B2B Website

Part #5.1

Introduction

In the B2B space your website is key, in fact it’s one of the foundational items that underpin your entire digital marketing strategy. For many organisations, their website is the main marketing channel with many of the other channels either acting as mechanisms to support the website or rely heavily on it as part of its operation.

B2B Website Strategy

Objectives: Defining what you want your website strategy to deliver and what is important to your organisation.
User Discovery: Identifying who will be using your website, what their needs are and how they can be met.
Site Functionality: Exploring and deciding what feature set should be utilised to enable user processes.
Site Structure & UX: Defining how to organise your site to enable user flows, optimised user experiences and conversion.
Content & Design: Defining how you will attract, engage, and retain users on your website.
Measurement: Identifying objective success, general performance and opportunity.

1. Objectives

Refer back to the ‘Level 3 – Marketing Team Objectives’ (Part #1: B2B Marketing Objectives) you set and build your specific website objectives around these (along with general best-practice/secondary objectives).

2. User Discovery

Here you will need to identify what stakeholders will be using and extracting value from your website and what their underlying needs are. This will consist of a simple need’s analysis, although the level of complexity can be decided by you. Its recommended that you don’t glide over this too quickly as the more insight you can extract, the more effective your website will ultimately become.

There are multiple stakeholders/users that should be considered during your analysis:

2.1 – Internal Stakeholders/Users

Content Creators: Your in-house (or agency) marketing team who will be proactively managing the website, continually optimising its capability, and creating new content for the purposes of engaging and converting your target audiences.
Employees: Represents members from multiple departments of your organisation that could be using the site for general updates and to use as a reference point when dealing with customers or other external stakeholders.

2.2 – External Stakeholders/Users

Prospective Customers: Refers to prospective new customers (your buying personas) who will be at various stages of their buying journey. Depending on the stage they occupy, their needs could range from simple information collation on a problem they have (identification stage) all the way to booking a demonstration of your product (decision stage). Commonly this element will be the most important and you should both consider their broader needs as a whole and their needs individually at each stage in their journey (this sounds like a lot of work, but it’s worth it).
Existing Customers: Refers to current customers who occupy the ‘usage stage’ in the buying journey. This stakeholder group has a very particular need and will usually be looking for specific types of content relevant to the usage stage.
Prospective Strategic Partners: Refers to other companies who may be looking for form a collaboration or partnership with your organisation for several reasons.
Industry Media/Commentators: Refers to media and PR based entities within your core or target markets who are looking to learn more about your company and your capabilities.

2.3 – A Focus On ‘Prospective Customers’

Commonly speaking, the most important user from the above list (in terms of developing your B2B website strategy) is the ‘prospective customer’ stakeholder and subsequently one where the needs analysis can become complex. It may not be necessary to go into this amount of detail, but given they are your most important user type, you should spend some time developing your understanding of their needs. Be sure to use your buyer personas the foundation for completing this. To help visualise, see the below.

3. Site Functionality

Here you will define what functionality your site will need in terms of technical features and capabilities:

Now you have your broader website goals established and you have an understanding of what your user’s needs are (and how you can satisfy them) you can start defining what functionality your site will need in terms of technical features and capabilities. To guide this process, you can generally house all functionality requirements into three key categories:

Admin & Management: This refers to the elements that will be internal to your team and the requirements of your organisation. Items here could relate to things such as degree of modularity, scalability, analytics tool integration, security, maintainability, permissions along with platform/CMS choice.
Attract & Engage: This refers to on-site elements and back-end capabilities that allows your users to reach your site and interact with it. Items here could relate to things such as SEO capability, design, front-end interactive elements, site-speed
Retain & Convert: This refers to on-site elements and back-end capabilities that allows your users to convert on your site. Items here could relate to things such as lead capture/forms, CRM integration and chat widgets.

4. Site Structure & UX

Armed with your needs analysis and required site functionality – now it’s time to start bringing your website to life through a sitemap and page mapping.

4.1 – Sitemap

Simply put, your sitemap details your core webpages and how they will be organised – forming the basic structure of your website. The pages you decide to include within your sitemap will be guided by your user exploration/needs analysis and by your type of organisation (for example, a product-based company’s website will differ from a services-driven variant).

Your sitemap can be visually represented, and each page should purpose and value to the user. Common webpages include:

Homepage
Product Pages
Services Pages
Industries
Audiences Pages
About
Contact
Resources
Customer Success

A simple sitemap could look like this:

4.2 – Page Mapping

Now that you have planned your website pages, now it’s time to strategically plan what each will contain. To do this, refer to all of the individual needs you have identified that your users will have and map them to the most relevant page from your sitemap. Ultimately, for each page you are planning you should have a collection of needs grouped into:

Core User Needs: These are the individual needs you have previously identified from the user discovery exploration step – here you need to logically map the user needs to the most suitable page from your sitemap, then detail how these needs can be satisfied on the webpage.
Webpage Specific Needs: These are additional needs that a user is likely to have when on a particular page. Think of these as being any needs that you didn’t cover in the needs analysis but are very likely to be experienced on a certain webpage.

Once you have mapped your user’s needs against each of your website pages (along with page specific needs) and identified both how these can be satisfied and what the next step should be for the user – you core site has been fully structured.

5. Content & Design

Now you have decided your sitemap and mapped your user’s key needs to each of your website pages – now it’s time to map the module flow for each page, structure the on-page content and bring the website to life with wireframes.

5.1 – Module Mapping

To do this, refer to your page mapping in the previous section and logically assign each of the user needs to a specific section of the webpage. This will not only aid page structure but also inform you webpage wireframing in the next step. Once you have the modules mapped for each page, you can start creating your content.

5.2 SEO

This is an entire channel/topic in itself so see Part #5.2: B2B SEO.

5.3 Wireframing & Design

With most of your content created and each page fully mapped, not its time to move into the final stages of your website development with wireframing and design. These will look very similar to the previous diagram, but will include a basic interpretation of each of the modules and include some of your text content.

Once each page has been wireframed through basic illustrations, you can now design your website using your brand identity guidelines formulated in Part #3: B2B Branding.

6. Measurement

A combination of hard and soft metrics should be used to allow measurement of your primary and secondary objectives in relation to your B2B website strategy and channel. Jump to Part #8: B2B Marketing Measurement for ideas on what metrics and KPI’s you can utilise as part of your B2B website strategy.