Your B2B Website Is Your Most Important Marketing Channel

When prospective B2B customers hear a mention of your brand, what’s the first thing they do to check out what you offer? Chances are that rather than making a phone call to a salesperson, they will spend time on your website as their first step to see if your products are a fit. After that, it’s a split second — 0.05 seconds according to one study — before they’ve formed an impression of your business.  

For B2B companies, your website is your most important marketing channel, from building brand awareness to generating leads. Your site needs to make a stand-out first impression, offer engaging and helpful content, and make it easy for potential customers to engage with you, plus tie into your CRM system to help turn site engagement into revenue. 

Over the years, I’ve learned that no matter what industry your company focuses on, there are a few critical success factors that every B2B website should follow. 

Determine the Primary Business Goal of your B2B Website 

Defining your number one business goal seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this step is missed.  Are you looking to generate leads? Build awareness of your brand?  Drive offline or online sales? Or provide a great post-purchase experience? 

Each of these goals drives its own set of requirements for the website platform and technology you choose, as well as the content and layout of your pages.  

• Sites focused on services or lead generation need a strong call to action and a form at the top of the page to lead users into your nurture funnel.  

• Brand awareness sites should have strong visuals and a deep content repository to educate potential B2B customers about who you are and what you do.  

• Sales-oriented sites may need an ecommerce platform — or a measurable path to offline purchases, so you can get business buyers to your product and attribute revenue from their purchases to your website.  

The most critical stage of the web design process is your initial discovery phase — and particularly, the inclusion of your sales team.

In order to deliver the results that you’re looking for, I’ve found that the most critical stage of the web design process is your initial discovery phase — and particularly, the inclusion of your sales team as part of that process. It’s in this phase that you should nail down your primary goal before moving on to anything else. 

Know Your Target Audience – Today’s B2B Buyer 

A key demographic shift to keep in mind — more than half of today’s business buyers are millennials and Gen Z. As online natives, those generations are twice more likely than older generations to discover products through online searches, according to Trust Radius. 

And because a business purchase carries greater risk, your customer will usually do extensive online research about potential products and services, long before they ever reach out for a conversation. Gartner research found that 76% of business buyers prefer a sales experience that does not include a sales representative. 

According to DemandGen’s 2022 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey, the first three resources B2B buyers turn to are: 

• Web search: 52% 

• Vendor websites: 36% 

• Review websites: 26% 

That means your B2B website needs to communicate your brand’s value proposition clearly on your home page, so business buyers know immediately how you can help them solve their business problem. Content that answers their key questions will help your brand make a business buyer’s shortlist for follow-up. 

Create Strategic Content for Your B2B Website 

A well-developed B2B content strategy will provide the audience insights you need to create high-quality web content that’s relevant and helpful to your target audiences. Audience personas, buyer journeys, message maps, and a content framework will help guide content that delivers the right messages at the right moments, helping establish credibility and trust. 

Most companies have multiple influencers when it comes to major buying decisions. Ideally, your website will have content for each of the roles on the customer’s buying committee. Here’s why: DemandGen Report found that 71% of B2B buyers consume multiple pieces of content, such as blog articles, videos, white papers, and e-books, to help them make a decision, and they share that content with others on the buying team.  

These additional content tactics can help compel business buyers to get in touch: 

• Create content for each unique solution you offer to show prospective customers you understand the problems they face and how your brand can help them solve those challenges. 

• Know which content types your business buyers prefer, whether to consume on their own or share with others. Short-form content (infographics and blog posts), webinars and digital events, long-form foundational content (e-books, white papers) and interactive multimedia are the top content types preferred by B2B buyers, according to DemandGen Report. 

• A well-crafted About Us page should cover what your company does, your brand story, leadership team, and mission, vision, and values, all to help prospective customers evaluate if your team is a cultural fit. 

Page design and relevant content are critical for B2B websites. Too much jargon and you lose your audience, but not enough information and they won’t know what to do next. 

