Website Best Practice: B2B

Essential Best Practices

The most effective B2B websites are not static online databases—they’re dynamic systems that continually evolve and adapt to your most loyal clients’ needs. Specifically, these sites do the following:

• Offer original content and valuable resources.
• Use language that speaks directly to the target audience; remember, you’re talking to people, not a faceless business.
• Provide logical information architecture that intuitively guides targeted users through the site and, ultimately, to a call to action.
• Strive for a simplistic, client-focused design.
• Don’t use stock images, phony reviews, or confusing industry terms (try to drop the acronyms as much as possible).
• Show contact information on every page.

Successful B2B marketers adopt a tactical content strategy approach and ensure that every page is relevant, engaging, and accurate by:

• focusing more on educating web visitors than on selling to them.
• utilizing social media to grow the website’s online presence.
• regularly tracking, testing, and redesigning content and calls to action.
• participating in continuing SEO campaigns to increase the website’s organic search rankings.
• meticulously checking online messaging for accuracy and clarity.

Protecting Sensitive Information

From telephone numbers and addresses to usernames and passwords, data encryption is the safest way to protect information sent through a web form. But once this data is collected and stored, it’s imperative for websites to have an additional layer of protection to ensure the information remains secured.

Gravitate Encryption, a custom WordPress plugin developed with businesses in mind, offers a safe and comprehensive solution to protecting your customers’ most sensitive information. With remote database storage and secret passphrases to encrypt and decrypt the data, Gravitate Encryption can safeguard web forms that require users to submit their social security numbers, dates of birth, or any other confidential banking information.

Implementing Responsive Design

From 2012 to 2014, we’ve seen a 91 percent growth in B2B researchers using smartphones during the path to purchase. This means that B2B websites must be mobile-friendly to serve the needs of these potential clients. A responsive design allows visitors to read and navigate your website on any device, as the optimal viewing area automatically adjusts to the user’s screen size, platform, and orientation. Consequently, whether your visitors are using an 8-inch tablet or a 4-inch smartphone, a responsive website eliminates the need to swipe, pinch, and reverse pinch to see the content.

Aside from providing a better user experience (UX) for your mobile customers, responsive sites can also be used to re-prioritize elements on a page. Buttons, calls to action, and even blocks of text may be removed, repositioned, or resized to make your content more effective on smaller devices.

How We Build B2B Websites

Strategy: The process begins by conducting market research, competitive analysis, and data tracking so that we fully understand your target audience and their buying behaviors. This data allows us to develop detailed persona archetypes, user flows, and intuitive information architecture based on content strategy.

Design: After creating a solid strategy, our designers work diligently to build a beautiful, conversion-focused design that truly upholds the power of your brand. Our designers reflect on weeks of research and strategy as they meticulously adjust layouts, calls to action, and visual hierarchy for an experience that makes a lasting impression.

Development: Through designer and developer collaboration, we draft technical specifications that detail exactly how the site will function in preparation for development. And because our sites are built on a WordPress platform, we can engineer a custom back-end solution that allows you to easily add, update, and edit content without knowing code or HTML markup.

SEO/Digital Marketing: By using extensive keyword research, on-page optimization, and technical SEO, our digital marketers and content strategists provide long-term solutions that increase your organic search rankings and enhance your bottom line. We also set up advanced conversion tracking so we can monitor the success of your website goals.

Ongoing Content Creation: Launching your website isn’t the final step in the digital marketing process—it’s merely the start of a ongoing effort to create compelling content that keeps users engaged with your products and services. This includes identifying underperforming pages and updating content, as well as restructuring page elements and calls to action to improve conversion rates.

This article is not intended to constitute legal advice. Neither Gravitate, nor our partners, make any representations or warranties that our services will guarantee compliance with applicable laws.