Designing Your B2B Website
By Alok Jaiswal
Before even properly starting this article, let me just tell you this: Your B2B (Business
to Business) website is your way to success in this 21st Century. You need to realize that
there is a lot more than just a company logo and contact information that makes up a fully-fledged
successful website. Your website needs to speak to its customers, it needs to be a part of
your sales proposition. Be it a product or a service that the buyers buy directly from your
website, or whether it is that you sell consulting or software projects, understand that your
buyers are doing their research online in any scenario.
Therefore, the more your services or products are complex in nature, the more you require
your website to work for you because today, the buyers want to make purchases online.
I repeat, since the B2B businesses are complex than the typical B2C businesses, they,
in fact, need much better user interfaces. The B2B websites should put emphasis on usability
more because this will help the users to accomplish more advanced tasks on the website.
This being said, rushing straight to the design of the B2B website can lead to a disaster.
Here are the things you and/or a professional web design company in Noida need to take
care of before design:
1. Ask the End Customer
The key to a successful website is to remember that your website is more about your prospects
than you. Your prospects or the end customers are the ones who will be buying the product or
service from your website. Therefore, taking their opinions into consideration before starting
to design your B2B website can save you heaps of extra costs and time.
You can initiate this by directly asking your customers the following questions-
• How did you come across our website?
• How much time did the website take to load?
• Were you able to figure out the Menu of the website?
• Was the description of our products/services sufficient?
• How was the product display image? Did you find it to be of good quality?
• Did our FAQ section resolve your queries?
• Describe in detail your buying process?
• What according to you, matters the most while evaluating options?
2. Ask your Sales and Marketing Team
Since they are the ones who are regularly in contact with your clients and customers,
their opinions play an important role in deciding how your B2B website should be. Your clients / customers
usually want valuable information, pricing information, fast response and a quick solution
to his needs. Meanwhile, you as a business want more leads, more conversions, and loyalty from
your clients.
To maintain a balance between what you want and what your customers want, you should
ask the following questions to your Sales & Marketing Team-
• How do you want your brand to be perceived?
• Why your customers chose you and not your competitor?
• What are our advantages according to you?
• What are the generally occurring problems in our products/services?
• Who all are our big clients, what is the number of clients that we have served?
• What according to the Sales & Marketing Team are the primary goals that the website should accomplish for succeeding?
3. Come up with a Buyer Persona
While many B2B businesses tend to not consider it as an important step, having a Buyer
Persona ready can help you better understand your business environment, what type of clients
usually buy your products and around what time do they make the purchases.
For creating an effective buyer's persona, consider these factors:
• Interview your clients / customers
• Interview your Sales and Marketing Team
• Carry a survey for your prospects
• Mine your in-house database for understanding the qualities of the best and the worst customers
• Review your web analytics report
• Interview your customer service team
• Use keywords to recognize the topics of interest
• Track your social media activities and keep a tap on the engagements with your connections
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