What effect does the look and feel of your website have on visitors? Both the design and the copy on your site can meaningfully influence potential buyers, for better or worse. To maximize your lead generation efforts, your business needs to optimize every aspect of your website, front end and back.
For inspiration, take a look at these effective B2B sites:
Project management tool Basecamp’s website messaging is direct and clear. Copy and design elements are minimal, allowing the functionality of the product to shine. The site is branded through the use of its quirky illustration style and logo, incorporates calls to action throughout the home page, and packs in plenty of information without becoming cluttered. There’s a good deal of white space on each page, the text is large enough to read easily, and the calls-to-action are emphasized in the design.
Basecamp’s design shows that it’s possible to retain a quirky sense of humor in web design without compromising content and functionality. The site’s simple project management process is easy to follow, and the design compliments the user experience. As an added bonus, the mobile app is similarly optimized and retains the user-friendly functionality found on desktop.
Basecamp has one B2B product; GE has many. With products spanning industries as diverse as energy, healthcare and mining, GE’s website needs to display a lot of information in a clean, readable way. The GE B2B homepage is laid out with attractive tiles displaying a photo and brief text about each practice area. It’s easy to navigate, and the tiles expand into practice area-specific sites complete with detailed case studies.
Why is this site successful? While there is a wealth of information present, it is laid out and arranged in a fashion that doesn’t overwhelm the visitor. It also uses images and copy that tells a story, personalizing GE’s products and drawing the website visitor further into the content. GE for Business has refuted the notion that B2B marketing has to be boring; instead, the brand uses their website to humanize what they do.
When Movéo worked with Abbott Labs on the Labs Are Vital initiative, we created the Labs Are Vital website to showcase the importance of laboratories to the practice of evidence-based medicine. Our goal was to move the laboratory from “out of the basement and into the boardroom,” spotlighting the lab’s role in influencing healthcare decisionmaking. We reflected this not only in the slogan of the campaign, but also in the “vital” design of the website. Since the Labs Are Vital project is largely about building a community around laboratory medicine, events and social updates are prominently displayed. The site is optimized for mobile use, so it’s suited to reading news on the go.
There is no tried and true formula for optimizing the design and content of your site because every audience has unique needs and every business has a unique set of goals. These high-performing sites will give you inspiration, but to truly maximize your site’s performance, you should A/B test everything you can and keep an eye on analytics so you can maximize what works and eliminate what doesn’t.
Photo credit Sebastiaan ter Burg via Flickr Creative Commons
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