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Good vs. Bad B2B Websites

I just got back from a B2B trade show in Las Vegas, representing the publishing company where I work, to sell our online products to our B2B customers. As part of my research of each customer, I visited their website to see what their Internet presence looked like. I looked at about a dozen websites, which ran the gambit from pretty good to not very good at all (ok I’m being a little nice – some were pretty bad).

What was the difference between the good sites and the bad sites? Whether they are customer-centric or company-centric. Customer-centric sites recognize that B2B customers come to a website to do research for a buying decision or to find service or support for products they’ve already purchased. These sites provide white papers, in-depth product descriptions, training, service and support. Most importantly, it is easy for a customer to find exactly what they are looking for through good web design (usability) and search functionality.

As shown in our previously discussed research from American Business Media and the Washington Post, and confirmed in research from the Nielson Norman Group, B2B Decision Makers use the web to conduct research for buying decisions. According to the Nielson Norman Group research, B2B websites measured a mere 58% success rate, compared to the 66% for mainstream websites (this is success of the website visitors being able to accomplish their goals in visiting).

How do you become a customer-centric website or improve your customer experience?

Finding What They Need
Think about what your customers may be looking for when they come to your website. Taking a look at your analytics to see what keywords are used to enter the site from search engines and what paths visitors take through your website can give you valuable insight on what information you need to provide or make easier to find. If you have an internal search function, take a look at what visitors are searching for through it as well. Visitors often turn to a search when they cannot find what they’re looking for on the homepage or menus.

Organization
Organize the information on your website in a logical, easy-to-find manner. Place top level menu links on every single page of your website. These top level links should be descriptive and easy to understand (ex. Home, Products, Services, Help). Your homepage can contain a lot of information, but make sure there is enough white space for eyes to easily scan through it for important points. Product or Service pages should include everything needed to make a purchase decision, including a ballpark price and detailed specifications.

Purchasing
Once a visitor has made a decision to purchase (or to get the final information before purchase), it should be easy for them to find your contact information. Placing information on every Product and Service page (or even on every page of the website) and having a Contact page puts the information right in front of their fingers. Provide both a phone number and an email address since some customers are very busy and email is easier for them. If you do have products with fixed prices, consider an eCommerce solution with a shopping cart to allow your customers to make a purchase as easily as possible.

Support and Loyalty
Make your website a place your existing customers can use by providing information and training about your products, including white papers, spec sheets, webinars, podcasts and training videos. Adding community to your website through forums, comments and blogs can help you connect with your customers and provide valuable feedback through direct communication. Embrace any customers who post about problems by addressing their concerns in a fair manner. Use their insight to improve your product and your customers will feel more loyalty to your brand.

Good B2B websites focus on customer-centric designs to fulfill the needs of their customers who in turn will be more satisfied and loyal.

Need Help with Your B2B Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

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Video for B2B Websites

Video can have powerful impact for your business. You are probably aware of video on major consumer websites such as the New York Times, MSN, CNN or video sharing sites such as YouTube. Video that provides information to your customers helps establish credibility in for your knowledge and expertise.

Content
Information that is valuable to your customers, such as how-to, training, or news updates will be best received. Videos are more likely to be watched if they are short: 2-3 minutes at the most. If you have more information, split it up into separate videos. Quality of the video does not have to be perfect. Thanks to sites like YouTube, Internet viewers accept lower-quality pictures. Investing in a good mic and making sure the lighting is adequate are worthwhile.

Technical
Videos can be in many formats, including Windows Streaming Media (WMV), Quicktime (QT), avi, mpg, mpeg, and Flash Streaming (FLV). I prefer Flash because most people have the plugin already installed and it has good compression (quicker to download). For Windows, there are several relatively inexpensive video software packages to try: Adobe Premiere Elements, ROXIO Easy Media Creator and Ulead Video Studio. All new Macs come with iMovie. Hosting a popular video can eat up your alloted bandwidth so you may want to consider having video hosted elsewhere, such as YouTube, which has disadvantages as a consumer-oriented site, or Cache-fly.

Promotional
If you’ve spent the time and effort to produce a video (even if its only one), you’ll get the more response if you promote it in ways other than just posting it on your website. Consider an email or an eblast to your customers letting them know about it (check with anti-spam regulations). Ads linking to the video on your search engine marketing programs and B2B publications can also help with visibility. If you post the video on YouTube, it will be included in their searches (which are mostly consumer based).

Measurement
How do you tell if your video has been successful? Your analytics program should be able to tell you how many people have viewed the video (at least to start it). Tracking whether they have watched it all the way through is more difficult and requires more advanced (and expensive) software. Keep in mind that if you pre-download the video to allow for faster viewing, that may count a view for every load – not necessarily when people are clicking on it.

Once you’ve created a few, using video to increase your credibility and image can be very rewarding (and hopefully fun).

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Measuring Your Success in the B2B Marketplace

You have a spiffy website with engaging content organized in an easy-to-find manner. How do you know what is and isn’t working on your website? Where are your visitors coming from?

Analytics. Otherwise known as web statistics. There are three types of basic information for a website: page views, visits, and unique visitors. Page views are the number of web pages viewed on your website. Visits are the number times people visit the website. They can view multiple pages (page views) each visit. Unique visitors are the number of people who visit the website (usually as near as possible to ascertain).

There are a lot of packages out there: Omniture, Web Trends, Unica, Coremetrics, VisiStat, Google to name a few. The type of information they offer is wide ranging and so are the prices. How they gather stats can also be quite different, but there are two general camps: log-based, or tag-based.

Log-based packages:
Log-based packages take all of the logs from your web servers and crawl through them periodically to count up all the stats from your website. These logs usually contain all the traffic that comes to your website including search engine crawlers and bots. Search engine crawlers and bots are computers which visit and index your site, usually for purposes of adding you to the listings on their own website. This can be good for getting your website out in front of potential customers but it doesn’t tell you what the people who visit your site are doing. Most packages get around this by having a list of bots and crawlers to ignore in the stats – keeping this up to date can be a bit of work. Due to having to crawl through logs for stats, these stats packages usually cannot report ‘live’ data. They are usually at least a few hours behind.

Tag-based packages:
Tag-based packages work by placing a bit of code on all the pages on your site. When a visitor visits your site, this code activates and updates a count on your stats server. Most tag-based software is coded in such a way that automatically ignores all search engine and bot traffic. They may also ignore real traffic from people who have security software or a firewall that blocks the code – but this is usually a very small portion of your traffic. Many software providers have ways around this limitation by using tiny images instead. Tag-based packages can often deliver real-time stats.

Which to choose?
I’ve been using both types of packages for stats at the publishing company: Unica Web Analytics – log based and Google Analytics – tag based. My preference has been for the Google stats because we have a lot of difficulty keeping the search engine crawler and bots filter list up to date. Google analytics is easy to install and use and it is hosted so they keep the software up to date. The disadvantage to Google is that it is very difficult to get your stats out of it if you want to use them in another application for data mining purposes (we’re actually looking an Urchin which was bought by Google for this purpose). There are also some packages which use a combination of both methods. These can provide the advantages of both and negate most of the disadvantages, although they tend to be more expensive.

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