“My B2B website isn’t boring… right?” 48% of customers might disagree

How to make your B2B website stand out

In the U.S. there are over 3 million B2B businesses, 86% of which use their website as their primary source of lead generation.

Yet, 48% of customers have described B2B marketing as ‘boring.’ So where does that leave your site? And what can you do to stand out as one of the interesting ones?

According to a Forrester report, 94% of survey respondents use at least one search channel for consideration/purchase, so the importance of having an engaging and appealing website should never be underestimated.

By creating a memorable digital experience, you can ensure your website users will remember and return to your website when they’re ready to buy a product or service.

Effective B2B web design

The term ‘website design’ has 49.5k searches monthly in the U.S. according to Semrush. Clearly this is a topic on plenty of people’s minds – and for good reason.

In fact, it’s reported that first impressions of a website are 94% design-related. And to top that off, these impressions can be formed in as little as 50 milliseconds.

People often see B2B website design as corporate, outdated, or just plain boring. Whether it’s because the products B2B companies sell are more specialist or niche or because of complex sales cycles.  

But times are changing. With digital designers and web design evolving hand in hand, website design has never been so full of possibility.

However, it goes deeper than designing for appearance alone. The most successful websites also apply user experience (UX) best practices to ensure their functionality matches.

Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios, coined the 7 principles of UX. These principles outline what affective UX should be:

• Useful
• Desirable
• Accessible
• Credible
• Findable
• Usable
• Valuable

If you can make your B2B website tick all these boxes, your site is much more likely to succeed in the marketplace.

This is because you should always be thinking about the user when it comes to your digital presence. This is how you make your audience feel valued and provide them with a stress-free digital experience.

Many business-to-business companies aren’t aware of the capabilities of their website, so they haven’t made moves to update their digital presence. This means if you take these steps, you’ll be setting yourself apart from the competition, and will stick in the mind of your customers.

After all, if 38% of consumers will bounce from a website if they find the design unattractive, ensuring yours is top-notch can help secure more business.

What’s more, user experience is a big factor in Conversion Rate Optimisation – meaning the better your UX design, the more likely people will take actions that benefit your business. That could be booking a call or product demo, filling in an enquiry form, or making a purchase.

Outstanding content for a stand-out website

The content that sits on your website is important for so many reasons. If the content on your site isn’t clear, relevant or well thought out, you stand to lose customers.

Your website content also reflects who you are – your personality as a business. It gives you the opportunity to add a personal touch to your buyer’s journey and build a connection with your audience.

It also tells prospects exactly what you do and the services you provide. So, ensuring your website content is optimised is key.

Your content may include headings, body copy, blogs, product descriptions, reports, whitepapers/ebooks, videos, and an array of other assets.

SEO

Content isn’t just about entertaining and informing your visitors. It’s also key to boosting your search engine optimisation (SEO) score.

As Google Search Central puts it, SEO is ‘about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.’

One of the main aims of boosting your SEO is to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This means your website will appear higher on the google search page when people search for certain terms.

The terms you want to rank for could be down to your industry, your services, your location, and more. These terms are known as ‘keywords’. The higher you rank for your chosen keywords, the more likely you are to get page visitors.

A hurdle that many B2B companies face is getting ahead of competitors who may be operating in the same industry or selling similar services. But, by harnessing the power of SEO, you can increase your chances of outranking them and being discovered by more potential customers.

When deciding on the keywords you want to rank for as a business, it’s important to look for words that have a high monthly search volume, but low competition. This means people are actively searching for it, but not many other businesses are focusing on ranking for this term.

Unique content

Ensuring your website content is helping your site stand out isn’t purely about technical optimisation and analytics.

Making your content engaging and unique goes a long way when it comes to differentiating yourself. And with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, originality is set to become even more important (and more rare, perhaps).  

When planning the content you want to include on the website, you need a strategy. This strategy should consider elements such as:

• Your audience
• Your competitors
• The value you can provide through your content
• Tone of voice
• Visuals
• Calls to action (CTAs)

By combining these personal aspects of your business, you are creating a recipe for a one-of-a-kind content plan.

Having unique content is so important because 40% of all final decision makers in the B2B marketplace say there is more thought leadership content than they can manage.

So, you now must work even harder to capture the attention of your prospects without drowning in the sea of generic thought leadership.

Time to differentiate your B2B website

Business-to-business companies get an unfair reputation for being overly corporate and boring. It’s time to change that perception and start bringing more innovation and design flair to these markets.

Your website says so much about you as a business, so you can’t afford to let yours simply be ‘middle of the road’.

Using a combination of outstanding design and groundbreaking content, you can get ahead of the competition in a saturated market and gain new customers.

So, if your B2B website is looking like it needs a boost, get in touch with us at marketing@proctorsgroup.com.