for you, then you need to produce quality content. The content needs to be clear and inform the visitor how you can help solve their problems or challenges.
Your next step is to start creating content that will attract the right people to your website — if no one is on your site to begin with, no one is going to be converting on your content offers. Your top of the funnel content will work to initially attract prospects to your website, while your middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel content can include gated offers that will drive conversions.
Additionally, your content needs to communicate your value proposition. Explain your business in a way that’s simple to understand and try to avoid jargon that may confuse a reader. Remember your content is all about your visitor, and they need to know how your company or solution will make their life better.
3. User Experience and Design
Design does matter. Your website’s look and feel needs to be up-to-date and represent your company’s personality and brand.
Not only is the look and feel of the site important but also it is crucial to have the design integrated with your conversion strategy. What content do you plan on focusing on? Do you want to guide prospects to blog posts or direct them to other landing pages? When you start developing your site layout, you need to think through different conversion paths in order to provide an enjoyable, intuitive experience.
The design team needs to understand what the goal of each page is, where the visitor’s eye should go and, most importantly, what action you want your site visitors to take. All of these elements need to be incorporated into quality page design in order to see higher conversion rates.
4. Conversion Opportunity
A conversion opportunity on your website provides the opportunity for contacts to exchange information about themselves for equally valuable content or offers. This can mean guiding them to a gated content offer, engaging with them via chatbot or incorporating CTA’s as an anchor text within your blog.
The ultimate goal of a conversion opportunity is to continue gathering information about the visitor that you can later use to continue tailoring your interactions with them. For example, at New Breed, we ask visitors to answer “what is your biggest marketing and sales challenge” before they can download some of our guides. This helps our sales team identify the prospects’ challenges in order to follow up with more contextually relevant content.
Conversion opportunities such as CTA’s, chatbots and forms should be effectively leveraged to engage with visitors and guide them through their buyer’s journey stages. These conversion opportunities serve as a crucial part of your website experience. If you can’t guide prospects to conversion opportunities and engage with them so they convert, then you need to reevaluate your approach.
5. Don't Forget About SEO
Following SEO best practices can ensure your content is found. Successful SEO begins with understanding the people you want to come to your site and conducting proactive keyword research.
Your content should be built around strategically placed keywords rather being initially written with keywords added as an afterthought in an effort to improve SEO. Keywords need to be consistent and not confusing to your audience in order to truly provide value to both you and your prospects.
6. Feedback Loop
Once you’ve finalized all of your changes, the most important step is to check things over and optimize those changes. Verify whether or not you’re successfully hitting the goals you originally set, and if you’re not, try to identify gaps and missed opportunities.
The Takeaway
If you incorporate these six elements into your website redesign, you are well on your way to creating a lead generating machine.
We all know that every machine needs maintenance, so make sure to continue to optimize and test your site. Your next hurdle will be to nurture your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and hand them off to sales. But we'll save that discussion for another day.
This post was originally published on November 9, 2012
