When you design your new website, you generally have two options: a good design geared to create customer loyalty and increase conversions, and a bad design that will turn off your target audience. Of course, if you want your B2B site to be successful you have to have a thoughtful design, and the easiest way to do that is to avoid specific design mistakes. Here are three crucial mistakes to avoid:
Thinking Your B2B Site Is a Standalone
Unless your company is a simple e-commerce store that only needs to list products, one of the biggest errors companies make in their site design is thinking their site can function by itself without providing information and valuable content. For most B2B companies, making a sale is a lot more complicated than that, and takes longer than simply clicking on a product and heading to checkout.
Most B2B buyers are hungry for knowledge and expect to have what they need to know at their fingertips before they commit to a purchase. That means that in order to promote your high-value products and services, you need to provide high-quality, relevant content, and have an easy-to-use workflow that leads naturally for potential buyers to move down the sales funnel. Your content needs to establish credibility and trust in your brand, and add value to your buyers. Most prospective clients are looking for information and a solution to their pain points, not a sales pitch.
Not Providing Critical Information In the Right Format
Your valuable content isn’t very useful to potential prospects if you don’t provide it or they can’t access it. For example, many companies are tempted to provide information in the form of PDFs. For most businesses, if you do that on your website, you might just as well tell your target audience to leave. Your buyers should have access to all the information they need with little to no effort at all. Creating 2nd-level navigational hurdles should be avoided whenever possible. This is especially true if your buyers are browsing your site on a smartphone since they won’t likely take the extra step to download a file, and it will be difficult to read a PDF on a small mobile screen. Make sure that all the information your readers need is easily accessible by computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphones. Here’s the essential information they need:
- Company and contact information
- Product or service specifications
- Pricing
- Information that addresses key questions or concerns
- Any information your buyer needs to make a decision
The fact is, that most people don’t read a website page from top to bottom. They tend to scan the page looking for the specific words that personally relate to them. This is very difficult to do if you’ve used an odd font, too many bright colors, or include too many graphics, which many people interpret to be advertisements. Your website design should feature easy-to-read content that is scannable. Do not be tempted to post an entire wall-of-words – people will stay on your landing page or blog longer if they aren’t intimidated by too much information they have to sort through.
Instead, encourage people to trust your brand by writing to how people read on the web. Quick scanning is a breeze for most readers when your site copy features:
- Shorter paragraphs
- Subheadings
- Bulleted lists
- Highlighted keywords