Design a Site that Supports Your Goals and the Needs of B2B Audiences 

An effective digital strategy relies on several essential factors as a foundation for high-performing B2B website: 

• Useful content that meets the needs of all of your potential customers. 

• An intuitive and easy to use website that allows your prospects to quickly access what is most important to them. 

• Appealing visuals and copy that are on brand will help you build trust. 

• And a solid SEO and content approach that will help your website rank high on all search engines. 

Page design and relevant content are critical for B2B websites. Too much jargon and you lose your audience, but not enough information and they won’t know what to do next.   

One of the big mistakes that I’ve seen over the years is that many companies use ‘internal speak’ instead of staying hyper-focused on their target audience. As you consider your customer-centered website design, aim for: 

• Clear and uncluttered calls to action to drive users forward. Get B2B audiences to your valuable content, resources, and connection points. 

• Valuable collateral to engage actions. From catalogs to resource manuals, parse out what’s most important. 

• Repeat touchpoints to support longer sales cycles and build relationships over time. Your site should also take advantage of the opportunity to nurture returning visitors. 

• Accessibility. Make sure you’re creating an experience everyone can engage in, with accommodations for users with special needs, in accordance with compliance guidelines. 

A marketing automation and CRM approach will allow you to see measurable impact from your B2B website.

Integrate Marketing Automation and CRM Systems to Prove Marketing Impact 

You’ve done the hard work of determining what type of website you need, identifying your business goals, understanding your B2B audience, creating content they value, and designing a site that supports their buying needs, start to finish. Whew! 

Now it’s time to turn all that into measurable impact. 

1. Set up marketing automation and a customer relationship management approach. These tools will deliver outcomes that are truly customer-centered and will help to ensure that your B2B website supports your business objectives.  

2. Tie your business objectives directly to your sales operation. This critical step involves supporting the sales team and tracking offline conversions, which allows you to measure the website’s impact on actual business outcomes. 

3. Empower audience segmentation through lead management and scoring. Implementing automation tools to qualify leads and segmenting your audience into groups based on their website behavior will help you home in on your most qualified prospects. 

4. Align your B2B content strategy with your customers’ buying cycle. Mapping valuable content to a business buyer’s journey allows you to provide the right content (like a case study, explainer video, or white paper) at the right time, through the right channels. An integrated marketing automation platform will empower your team to demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts. 

5. Integrate your entire marketing technology stack. Setting up a seamless connection between your key technologies will give you a complete view of a customer’s digital footprint. And that means more effective targeting and personalization. 

6. Facilitate customer journeys. A B2B website should map to both the user and buyer journeys, in alignment with your sales and business objectives. This approach ensures a smooth transition for prospective customers, from their initial interest to conversion to customer loyalty and repeat purchases. 

7. Consolidate reporting with marketing automation and CRM tools. You’ll want to deliver revenue attribution, a crucial step for demonstrating marketing impact. This involves tracking leads and applying scoring to behavior with specific campaigns and channels in order to attribute revenue accurately to the appropriate marketing efforts. 

Ready to Optimize Your Website for B2B Audiences? 

As a B2B business, your website is the most important marketing channel you have. And it’s owned media, giving you complete control to improve and optimize for your target audiences. If you’re ready to take a fresh look at your website, we’d love to chat about what’s possible, drawing on our experience building and managing B2B websites for many clients. We look forward to hearing about your challenges and sharing ideas on how we can help. 

Rick Gardinier, Brunner partner and chief digital officer, is responsible for developing and executing comprehensive digital strategies that help Brunner’s clients unlock new avenues for growth. He brings more than 30 years of experience helping companies leverage emerging technology to solve business and marketing problems. Rick spearheaded the launch of Brunner’s innovation lab, BHiveLab, which for 10 years was dedicated to helping companies invent new ways to use technology to engage their customers. His unique blend of technical, marketing, and business expertise has enabled him to build bridges between the technical and creative sides of the digital space. Rick earned an MBA with a marketing analytics concentration from Capital University and a BS in computer science from Bowling Green State University. | LinkedIn