You’ve fine-tuned, tested, and market-researched your product. You’ve hired key staff, and have a shiny new office. You’re hell-bent on becoming one of the 10% of startups that succeed and are determined to beat the averages on becoming profitable in the meantime. But how? You believe in your product and know there is a need for it, but how do you translate that into clients, sales, and growth? Enter B2B website strategy.
A strong B2B website strategy highlights your brand value proposition through carefully crafted buyer-centric messaging and utilizes compelling calls to action in order to inform, engage, and ultimately convert website visitors into high-quality leads.
What Makes B2B Website Strategy Unique?
Selling to businesses requires a different approach than selling to consumers. With B2C, usually, it is one person looking to purchase one product or service to solve one problem.
With B2B, it might be one person, but they are part of a team or have to get authorization from a supervisor. All stakeholders have to agree. They might be considering several different products or services or approaches to solving their problem and the problem itself might be quite complex. This means that the sales journey for B2B is often longer and inherently more complicated than the B2C journey and what’s more, usually involves a larger investment.
So it makes sense that the goals of B2B and B2C websites differ — where B2C is looking to “close the deal” and complete a transaction directly through the site, B2B is often selling an initial meeting or consultation. B2B website strategy then is about attracting the target audience, engaging them with valuable, informative content, and moving them into the sales funnel with effective calls to action.
The Essential Components of a B2B Website Strategy
- Brand Value Positioning — What makes your product or service valuable to your ideal customer? Why should a business buy from you and not your competitors? What makes your process, product, or method uniquely different? Communicate these differences to your customers. Help them choose you.
- Understanding Your Target Market — Who are your customers? What problem are they trying to solve or what job are they trying to get done? What is holding them back? What or who is offering them other possible solutions? Know who your ideal customer is. Study them. Be aware of the kinds of industries they exist in, their stage of growth, their pain points, and where they seek information.
- Buyer-Centric Messaging — Now that you know your audience, speak to them directly and through the channels and formats they prefer. Address their concerns. Give away solutions. Keep the customer at the heart of all your content creation and throughout your website design. As we’ve said, the B2B buyer journey is long and complex - do everything you can to facilitate building trust while also establishing your authority.
- Use SEO to Your Advantage — Now, take all that information about your ideal customer, their industry, the problems they face, and the tasks they need to complete and create optimized blog content around it. Turn their FAQs into keywords you can rank for and provide solutions on the pages and posts of your website. Capitalize on SEO best practices to help your audience find you.
- Effective Calls to Action — No B2B website strategy is complete without a way to help customers take the next step. All the work you’ve put into your website is really for naught if you neglect to entice, encourage and inspire website visitors to do something! Whether that something is booking a meeting, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a free resource, if prospects have made it to your website, you want to nudge them into and then through the funnel with effective CTAs.
- Keep the Buyer Journey in Mind — Remember the complicated B2B buyer journey we talked about earlier? The last essential component of an effective B2B website strategy is to make sure you create content targeting website visitors at every stage. From top-of-funnel broad topic content to mid-funnel content aimed at helping visitors decide between options, to product or service-specific bottom-of-funnel posts aimed at conversions, your website should provide value to visitors wherever they are in the journey. Remember, it may be a whole team of stakeholders you have to convince. So blow them away with your expertise, understanding, and insight into the challenges they face.
How & When to Implement Your B2B Website Strategy
A strong B2B website strategy ensures that your site is a hardworking partner in building your brand, serving your audience, and helping you grow by engaging with visitors, guiding them toward solutions, and ultimately converting them into happy customers. It should do much more than act as a virtual business card. Considering strategy early in the process gives your website design more structure and purpose.
Developing your BVP and getting to know your target audience are key first steps. Then you can plan, strategize and build with this information at the heart of your content creation, messaging, and CTAs. Ready for launch? Fantastic! But your B2B website strategy doesn’t end there. It’s vital that you continue to create consumer-centric content, test CTAs and landing pages, and measure your site’s performance so you can do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.
At Brand Theory, we use a 12-week process to guide clients through website creation with a concrete schedule and specific milestones in place. The strategy provides the guardrails and the schedule provides checkpoints to ensure that your site is built efficiently, effectively, and on time. If you’d like to find out more about how we can create an effective website strategy for your B2B, schedule a personal introduction today.
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