It’s 2018: every company has a website and there’s more marketing material on the internet than one person could ever read – even if they wanted to.

Businesses that want their website to gain attention and generate leads must work harder than ever to get potential customers on their site and keep them around once they’ve arrived.

For B2B websites, this is particularly difficult. As a rule, business customers are savvier than your average B2C consumer in knowing what they want from you – and what you’re trying to get from them.

Harnessing the maximum potential from a website’s traffic requires understanding a few fundamental things about who your audience is, what they want, and how your website can help them get it.

Let’s have a look at how the different components of your website can be properly optimised to achieve this.

Navigation

The good news here is that website designs are becoming simpler – so this part shouldn’t be too difficult. If your website bombards the user with too much information, chances are they’ll decide that the whole lot isn’t worth their time.

Boil it down and keep it simple. One neuromarketing principle talks about ‘the paradox of choice’ – make what you want a user, or potential customer to do, easy. Don’t overcomplicate things, don’t have 5 CTAs when one is more than enough.

The navigation tab on your home page shouldn’t feature more than about 4-6 tabs. It might seem a little uninspiring for these to include ‘about us’, ‘services’, ‘contact’ and ‘blog’, but it’s a familiar structure that will make navigation through your website quick and efficient, so don’t stray from it without good reason.

B2B customers want to be properly informed before making purchasing decisions – and they’ll likely want to speak to somebody before doing so. Your website should therefore be well optimised to direct readers towards content that answers their questions, with routes to conversions optimised towards contact-based CTAs.

Dynamic Elements

The dynamic elements of your website include blogs, news articles and resources.
They’re the bits that are regularly updated.

The trick to creating engaging dynamic elements is to keep it contemporary. B2B customers are interested in developments within their industry: how to track and beat their competition and, more importantly, how you can help them do it.

Create content that offers your audience real value, whilst remaining engaging and contemporary – and the readers will reward your time.

Aesthetics

Too many websites prioritise density of information over ease of accessibility. But the better websites value minimalistic designs and direct copy.

Make it interactive. Prioritise visuals over text and ensure that all the content on your website is organised to make it as easy as possible for the user to navigate.

For this reason, it’s a good idea to group together similar types of content to make it clear where users need to click and what they’ll find once they have.

Branding

You might be tempted to think that branding and aesthetics are largely the same thing – but they’re just about distinct enough to justify separate sections. If aesthetics relates to the raw colours and images on your website, then branding is the way they’re used.

There are some obvious points to make here. Branding should be coherent and consistent throughout the website. Having a specific logo and colour scheme is a pretty popular way of achieving this.

But you don’t want the branding material to be an exact replica on each page of the website. It’s important that it operates alongside the website’s navigability, differentiating different sub-sections of a wider overall website theme, and drawing the customers’ attention towards the right destination.

Potential customers should go away from your website with a defined idea of what your business is about, what its values are, and whether it’s a right fit for theirs. Branding is the glue that unifies all these abstract entities under one defined theme.

Call to Action

Calls to action, or CTAs, are common features of most blogs and website pages. If you’re trying to sell something, a CTA draws attention to the action you would like your website visitor to take. For example, if you’re trying to divert traffic towards content that explains more about what you’re selling, the CTA is the text, graphic or link that does that.

B2B consumers also generally know what they’re looking for and want to be able to quickly distinguish whether a website, product or blog page is worth the time they’re going to spend reading it.

In short, a decent B2B CTA has ‘this is the information you need to know’, or something very similar, implied quite heavily within. Do that, make it snappy and attractive, and you’re well on the way to creating a CTA that pops.

A Fully Integrated Design

Good B2B websites often combine several of these features. Only the best draw all five components together under one fully integrated theme.

B2B customers aren’t browsing. They want to get on your website, find the essential information as quickly as possible and decide what they’re going to do with it.

Whatever the content of your blogs or the style of your branding – a contemporary website should make it as easy as possible to achieve this.