Nowadays, just having a website for your business is not enough. In the first part of our new “Tips from the Experts” blog series, we asked three top digital marketing agencies, Blueleaf, Rufus Leonard and 3 Fish in a Tree, for their top 5 pieces of advice on making your website work harder for you.
Blueleaf – Jonathon Palmer, Commercial Director
1. The lines of B2B and B2C are blurring. When you’re looking for inspiration to start your website, don’t rule our looking at B2C websites. Ultimately, websites should be user-friendly and trigger the desired call to action, be that reading a case study, sign-up for a newsletter or making a purchase. So if you’re looking at re-designing your website, you need a clear vision and/or problem to solve – inspiration for the solution can come from anywhere.
2. Don’t scrimp on UX and design. Anybody looking at a website wants it to be easy to navigate, allowing them to quickly filter to the information that interests them. Heads of business are people, who will respond to design and user triggers – whether they are making a business decision or buying new shoes. Keep it simple and user-friendly.
3. Integrate your social media. LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools in a B2B Business’s armoury. Make sure links to your Company Page are prominent on your website. Also, pay attention to the new changes to Company Pages. The Products & Services pages are being replaced with Showcase Pages. These present an opportunity for you to be more targeted in your approach. Your business may sell to many different industries and business sizes, and these new pages allow you to direct your content updates to each market. So enterprise businesses can stop receiving your start-up business updates, rather than having it all lumped together in the Products & Services tab.
4. Share great content. Offer your website visitors a reason to stay on your website and make repeat visits. Introduce a page or tab where visitors can download content, be it a white paper, eBook or simply for information about your business. This is also a great chance to get visitor data as you can ask for their details in return for some of the content. However, we wouldn’t recommend asking for data if the content is purely about your business.
5. Don’t leave customer service messages off your website. All customers want to feel supported and understood. Consumer brands wouldn’t leave customer satisfaction case studies or customer service related SLA’s off their website, and nor should B2B businesses. Customer experience is a competitive differentiation; it’s worth investing in and showcasing on your website.
Rufus Leonard – Iain Millar, Head of Innovation
1. Customer Obsession
Research, research, research – understand your audience, create personas, don’t be afraid to share things with them, finished or not. Put your customers at the heart of everything you do and ensure they understand how things work.
2. Simplicity
Keep it simple. Too many B2B sites lack the confidence to focus on what counts. Get your navigation and content right and don’t forget that business people like a good looking website too. Above all, the quality of messaging and call to action count when converting.
3. Connect your platforms
Your website is not an island. Once you understand your customers, ensure you manage their journeys end to end and consider how they get to the site and where they go next. Use personalisation to target the right people with the right content, and make it easy for them to choose their channel of choice (chat, phone, email or social) when getting in touch.
4. Engagement
Build engagement and relationships through knowledge sharing and thought leadership to the site, and deliver real value when there. Make your site about meeting the needs of your customer; what service, utility or value can you provide other than selling?
5. Analytics and optimisation
Maximising the return is all about improving on where you stand, so make sure you are measuring everything that counts. Use site performance, search, call-tracking, funnel conversion and social data to test and optimise the experience for customers.
3 Fish in a Tree – Ricky Oh, Director
Everybody knows it’s all about the content…
But unfortunately, hardly anyone takes any notice of this. So, out of my five tips, four of them are about content, one is about design. Sorry if that’s not what you expect from someone who’s been running a design agency for 14 years, but it’s the truth.
First, don’t talk about you, talk about your customers.
Okay, there’s a place for the hygiene factors that demonstrate you are a proper company that’s been doing what you do successfully for donkeys years, but it’s not the home page. I need to be reassured you aren’t a bunch of criminals operating from a bedsit in East London, but once I’m assured, then the job is done. I want to know what I mean to you. What you can do for me. Why I’m important. Why my job is difficult. What issues other people in my position are facing. Talk about me – if you do then I’ll be interested and I will want to listen.
Second, if you know something, tell me.
The internet is chock-a-block full of cats and how-to-do-it walkthroughs. It wouldn’t surprise me if there weren’t a YouTube video detailing how to do your own brain surgery. So, the fact you know how to do something isn’t worth a bean. The fact you can do it is worth every penny you charge for it. So, tell people what you know. If you do this they will realise how knowledgeable you are and how difficult it is to do what you do. They won’t do it. But they will know you can. Don’t hold on to knowledge because you think it’s valuable. Let’s face facts – unless you are Stephen Hawking, it’s probably public domain anyway.
Third, keep adding more
Next to a photo of a bush baby staring at you through its big black eyes on a Facebook post with 100k+ likes, the saddest thing on the internet is a website that looks the same today as it looked last week. Often when we are in a brief for a new site, our clients ask for a news section. I ask them how many proper news articles they generate a week. Three a month, they say. I tell them to forget it. Keep it fresh. Keep the homepage message new. Even if the pages the homepage is pointing at are old, no problem. They are new to your readers.
Fourth, have an opinion
I’m not saying you have to rant and rave and turn into ‘Disaffected of Basingstoke’in the Daily Mail letters page, but say what you think about industry issues. Is that skyscraper development in West London a good design decision? Will the government’s tax breaks for the games industry keep UK talent in the UK? Become a go-to voice and publish your opinions.
Finally, employ a design agency that will design a website that is invisible
I have just railed on about content being everything. There is no point getting the content right if it’s hidden behind an incompetent web design. Or an overly-rococo front end. Or style over content. Great web design is invisible, it lets the content speak. And that’s what’s really hard about web design. Making it look like it isn’t there. We spend a lot of time making things simple.
Addendum, employ a good marketing director
I was asked for five points to make your website better. Everything I’ve written here relies on you employing a great marketing director who understands the power of digital. Agencies all across London, and probably the world, are banging their heads against brick walls because the marketing department just don’t get it. Good websites come from good clients, not good agencies. Good agencies just make it more fun getting there.
So, there you have it – some simple tips on how to make your site work harder for you. We know this is a daunting task, and a lot of website owners simply don’t have time to push their website out there – but in this digital age, your online presence is everything.