The web design industry is incredibly fast pace, particularly in the B2B market. It’s hard to keep track of what you should and shouldn’t be doing for your next website redesign and even harder finding the time to actually implement any trends you do come across.
That’s why we Intergage Nerds have put together this list of 6 B2B website trends you should know about:
Responsive Design
We are now in a world where mobile searches have overtaken desktop ones. In fact, 51.3% of global searches are now made on a mobile or tablet devices (4) and if your website doesn’t take on a responsive design, you’re potentially providing an un-optimised experience to over half of your audience if not, more.
But that’s not all!
Google is well aware of these stats and at the end of 2016 started mobile first indexing. As a result of this, Google will first index mobile content to decide where to rank your website. Not having a mobile friendly site will affect where your site appears on Google. Even on desktop searches. So not having a responsive website will soon be affecting the number of users visiting your site, and converting them when they do find you is a whole different story…
Are you likely to be interested in a business whose website is difficult to read, hard to navigate and infuriatingly small on your mobile device? I think not.
If you don’t have a responsive website yet, you should be thinking about it in your next website redesign. If you aren’t thinking about it, you should be worried.
Original Photography
For a long time now, many businesses, particularly in B2B markets have relied on unoriginal stock photography for their website. However, when compared to today’s best examples of website photography, stock imagery can seem dishonest, uninteresting and a little bit ‘vanilla’.
Having your own, professional photography is absolutely something you should be investing in. Not only will it bring your products, services and business to life, it will also allow you to represent your business in the way you want. One constraint with stock imagery is that you have to make the best with what’s already out there and quite frankly, the ‘that will do’ attitude just won’t cut it anymore as imagery has become increasingly important within web design. Your own photography will also allow you to represent your products in situ, allowing potential customers to relate to the products/services more and understand how they will fit in to their own context.
User Defined Design
Something many businesses struggle to remember is that your website isn’t built for you. It is built for your users. As defined in one of our previous blogs Grandad, What Was A Sales Person? this is now a buyers world and your buyer will control what content they consume and how they navigate your website. Because of this, your website design should be focused on what content your users want to see and how they navigate your site.
Typically, the language used on websites can be very ego centric in attempt to get as much information about your company across to the audience e.g. how many awards the business has won, how long it’s been established and what big clients you have worked with. Sure, prospects who are further down the buying journey will want to know this stuff, but honestly, your customers and prospects are generally more interested in how you can help them and the fact you understand their pain points and needs.
Making this information easy to find on the website is crucial and designing your site structure around this is the only way you will be able to speak to your audience directly. But remember, a good website is never ‘finished’. Split testing and reviewing site stats on a regular basis will enable you to constantly improve your website in conjunction with what your audience want and not what you think might work.
Landing Page First
So we’ve covered the fact that this is now a buyer’s world. Your website users now have all the power and all you can do is try and keep up with their demands so your website is as easy to use as possible.
Landing pages are becoming increasingly important as a result of this. Once upon a time the only real way an internet user would enter you site is through the homepage. But with Google’s advanced search and an algorithm based around finding the most relevant answers for users, landing pages are now a more likely point of entry and often more likely to convert users into customers.
Make sure you’re investing time into your landing pages and not just designing them but split testing them too! Regularly reviewing the conversion rate of your landing pages and identifying ways to potentially improve them is time well spent. Especially if you’re running lengthily campaigns.
HubSpot has a great guide to Landing Page Best Practices if you are a beginner (3).
Use Numbers to Prove Your Worth
With the average person consuming up to 5000 ads and marketing messages a day, our tolerance and attention span is decreasing (1). In fact, your website only has 7 seconds to make an impact with a user. In this time they will decide whether you are the right provider for them and potentially whether or not to embark on a buying journey with you. That 7 seconds is undeniably important.
Trying to convey what your business does, what you have achieved and essentially why prospects should chose you over competitors is difficult to do in just 7 seconds. But using numbers to prove your worth can be a great way of doing this. It’s snappy, memorable and will resonate much better than a wall of text explaining how great you are.
This is something we have very recently adopted ourselves, take a look at our home page!
Video
The saying goes ‘A Picture Paints a Thousand Words’, and if this is the case imagine how many words a video paints? Suddenly, you are able to fit a lot more into that 7 seconds we mentioned earlier.
90% of internet users say that video helps them make a decision to buy, and there is so much you can do with video: Business Overviews; How To Guides; Recruitment Videos, the possibilities really are endless. It not only allows you to make the most of the 7 seconds you have to make an impression, it also allows you to get vital information about your business, products or services across to your audience visually.
Video content is also easily shared, you only have to scroll through your Facebook feed to see that around 90% of it is filled with video and often these have a healthy amount of engagement. Encouraging your users to share videos as well as engage with them will only increase your reach.
Another benefit of using video on your website is that Google loves it. It allows you to tap into the second largest search engine (YouTube), increase time on page both of which are in Google’s interest.
Really, there’s no reason to not be using video on your website!
Of course there are other website redesign trends out there that also need adopting e.g. Infinite Scrolling, Growth Driven Design and Minimalistic Design, but we will save those for another day…
If you would like to learn more about B2B website design or even help specifying a project why not get in touch/attend our next event.
References
- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cutting-through-advertising-clutter/
- https://www.tributemedia.com/blog/you-have-7-seconds-what-a-visitor-should-know-about-your-website-within-moments
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/7-landing-page-design-tips
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/02/mobile-web-browsing-desktop-smartphones-tablets
