Are you Leveraging the Number One Sales Tool for B2B Brands?
The pandemic has accelerated the shift to e-commerce by five years. Our consumer climate has catapulted to where it would have been in five years without a pandemic. Unfortunately, this has meant the end for many businesses. However, some companies are seeing tremendous growth during these challenging times and have embraced, and even expanded, their digital presence.
The strongest marketing and business strategies will continue to revolve around digital platforms.
Where should you start? Your website. Here’s why.
Buyer Behavior Is Changing
The traditional B2B sales landscape of one-on-one conversations is shifting. B2B buyers are increasingly behaving more like conventional B2C customers. Buyers are operating more independently than ever before. Today’s digital presence allows professionals to do self-guided research and make decisions before even beginning the conversation, and they like it this way! 
According to DemandGen’s 2020 B2B Buyer Behavior Study, here’s what the buyer journey looks like now:
- The time required to research purchases has increased. Deeper dives start online, and users expect a seamless website experience.
- 82% of buyers are now prioritizing changing business needs when making purchasing decisions, and 76% of respondents strongly react to industry-specific, tailored content.
- Peer/colleague recommendations and word-of-mouth remain one of the most persuasive tools – featuring client testimonials on your website can make a huge impact!
In 2019, a dynamic and user-friendly website was a perk, but it’s now table stakes for how your business is evaluated by buyers, even for B2B businesses with long customer journeys and long sales cycles.
Websites Help Strengthen Lead Gen
Since the dawn of the internet, the brochure website was the traditional B2B approach. A brochure website is a printed brochure except, well, digital.
It merely serves to let the internet know that you exist, and in today’s world, that’s an obsolete strategy.
Your brand’s website is more than a digital billboard; it’s an integrated part of your sales strategy. A powerful, lead gen-oriented website has three factors:
- Traffic (being driven from social media, email marketing, and search
- A strong value proposition that connects with the viewer
- A clear path to conversion
After researching, a potential customer should be able to move on to the next steps with ease. A lackluster website leaves the ball in the customer’s court; a productive website brings the ball to the customer.
It’s All About the User Experience
The secret sauce to any digital strategy always comes back to a positive user experience. If a brand can map out and provide a great user experience first, all other strategies (content, email, social) become a lot easier to perfect.
A website has about 15 seconds to make an impression. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when refreshing or building a website:
- Is the site usable? Eliminate broken links, optimize images to improve page load times, and update maze-like navigation menus.
- Do visitors know what to do? Avoid information overload by providing a clear path forward that allows the customer to easily research and connect with the team.
- Are visitors intrigued and inspired to learn more?
Planning for 2021 and Beyond
B2B buyers are pivoting their purchasing strategies for 2021 and beyond, and it’s time for B2B brands to do the same. The market is leaning into virtual sales more than ever before. Brands should consider reallocating budgets from traditional meetings and events towards creating a digital sales experience.
An up-to-date, engaging website will be your #1 sales tool for the future.
Questions on how to make this happen? We’d love to help.
