Web design is essential to a B2B organization’s sales strategy. B2B marketing presents unique relationship-building, lead generation, and qualification challenges. The best B2B website designs offer information, attract attention and persuade audiences to engage with the brand.
This is why B2B web design is considered an effective tool for B2B organizations.
B2C brands usually expect sales transactions to occur on the first website visit, while B2B companies typically do not expect conversions on the initial visit. It is because B2B sales cycles tend to be longer, and the customer journey for B2B often includes multiple interactions across various media channels and mobile devices.
Adhering to B2B website design best practices is crucial for B2B websites to meet the audience’s needs and expectations. Additionally, well-designed B2B websites improve engagement and search engine optimization (SEO), resulting in increased organic search traffic that converts into high-quality sales leads and contributes to business growth.
The process of B2B sales is often prolonged and intricate. Usually, most website visitors are not prepared to reach out to the company or complete a purchase. The customer journey is generally extensive, as any buying decision needs to be approved by multiple decision-makers and involves thorough research.
A website needs to give the following impacts to engage visitors:
- Establishing trust and credibility
- Defining the value
- Providing relevant and informative content
- Call to Action
Key Takeaways
- Understanding B2B website design
- Key elements and B2B website best practices
- Best B2B website examples for guidance
- Tips for designing
What is B2B Web Design?
Business-to-Business or B2B web design refers to the design and development of websites for businesses that sell products or services to other businesses. This type of web design differs from B2C (business-to-consumer) web design geared toward customers.
The B2B web design focuses on creating a professional and reliable online presence that reflects the company’s brand and industry expertise. The website must be easy to navigate and provide the information potential business partners, or clients need to make informed decisions about working with the company.
Some key elements of B2B web design include a clear and consistent layout, easy access to product or service information, case studies or testimonials, and a way to easily contact the company. A B2B website should also be optimized for search engines and mobile-friendly, as many business decision-makers use their mobile devices to research potential partners or vendors.
In addition to these elements, B2B websites must have strong security features to protect sensitive information and comply with industry regulations. They may also need to integrate with other systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Overall, B2B web design aims to create a website that helps businesses establish trust and credibility with potential partners and clients and streamline sales. Professional companies for web development in Houston, such as ClickySoft, consider these factors in the notice to develop a secured and robust business website.
What are Common Elements of a B2B Web Design?
Every B2B website design has common elements embedded into its development process that make the entirety of an engaging web application. These elements include:
1. Clear and Consistent Layout
A clear and consistent layout is one of the key elements of successful B2B web design. It means the website should have a clean and organized design with consistent use of color, typography, and imagery. An organized layout creates a sense of structure and hierarchy, making it easier for visitors to navigate the site and find the information they need.
Additionally, a clear layout can enhance the user experience with a pleasant look and easy navigation. Overall, a clear and consistent layout helps to create a professional and trustworthy image for the company and makes it easy for visitors to find the information, which enhances the chances of success with an intuitive user experience.
2. Product or Service Information
Product or service information is another crucial element of best B2B website designs as it provides potential customers with the details they need to make informed decisions about purchasing products or services.
This information should be detailed, accurate, and up-to-date, providing potential customers with a clear understanding of the products or services offered.
The product or service information should include features, images, videos, infographics, specifications, pricing, and relevant certifications or accreditations.
Addressing these aspects can help navigate common web development challenges, offering visitors a more engaging and interactive experience.
3. Contact Information
Contact information allows potential customers to easily get in touch with the company. This information should be prominently displayed on the website, ideally on a dedicated “Contact Us“ page or section.
The contact page should include various options for getting in touch, such as a phone number, email address, and contact form. It’s also important to include the company’s physical address and a map for easy location.
In addition, providing alternative contact options such as live chat, social media links, and a meeting scheduler with a virtual meeting link ensures convenient accessibility for visitors to connect with your business.
A clear and easy-to-find contact page helps build trust and credibility with potential customers, showing that the company is open and responsive to their needs. It also helps streamline the sales process, making it easy for potential customers to inquire about products or services, request a quote, or schedule a meeting.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Effective B2B web design incorporates Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a crucial aspect, as it improves the visibility and ranking of the website on search engines like Google and Bing, allowing it to reach more potential customers.
