Martin Broadhurst By Martin Broadhurst • May 1, 2013

Must have features for your B2B website

There are some essential features that your website will need to incorporate in order to take advantage of all the different tactics involved in B2B digital marketing. Most visitors to your website will not be ready to make a purchase at the time they visit; instead, they will be seeking out solutions to their problems or comparing your services against the competition. Your job is to ensure those visitors engage with your organisation and enter your marketing funnel to ensure a deeper dialogue with them can take place.

In order to do that, your website must have the following features:

Calls-to-action

These are the visual aids that will help guide your visitors to the areas you want them to visit. They help to signpost your visitors towards your offers and closer to a point where they will exchange some useful data with you. Make them bold, snappy and compelling so that your visitors simply have to take up your wonderful, generous offer.

Landing pages

These are your conversion hotspots and should be designed with the single goal of converting website visitors in to leads. Your landing pages you will need to have some data capture, a headline that sells your offers, body copy that reinforces your message and an image that shows what people will be getting. It’s important that your process is seamless, so consider investing in some marketing automation software to ensure your follow-up process, CRM and website analytics are joined up to provide high quality insights into your website visitor and lead behaviour.

Analytics

While this might sound exceedingly obvious, having a good analytics package on your website is vital. That is only half of the story though as a good analytics package is only useful if it is regularly used. Create some benchmarks for your website, look at your organic search traffic and find ways to optimise your content to increase your visibility for long tail keywords. I'll a write a more detailed blog post on this in the near future.

Google Analytics Dashboard

Blog

When something is important you will find time to do it. It’s very rare that you will find a business who doesn’t rank chasing debts as an important task for their organisation so when blogs are so effective at increasing reach and visibility, why is it that marketing departments still struggle to find time to blog regularly? With pageviews, bounce rates and ranking opportunities being so important for marketing managers these days, it really is essential to have an active blog.

Social Media

Being able to keep a conversation open with your website visitors, leads and prospects via social media is important, right? Well, if it is so important, you have to make sure your social media profiles can easily be found. Add links to your social media profiles and use your social media profiles to share your blogs and links to your landing pages. Maybe I'm teaching Grandma to suck eggs by saying that but I see too many B2B firms tweeting nothing but pleasantries and product pages.


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