Sep 02, 2022 · Partners
The B2B (business to business) e-commerce market is overgrowing. It is not surprising, considering the benefits it offers to manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and other companies that operate in this sector. No matter how fragmented the B2B e-commerce market might be at this point, some universal principles apply to all businesses that want to establish an online presence. To build a good B2B website and nurture your B2B e-commerce business, you need to have a strong foundation from the very beginning. Here are some steps to build a good B2B website and give your business the best possible start.
A business's goals might be many, but fulfilling customer needs and use cases should be the first. A B2B website that only talks about what you sell is the wrong approach, and you should post a digital copy of your sales flyers instead.
Suppose you want to explain how your products and services will improve your visitors' lives and businesses. In that case, you must conduct extensive buyer persona research, which includes gathering insights from your customer service teams, your partners, as well as from your competitors, and your customers. Primary and secondary sources are included.
With a powerful CTA, you should highlight this message at the top of your homepage to attract visitors. To fulfill your promises, your content should follow the same theme.
Although most customers lack patience, a successful B2B seller needs a great deal of patience. A B2B purchase typically takes four months to complete compared to a B2C purchase. Buyers tend to take longer to decide if it impacts their companies or involves larger budgets. Your product and service need to differentiate and offer value immediately in B2B purchases. You can accomplish it by understanding the profile of your key decision-makers (or website users) and communicating directly with them.
Your value proposition must be persuasive and clear to begin building trust. When you promise something like this, follow up on it and provide customer references to demonstrate your reliability.
You can really stand out with your B2B website's design if you meet your users' expectations. The more engaging your content is, the higher the chances of your users staying on your site. By 2022, 82% of online traffic will be video, so you'll be able to stand out visually on your website with video. As much as 100%, you can gain more engagement through videos. Create a brand and visual style that stands out in a crowded market.
Choose colors, graphics, and typography to entice customers. It is essential to research your visual style. Analyze your competitors and peers to find opportunities to stand out. Test your brand visuals using multivariate testing and online focus groups. You should optimize your website for mobile devices and ensure it complies with responsive design whenever possible.
It is vital to trust your brand if you sell your product online. 81% of the time, consumers influence their purchasing decisions based on their trust in brands. B2B websites sell their product online. In addition to bounce and conversion rates, you can also measure brand trust with retention rates and online reputation scores.
Using your website as a tool to build and improve your credibility in your target market's eyes will help you succeed.
Display your customers' logos (with permission), testimonials, and case studies for your product or service. It allows you to validate the trust that others have in your product.
Please take advantage of this opportunity to introduce your team, and demonstrate your key people's skills and experience to prove their ability to help your customers.
For your B2B website to succeed, you'll want to ensure it's optimized for search engines (SEO). SEO involves optimizing your website for search engines and meeting the needs of your target audience. Here are a few aspects to consider:
Keyword research: You'll need keyword research to optimize your site for search. It will help you identify the right keywords for your website's content.
Content: Once you've identified the right keywords, you'll need to create high-quality content that includes those keywords. Not only should your content be informative and helpful, but it should also be engaging and well-written.
Title tags and meta descriptions: These are essential elements of your website's code that help search engines understand what your website is about. Ensure your title tags and meta descriptions are concise and include your target keywords.
URL structure: How your website's URLs are structured can also impact its SEO. Ensure your URLs are short, easy to read, and include relevant keywords.
Mobile-friendliness: Your website must be optimized for mobile devices in today's mobile-first world. It means having a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes and ensuring that all of your website's content is easily accessible on a mobile device.
Local SEO: If you have a physical business location, optimizing your website for local search is important. It means including your location in your website's title tags, meta descriptions, and content and creating listings on local directories and maps.
Link building: One of the most important methods for improving your website's SEO is link building. It refers to the process of getting other websites to link back to your site. The more high-quality links you have pointing to your website, the higher your site will rank in search engine results pages.
To convert customers, you need to develop a conversion plan based on each stage of the buying process. Create an engaging path for your clients that they will consume along the way rather than leaving it up to chance.
Among all types of content that drive traffic to your website, social media posts, blog posts, and email newsletters are the most commonly used by B2B marketers. You can provide your buyer with content like videos, blog posts, and e-books to answer the call of awareness when your buyer realizes their company has a problem.
Buyers may expect dense content during the evaluation phase, such as case studies, podcasts, webinars, and comparison charts. It would help if you mapped out a logical journey that informs the core paths to conversion to help buyers understand your product or service's value. Your website should have clear CTAs and allow users to interact intuitively.
B2B customers prefer personalized websites over intrusive emails. But the researcher emphasizes that these audiences prefer helpful information. For this level of personalization to be achieved, the correct data is essential. Utilize Google Analytics to collect site analytics and set up conversion goals for your site. Maintain compliance with GDPR and data privacy regulations.
With marketing automation software like HubSpot, you can track lead generation and digital marketing campaigns from beginning to end while connecting them to Salesforce customer databases. Monitor your traffic using tools like Leadfeeder, and analyze how pages, content, and messages perform with tools like Hotjar or Hitsteps. With solutions like CliClap and Kenshoo that use AI, you can personalize content based on your visitors' interests and needs.
Visitors to your website will get frustrated if they can't find what they're looking for quickly, leaving and developing poor opinions about your brand. A Stanford web credibility study found that its website determines 75% of brand credibility. You can accomplish this by creating an intuitively designed site and adhering to the best UX principles.
It is also important to design or redesign your buyer's journey to make sure it aligns with your SEO strategy and demonstrates how individual pages contribute to your SEO strategy.
Your content management system (CMS) should also easily filter and personalize your content based on the specific user or visitor profile if you create a detailed taxonomy that you can apply to all current and future content. Using standard categories, you can connect the stages in a buyer's journey to things like product information.
You will create the critical components of your final B2B website in rapid prototyping and agile development by running short sprints set against milestones.
You may wish to launch a homepage or other product page early in your website development instead of using an extended waterfall approach. With each update, you can keep improving and adding to it. From the beginning, create an agile B2B website roadmap. Following these steps will increase visitors to your website and gain new clients. You'll be able to see what works and make changes as the project progresses.
You won't waste your time on a B2B website that doesn't convert if you follow this roadmap. Keeping your customers' needs in mind and paying attention to your visual and technical requirements will ensure your new website delivers awareness, engagement, and leads.
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