By working with a reputable Houston SEO company, businesses can optimize various website elements, such as content, meta tags, and URLs, making it more attractive to search engines.
One of the key aspects of SEO is keyword research, which identifies the keywords and phrases that potential customers use to search for products or services related to a business. Once these keywords are identified, they can be incorporated into various elements of the website, such as the title tags, meta descriptions, and body text, to help search engines understand the website’s content and match it with relevant search queries.
A key element of SEO is link building, which centers on acquiring links from other websites that point towards your website. These links act as a vote of confidence for your website and can help to improve your search engine rankings.
In addition to these technical elements, it’s important to have quality and relevant content on your website that answers the questions of your target audience and provides them with value. This can help increase the chances of your website appearing at the top of search engine results and attracting more organic traffic to your site.
Struggling to get traffic to your B2B website? Don’t panic! Our comprehensive Shopify SEO guide can help you maximize visibility and attract more potential customers. Read now.
5. Mobile Friendliness
Mobile-friendly refers to designing and developing a website optimized for viewing on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, websites need to be mobile-friendly to ensure they can be easily accessed and navigated by visitors.
A mobile-friendly website will have a responsive design, which automatically adjusts the layout and content of the website to fit the screen size of the device in use. It ensures that the website is easily read and navigated on small screens.
Touch-friendly elements such as larger buttons, easy-to-find menus, and navigation increase mobile responsive capabilities.
6. B2B Security Features
Security features are an essential aspect of B2B web design, as they help to protect sensitive information and ensure that the website remains secure for the business and its customers.
One of the essential security features is using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates, which encrypts the data transmitted between the website and the user’s browser. These certificates make it difficult for hackers to intercept and steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers and login credentials.
Another important security feature is a firewall, a barrier between websites and potential threats such as hacking attempts, malware, and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Firewalls can also block or limit access to certain parts of the website, such as the admin area, to prevent unauthorized access.
Two-Factor Authentication, software updates, and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) are all security features you can implement.
7. Customized Call-To-Action (CTA)
Call-to-action (CTA) is an essential element of many B2B web design examples, enabling businesses to effectively capture and qualify leads from their website.
Calls-to-action (CTA) are buttons or links that encourage the user to take a specific action, such as filling out a form, scheduling a demo, or downloading a whitepaper. CTAs are often used to drive conversions and help move the user through the sales funnel. Effective CTAs are clear, concise, and prominently placed on the page; they should also be attention-grabbing and offer a sense of urgency.
CTAs can be placed on various website pages, such as the homepage, landing pages, and blog posts. Additionally, you can optimize CTAs for different stages of the customer journey.
What are B2B Website Design Best Practices to Follow?
The development process of a website requires developers to follow a series of B2B website design best practices to gain maximum visitor engagement. Professional companies for website design Houston consider these practices as guidelines to train their developers and fulfill client requirements.
Let us look at these best practices for a better understanding:
1. Understanding Website Visitors
Understanding the mindset of visitors is the key to creating an engaging B2B website design. Many companies make the mistake of designing their website from an internal perspective, where stakeholders decide on the site’s content without considering the needs and wants of the target audience. This approach overlooks the requirements and motivations of the website’s users – the visitors.
Consider empathy as the central point of a website design that integrates qualitative and quantitative aspects to analyze behavior and various segments of website visitors.
2. Website Relevancy
Whenever a visitor opens a website, they do not intend to talk to the team or consider purchases immediately. They have specific queries related to trustworthiness, value-addition, and decision-making to make an informed choice.
Understanding your website targeted visitors gives you a glimpse of their search intent and customer journey. Website strategists can help map a customer journey that effectively identifies each customer’s trigger points and needs. The journey should reflect relevancy to create awareness, consideration, and support for their buying decision.
3. Storytelling
Every business has a background story; your website is the best place to tell that. Storytelling is differentiating your website and brand from others using unique content, and it helps establish an emotional connection and a sense of relationship with visitors.
A skilled B2B website design expert can integrate colors, fonts, images, videos, white spacing, animations, and interactive elements to make the website more attractive.
Everything on your website can support or hinder the message conveyed to visitors, so placement is necessary.
