Strong messaging
Your marketing copy is one of the biggest factors in your conversion rate.
Your site must clearly demonstrate the benefits you offer your customers, so they can clearly understand how you will solve their expensive problem.
What’s so special about B2B sales?
B2B businesses sell their products or services only to other businesses. As such, there are several factors to keep in mind when building your website.
Lengthy Purchase Decisions
Rarely are B2B purchases impulsive – they are usually the result of a long, complex decision making process. B2B products and services are relatively high priced items that are expected to have a significant impact on your organization’s operation.
The decision typically involves multiple people across a corporate hierarchy, as they share possible solutions with multiple team members for research, justification, and approval purposes. This means the sales cycle is often measured in weeks or months (or even years in some cases).
A wide audience
B2B purchasing decisions commonly involve more than a single individual. As such, each of these people may reference your website looking for different types of information. This purchasing scenario may involve significant internal dialogue between decision makers and the end-users of your products.
While an engineering lead may initiate the purchase of a new piece of equipment, his manager may also need to approve it. A C-level executive will likely need to confirm the manager’s decision, and a member of the procurement team may be involved in the final transaction.
This purchasing scenario may involve significant internal dialogue between decision makers and the end-users of your products. An end-user may be your main point of contact with the client, but they will still need sufficient information to justify their preferred option to the decision maker.
Complex pricing
Most consumer-oriented products have straightforward pricing that is consistent from one customer to the next. With B2B sales, pricing isn’t always so simple.
Your product or service may be heavily customized for each customer's needs, resulting in signfiicant price adjustments. In addition, bulk orders are a common practice and individual customers may have negotiated favourable rates with your sales reps.
As a result, providing pricing information to potential customers is not a clear-cut task, and needs to be tailored specifically for your business and its customers base.
Multiple customer segments
It is not uncommon for B2B companies to support customers from a variety of different sized businesses – from small “mom-and-pop” shops to large, multinational enterprises.
Because of this, some product and service offerings may not be appropriate for all customer segments. However, the website still has to establish credibility with each customer segment, and highlight which solutions solve the problems of a given industry or type of customer.
Did you know?
Interesting facts about B2B marketing that may change your approach to your web sales strategy.
24%
of B2B sales cycles take more than six months to complete
Source: Harvard University
49%
of B2B researchers use their mobile devices for information gathering at the office
Source: Google
75%
of B2B buyers find demo or explainer videos to be helpful in the buying process
Source: Hubspot
Traits of a successful B2B website
Building a website that captures qualified leads doesn’t start by choosing the “look and feel”. Successful B2B websites are built upon 6 key principles.
A real example
This screenshot shows a product page of one our actual clients, Bee Vectoring Technologies.
They provide an environmentally-friendly solution to pollination of farmer's crops. The end result for their customers: better tasting food and higher crop yields.
Hover over each hotspot to learn more about the purpose of each element on this B2B web page.
Leaf Design seamlessly integrated all the elements of our B2B site so customers could find our product material in multiple locations.
Audit your website
Before you dive head-first into a re-design, you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your website. Our free Website Audit Guide will provide you with an assessment on …
- The usability of your website (on desktop and mobile browsers)
- How well organized and accessible your content is
- The effectiveness of your calls to action
- … and much more