B2B Website Design: How to Generate More Leads
B2B companies often tend to dismiss the intricacies of website design, its influence on their lead generation, and the overall efficiency of their business. After all, you are dealing with other entrepreneurs, who must be serious people who make logical decisions. Surely they aren’t so impressionable that they can be easily swayed by a color scheme or the button placement on the landing page. They know what they want and what they are doing. So you should be businesslike, offer what you have in a no-nonsense manner, and not bother with details. If they need what you’re selling, they’ll buy it. Right?
Well not exactly. What this approach forgets is that the entrepreneurs and company representatives you are dealing with are still human beings, with all accompanying human weaknesses. They will get annoyed with poor design and leave for greener pastures. They will go if they feel you are wasting their time. Proper web design is at least as important when dealing with them as it is for a B2C company. And in this article, we will cover some of the best practices you can use to excel in this.
1. Use Social Proof
Today’s customers, especially B2B customers, are jaded and skeptical. It is no use just telling them how awesome your product or service is. You have to give them proof it is so. One of the best ways to do it is to use customer testimonials and case studies. Make them easily visible on landing pages and other pages they are likely to visit when coming for the first time. This will immediately make your business look more trustworthy, thus increasing the likelihood of generating a lead.
2. Make Your Website Look Unique
In the course of the last decade or so, the Internet settled into a comfortable and very stable shape. While one can argue that websites from before then were often ugly and inconvenient, they at least were sometimes original. Since then, the ubiquity of WordPress and other theme-based platforms, as well as the laziness of professional web designers, led to a situation where 9 websites out of 10 look almost the same. If your website is designed this way, there is next to nothing to distinguish it from those of your competitors. A visitor will not remember it and will easily mix it up with a dozen sites on the same topic.
Meanwhile, if you make your website unique, you immediately attract attention. You become memorable. You give a visitor a reason to stay longer and make it easier to distinguish yourself from the competition. So do not forget about this. As simple a thing as not being like everybody else can increase your chances of generating a lead.
Check out this video of the 5 TOP online graphic design websites in May 2020 selected by Flux Academy.
3. Optimize Your Calls To Action
If your website does not generate as many leads as you want, it probably means you do not pay enough attention to your calls to action. There are several ways in which you can make them more engaging:
- Use more than one CTA per page. The exact number may vary – just make sure it does not look too persistent. Do a bit of A/B testing to pick the number that suits you;
- Make CTAs more prominent. Visitors often spend only a couple of seconds scanning a page – make sure they cannot help but see the CTA;
- Aim at all levels of engagement. Do not copy and paste the same CTA all over your website. Use multiple different calls appropriate for various positions of a customer in the sales funnel: “Subscribe to our newsletter”, “Buy now”, “Contact us”, “Download exclusive content” etc.
4. Optimize Your Navigation
Believing that a customer who really wants to solve a problem will stick around long enough to do it is the height of arrogance. In reality, if the customer cannot navigate your website easily, he/she will probably give up before arriving at the conversion page. Even if your product or service is unique enough to command some persistence, poor navigation will not create goodwill.
Think about the goals and problems of your clients and design your navigation around them. Create clearly distinguishable sections explaining to the customer what problems you solve, what solutions you offer, and how he/she can buy from you. Create specific content for customers on different decision stages: e.g., first-time visitors, those interested in your product, those considering what exactly to buy, etc.
Hotskills picked the most popular designs from Dribbble in 2020 that will become trends in the web design industry.
5. Use Slide-in CTAs (sparingly)
Slide-in CTAs (aka lead flows) are similar to pop-ups. Still, instead of jumping at the user as soon as he/she opens a page, they appear only under certain conditions: e.g., after the visitor scrolls to a particular section of the page, spends a certain amount of time on it or performs a specific action. How effective they are depends on how good you are at judging the visitor’s motives for doing so. If he/she is mildly interested, a slide-in CTA can get him/her back on track and persuade him/her to convert. However, use this tool very carefully – if you misjudge the visitor’s situation or are too pushy, it will only cause annoyance.
6. Build For Mobile
These days, using a mobile device for most of your Internet needs is no longer a prerogative of teenagers. Most people primarily use their smartphones for both business and pleasure. In 2019, mobile devices generated more than half of global traffic. So, if your font is small and unreadable or if your website is slow to load or does not have a mobile version at all, you annoy more than half of your potential visitors. Moreover, they may not visit your website at all, as Google treats mobile-friendliness as an important factor in its ranking algorithms.
Of course, there is a lot more to building an effective lead-generating B2B website. However, we believe that the items we listed above are among the most essential and effective means of increasing your conversion rates. Start using them now, and you will soon see the difference.
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David Gutierrez
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