4. Defining Value Proposition
Most B2B businesses have a clear mission statement and a value proposition laid out for their company. However, there is a very short window of opportunity to make an impact on a visitor.
The goal of a B2B website is to capture the attention and show its value in a concise time. The solution for this challenge is to create a robust website value proposition that states the company’s what, who, and how.
The value proposition is a few lines placed on the homepage but is not limited to only the text. Images, videos, and functionality all play a part in projecting the value of a website and gaining attention.
5. Nurturing Leads with CTAs
As the name suggests, CTA or Call-To-Action guides visitors to take the next step in their journey. CTAs are part of value propositioning that tells a visitor about their next move, and CTA is a button or a link placed strategically on various page sections. On a B2B website, these CTAs may be “Order Now” or “Add to Cart.”
You can add a “Learn More” CTA on a page to link it with a product or service. Visitors seek information before engaging and CTAs are vital in offering that information.
Visitors may lose interest if there are no CTAs available on a page. You may need different CTAs depending on your website design to fit the end goal of your visitors.
6. Establish Trust with Visitors
If you are a visitor and land on a website you have not heard of, will you trust that business? Probably not.
Visitor skepticism is a common trait even the most frequent visitors possess. Usually, new visitors to a B2B website judge a business by their aesthetics and content. The goal of a B2B website is to lay the foundation of trust so the visitor feels comfortable and stays on the page for a long time. Visual, industry, transactional, and relationship trust are all established through an effective B2B website design.
7. Emphasizing Product or Service
The product or service page is the second or third page that visitors go to in their buyer journey and is often called the mission-critical page. The best B2B websites create custom designs to elevate their service or product.
A well-executed product page design is essential in highlighting the unique features and benefits, guiding the visitor towards making an informed decision.
An effective website design and layout guides a visitor towards the product or service, so the page content should address the primary intention in the B2B space. They should find the answers to whether the product/service is best for them and whether investing in it is the right decision.
8. Use Captivating Visuals
Visuals are a powerful tool to engage visitors and share stories. The homepage is where visuals make the most impact, as they are the first sections that captivate visitor attention.
Tie the visuals with the value proposition to give a story but be careful in their selection as too much movement or graphics may distract users. Another page to place visuals is the blog section, where you can discuss a topic or share information without too much text. A combination of written content with visuals is a formula to engage visitors and keep them on a page for a long time.
9. Focus on Page Speed
Speed is an essential factor to consider, especially for B2B website design. If a page takes too long to load, the chances of visitors leaving become high. Various elements hinder page loading speed, such as the development platform, hosting server, size of images or videos, and the practices implemented.
At Clickysoft, we offer website design services that prioritize page speed optimization as a crucial factor in website performance. When designing B2B websites, we continuously optimize page speed to keep performance aligned with visitor engagement. This approach reduces bounce rates and allows for multiple page views within a short time for maximum engagement.
10. Providing Engagement Opportunities
Engagement is the central point of best B2B website designs that creates awareness and visitor motivation. Every website has visitors looking for specific resources to engage with, such as articles or case studies.
Connecting visitors with the right resource is the best way to establish trust and credibility for a business. Share your success stories or business-related posts with visitors to give them something with value. Keep the content relevant and avoid adding too much information, or visitors may feel overwhelmed.
What are Some of the Best B2B Website Examples?
Having a user-friendly website can lead to favorable impressions of your brand and increase customer acquisition. If you’re looking for inspiration for B2B web design, check out these best B2B website examples that provide a great user experience for visitors.
1. Blake Envelopes
Blake Envelopes is probably the most prominent B2B website example focusing on product quality using vibrant colors and images. Their website has a cheerful feel and uses product quality to capture the audience’s attention. They create a feel in their passive products with appealing colors and movement that keeps users interested in the brand.
2. Asana
Asana is a project management tool renowned for perfectly placing CTAs on their website and doing a great job directing the customer to the next step. They have an immediate CTA on the first fold of their homepage to convert visitors into customers. As you scroll down, you can see the CTA placed near product animation and other design elements that prompt users to navigate further and learn more.
3. Acme
Acme is the perfect example of the phrase less is more as they have minimalistic functionality free from clutter and chaos. Acme does a great job with this theory to improve user experience, reduce load times, and increase readability, which is rarely seen in a B2B website design.
