Business-to-business (B2B) companies count on their website to act as their organization’s digital front door. It is exactly why organizations must have a content creation process in place to maintain a website with high-quality and fresh content.
This can be struggle for many B2B companies. Whether you need to refresh your website’s content or are planning to completely overhaul your B2B website, what follows are some core elements to consider as you set about the task of content creation.
12 considerations for content creation for a B2B company's website refresh or redesign:
1. What is the role of your B2B company's website?
What is the purpose of your website? Are you looking to share relevant information as your B2B buyers seek to learn about your services and solutions? Or will your website need to be designed to capture qualified leads for the B2B sales team’s pipeline? Will your website be designed to support online sales?
For example, one objective of the Salesforce.com website is to have prospective customers sign up for a free trial.
Why it matters:
The role of your B2B company's website will affect its structure, overall design and resources needed to support the required technologies.
2. Keep the content relevant.
Understanding who will be visiting your website and what they want to do on your site will ensure the creation of highly relevant content. For example, a fintech communicating to small business owners (SMBs) will have different content needs than a healthtech company creating content for biomedical engineers.
Below is example of the C.E.K. & Partners' website. It is designed to showcase our services and that we are trusted by category leaders:
Why it matters:
Understanding who will be visiting your site will allow you to upfront plan how they will use the site allowing your content creation process to prioritize the right information. Relevant content is critical for visitor engagement, as well as the search engine algorithms.
3. Avoid industry jargon, and speak simply.
We all know them. The people who love to pepper their conversations with big words. I mean really big words. Leave industry speak and jargon in the conference room. A website for a business-to-business company should use plain English. It should be clear and compelling.
Why it matters:
If your website visitor doesn’t understand what your B2B company is saying or feels intimidated, chances are they will not engage with your site.
4. Keep your B2B website content easy to read.
Understanding who will be visiting your site will allow you to upfront plan how they will use the site allowing your content creation process to prioritize the right information. Relevant content is critical for visitor engagement, as well as the search engine algorithms.
Here’s an example of concise and information headlines, copy blocks and other visual cues.
Why it matters:
Engaging website copy should be clear, easy-to-read and visually interesting. It should help users easily navigate your site to find what they need and accomplish an objective (e.g., setting up an appointment to learn more or downloading a report).
5. Vary the format of content.
While clear and compelling content creation is key, varying the format you choose to share your content supports better visitor engagement and higher search engine rankings. Websites can present content using plain text, infographics, images and video, to mention a few.
B2B marketers are leaning more heavily on video; 72 percent of them are providing B2B buyers with video to help them make their buying decisions.
Why it matters:
Video is personal and engaging. Plus, the human brain processes video 60,000 times faster than words.[1] Overall, each of your website pages should have multiple images to ensure higher search engine rankings.
6. Offer customer testimonials or success stories.
People trust recommendations. When it comes to developing or refreshing your website, include customer testimonials.
Shoppers on an eCommerce site will be more accustomed to reading ratings and reviews to aid them in deciding which model or item to purchase.
For those B2B companies without an eCommerce site, case studies or customer testimonials are extremely useful to include on your website.
Even better if the written case study or testimonial is accompanied by a watchable format (like the one we shared above!)
Why it matters:
Research suggests that "70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know."
Developing success stories helps provide a customer perspective of what it is like to purchase from or partner with your company. Read more here about how to leverage video to better connect with customers.
7. Include a blog.
Developing or revamping your business-to-business company's website should include development of a blog. Longer blog posts, 1,000+ words, will work the hardest to support your search engine rankings.
If you don’t have capacity to write longer posts, start by developing regular fresh content. Remember content can be repurposed for social media, solution sheets, white papers and more. Plan to use Google Analytics to track which site content is most popular with visitors.
Why it matters:
For B2B marketers, content creation and thought leadership is instrumental in supporting effective B2B lead generation. Get tips for establishing thought leadership.
8. Use social media.
In addition to your website’s core content creation, your B2B website should include social media buttons. This will allow people to more easily share content, as well as engage with you on social channels.
Why it matters:
Social media is no longer optional, it is expected. Make it easy for your visitors to interact, whether they want to follow your posts, engage by liking and commenting, or share your posts to their own feeds.
9. Share links.
With so much energy put into the content creation process for your website, you’ll want to include links to it across your website. If your blog post speaks to findings from your annual consumer payment study, link to the study or a relevant infographic.
Remember to consider external links that will be valuable for your visitors. For example, a fintech company may offer a list of upcoming tradeshows they are attending such as Money 20/20 or FinTech South.
Why it matters:
Including links within your website helps make your site easy to use and can support better engagement with the visitor. Plus, links help to support your rankings with your search engine results page (SERPs).
10. Make it easy to reach someone.
Don’t forget your website is there to make it easy for the visitor to gather information or have their questions answered.
It’s critical to ensure that via your website visitors can reach someone—the way they want to. That means including a phone number, email address or a live chat function.
Here's how Apple handles it.
Why it matters:
There will be times when a person visiting your website will want to reach someone. Make it easy for people to interact, whether it is through live chat, email support or a phone call.
11. Be transparent with your policies.
With the frequency of data breaches and headlines about lack of data privacy—whether you’re a purpose-driven brand, a fintech or a healthtech one—your website should clearly provide relevant privacy policies, email policies or email subscription policies.
Why it matters:
In some instances privacy policies are required to adhere to industry regulations. Transparency helps build trust and ensure confidence.
12. Site layout + user experience = more engaged visitors.
Your website’s design and layout supports the user experience. It’s why brands increasingly conduct user testing with a site or prototype before the site goes live.
For example, is the visitor to an eCommerce site able to easily browse products and services and check out or enroll? Is a potential buyer able to find the right information— a customer success video or white paper— to help them make a decision about working with your company?
Why it matters:
The testing of your site helps your web development team understand if a user can complete a handful of highly relevant tasks. The results will validate that the site is well designed and identify a few areas for refinement and content creation to support areas that need further refinement.
Following these 12 considerations will help you get started with planning your B2B company's website refresh or redesign! We know it takes planning and expertise to design a site that meets all of your users’ needs. If you need help with the website design and content creation process, we’re here to help.
About C.E.K. & Partners
C.E.K. & Partners is an Atlanta-based brand strategy firm. Our writing lab supports content creation for white papers, case studies, websites, solution sheets, infographics, articles, blogs and more.
Need help with website user testing? Our market research lab designs custom market research studies including designs for user testing. Ready to elevate your company’s communication or just extend your team's capacity? Let's talk.
[1] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/the-changing-face-b2b-marketing/Source
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