As marketers living in an increasingly digital world, we are obsessed with our brand’s website design, visitor traffic, content engagement, and, of course, lead generation.
Your brand’s website is the digital face of your company. It has a lot of hats to wear, so to speak. It must be optimized for search engines so they can easily crawl it. It must be an educational tool that demonstrates what products or services you offer and the benefits/features of each product or service. It’s also a repository of training materials like webinars, ebooks, white papers, case studies, etc. – the living breathing resource of your company. Last, but not least, it also needs to be a tool for generating leads, aka converting website visitors into prospects.
Here, we share crucial elements you must include in your B2B website design to ensure it’s optimized for conversions.
Easy to Use, Organized Navigation
The navigation of your website is a critical part of a website visitor’s experience. Website visitors don’t include just new visitors who are interested in your service offerings. Visitors include returning prospects who may be aware of your services but need case studies to build a case to their internal stakeholders. Visitors may also be a new contact at an existing client who needs to get in touch with your company.
As mentioned above, your B2B website design must be a lot of things to a variety of people. The first step in meeting this requirement is easy-to-use, organized navigation. Navigation layouts can vary widely by industry, target market, even the services being offered, but the one consistent element is that it is organized appropriately for your website visitors and it easy to use. Try to avoid massive website menus that span out across the entire page or require scrolling. Boil down your navigation to the essential elements that your website visitors need.
Clear Flow of Your Homepage
Google and other search engines classify the homepage of a website as the most important page. It doesn’t always mean it ranks the highest or has the highest volume of traffic, but it’s the central page of the website. Think of it as your digital storefront, even if you don’t do ecommerce.
Your website’s homepage is often the first interaction a new visitor has with your brand and is a landing page for returning visitors. While it’s important to craft a B2B website design that grabs the visitor’s attention, it should also keep their attention and guide them through a story.
Experienced website designers understand how humans interact with a website page and design it accordingly to tell the story of your brand and connect with the visitor. It’s your first opportunity to educate them on what you offer, why your offering is a good fit for them, and why they should trust your brand. A clear flow is essential to keeping a visitor engaged without bombarding them with too much information at once.
Obvious Call-to-Actions
Have you ever visited a website, thought, “This is it, I need to get in touch with this brand,” and then been unable to find any contact information? What a frustrating experience.
While you don’t want to irritate a new website visitor with a bunch of pop-ups and CTAs yelling at them, you do want to make your calls-to-action obvious and easy to find. Placement, design, and a variety of CTAs are crucial to ensuring they are obvious to a first-time visitor or a prospect returning for more information. At least one CTA should be at the top, or near the top of the website page.
The CTA should be easy to spot either through a contrasting color or a button design. Rather than stuffing a website page with “Contact Us” buttons all over it, use a variety of CTAs like “Get in Touch,” “Read Our Blog,” or “Join Our Newsletter” to appeal to your visitor, whatever stage of the purchasing decision they are in.
Simple to Complete Forms
We get it, B2B products and services are often complicated and involve a lot of information to even quote out. But, the first form a prospect completes should not be complicated. It should be short (think name, company, email, comment) and easy to complete. If you have a B2B WordPress design, there is a lot of flexibility in plugins for creating forms – but you should still keep it simple.
Remember that you are looking to improve conversions. Always start with a simple form and only add to it if there are issues with your leads (like you are getting personal customers rather than commercial customers). Long website contact forms are often a barrier to conversion as a prospect sees the length, gets overwhelmed or doesn’t have the time to fill it out, and then trots off to see if your competitor is easier to get in touch with.
B2B Web Design Optimized for Leads
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – the process of optimizing your website for lead generation – is a complex process that ultimately depends on your unique B2B web design. However, the four tips listed above are an excellent place to start to optimize your existing site or begin the process of building your new website.