Acme’s web design is minimalistic and enhances users’ experience navigating the site. The homepage has divisions of subtle lines that lead to interior pages. The background changes and animates as the cursor moves over different sections, indicating where clicking will take the user.
4. Zendesktop
Among famous B2B website design examples, none compare the excellence in customer service to Zendesk. Zendesk’s website provides an outstanding customer support experience, starting with the design of the homepage. Visitors are immediately given the option to sign up for a free trial, view a software demo, and chat live with a sales representative, all readily available at the top of the page.
5. Grammarly
Focus on clearly communicating your company’s purpose and solution rather than trying to motivate the audience. Similar to how Grammarly presents its offerings on its website, Grammarly removes excess attempts to increase buyer motivation and focuses on providing solutions. They are the best example of defining value propositions from the beginning.
The headline on the homepage of their website effectively communicates the company’s value proposition, and the call-to-action button is clear in directing the user to the next step. The homepage uses animations to effectively demonstrate the product’s value, even if the visitor doesn’t read any text. This web design technique is effective for Grammarly.
6. Kao Collins InkTank
Choose a brand voice that aligns with your company’s mission statement and consistently use it to create positive and engaging content for users. This will help establish your company as relatable and reliable. Kao Collins, a global leader in ink engineering and manufacturing, understands the power of great content and web design. The homepage of their InkTank blog features captivating visuals and organizes the links to the blog content in an attractive user interface.
7. Adobe CXM
B2B sites should use a web design that guides users through a journey rather than overwhelming them with complex navigation and category pages, similar to Adobe’s CXM website.
This approach promotes conversation marketing over content marketing by providing users with text and animated graphics that explain how the company and its products can help customers, including testimonials from industry experts as they scroll down the homepage.
This website illustrates that conversational marketing encompasses more than chatbots and live support. It’s also about using web design and content to understand users’ needs, guiding them to the appropriate page, and providing them with relevant information.
8. Fullscreen
Fullscreen’s website uses compelling videography to showcase the company’s identity as a video entertainment and content provider for brands and talent to share on social media. This web design trend, commonly used on home pages, is gaining popularity as videos are more effective in communicating a brand’s identity than a large amount of written content on “About” pages.
What are the Best B2B Web Design Tips?
1. Work with Professional Designers
When redesigning a website, it is vital to consider the impact on existing marketing and brand equity. Research and select a reliable web team experienced in B2B website development to ensure success. A professional web team should possess web strategy, design, and development expertise. They can ensure that your brand equity is preserved while incorporating best practices for visitor engagement, interactive designs, and content. Additionally, they should follow best SEO practices and optimize the site for mobile and performance as per B2B ecommerce marketing strategies & best practices.
2. Have a Clear Scope of Work
When communicating website plans with your B2B website design and development team, be as specific as possible. An experienced web development and SEO agency should ask detailed questions and provide a comprehensive estimate for cost and timeline.
If your project involves complex functionality, ensure the web development team evaluates your existing website before providing a quote. Many B2B businesses have existing websites with a large amount of content. Redesigning a website with a large amount of content can be challenging, so it’s essential to work with a website development company that can help you strategically plan the navigation and information architecture to ensure that valuable content is not lost during the redesign process.
3. Set Reasonable Goals
When investing in website adjustments or a full website redesign, have reasonable expectations for the timeline and outcome. Redesigning a B2B website typically takes 3-4 months. While you may be able to shorten the timeline, be cautious about cutting corners and sacrificing quality for a faster turnaround.
When launching a brand new website, some marketers and business owners may expect it to rank high on search engines and generate leads immediately after launch. However, an effective B2B website design is the hub of communication and marketing. It’s essential to continue to build and maintain “spokes” or marketing channels that drive traffic to the site. Your efforts on the website and marketing will pay off in time, but it may take some time to see results.
Final Word
B2B website design is essential for organizations that deal in business-to-business niches. A business website is a chance to make an immediate impact on visitors and give them something to trust and engage with. The best B2B website examples, combined with design tips, serve as a guideline for B2B businesses to design their website for maximum engagement and eventual growth.