Regardless of the industry you operate in, when it comes to the B2B world, a professional website is the crux of a successful marketing strategy. A B2B website is the landing spot for digital ads, email campaigns, social media advertising, direct mailers, and everyday communications.
If you don’t already have a clear B2B web design strategy laid out for your firm, it’s time to set one in place. Before you determine whether it’s time for a website redesign or start bidding out website enhancements, check out at these six statistics that will help you determine what matters (and what doesn’t) in your web design strategy.
Mobile Is Key
Even as recent as five years ago, professional websites were being built that weren’t optimized for mobile users. Or mobile versions of the website were built as an afterthought to the main desktop version. This is not the case anymore. Today, all B2B web designs should be built with the mobile user in mind.
Why? Adoption Rate
Almost all Americans, 95% to be exact, own a cell phone of some kind. What’s even more interesting is that 77% of Americans own a smartphone (so they can access the internet and websites from their phone). (Pew Research Center, 2017)
All-Device Experience
This focus on the mobile user’s experience does not mean that mobile-first is the only option for a strong B2B web design. Rather, we argue that a desktop user’s experience is just as important, particularly in B2B where we see more than half of our clients’ website traffic from non-mobile devices.* However, you don’t have to take our word (or research) on it.
Recent reports state that 83% of global consumers report multiscreen behavior, using an average of 2.23 devices at the same time. (Adobe, 2015)
Communicate with Design
The design of your B2B website says a lot about your firm. Is it sending the right message? If your website is more than three years old, it’s worth asking this question. Brands evolve over time and it’s critical that the central component of your marketing strategy, your B2B website, reflects that evolution. Additionally, your target market wants your website to be well designed and nice to look at.
Studies have documented that 59% of global consumers would rather engage with web content that is beautifully designed as opposed to simply designed. (Adobe, 2015)
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As the above statistic shows, it’s essential that your firm doesn’t skimp on the design of a website. If you are looking for clients with a minimum lifetime engagement of $10,000 + with your firm, it’s important to invest that much or more in the design of a professional website.
Site Performance Matters
Design matters, but site performance is the first step. If website visitors get frustrated with how long your website takes to load and leave before it loads, then the design has failed. The speed of a website has become more and more critical to the user experience, particularly for mobile users.
In fact, 53% of mobile visitors will abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. (Google, 2016)
This can be broken down even further by how much the bounce rate increases as the load time increases:
The longer it takes your B2B web design to load, the more potential customers you are losing. Your web design strategy should include technical components for increasing the speed of your website and reducing load time.
SEO: Your Competition Is Doing It
Now, there are a lot of great reasons to include search engine optimization (SEO) in with your B2B website strategy: increased visibility, a better user experience, improved traffic, and targeting the right market. Another great reason to implement SEO is because it is essential for remaining competitive in most industries. Many of your competitors have implemented SEO on their websites, so it’s essential that you are also optimizing your firm’s website. You don’t want to ignore SEO just to watch all the traffic from your target market go to your competitor.
Keep in mind that SEO isn’t just about keywords either, it’s about optimizing the coding and display functionality of your website. As we have mentioned in previous blogs on SEO, Google and other search engines have stated that website optimized for mobile will perform better in searches.
A recent survey found that 62% of B2B marketers have optimized their brand’s blog for mobile in order to improve SEO. (SocialMediaExaminer, 2016)
For B2B marketers, whether in competitive spaces or nice industries, SEO is essential to getting in front of a prospect when they are looking for your products or services. SEO should be built into all successful website strategies.
*This is based on estimates gathered from Google Analytics over a 2-year period for B2B firms in a variety of industries.
[“source-smallbiztrends”]
