B2B Marketers: Is Your Website Working Hard Enough?
If you’re a B2C company like Amazon or Nordstrom, your website is your storefront. Consumers come to your site with the intent to purchase. Without a highly usable design, you’re missing out on a lot of revenue.
If you’re in the B2B space, it’s time to start thinking about your website the same way B2C companies do. Your website should be your most efficient and effective sales and marketing channel.
At Domo, it is certainly ours. A significant portion of our revenue originates with leads from our website and more than 99 percent of prospects check it out at some point in the buying cycle. That’s some pretty telling data. Given that we spend the biggest chunk of our marketing budget to get people there, we’re intent on making sure the website is working as hard as it can.
With that in mind, today we unveiled a new website to make it easier for customers to connect with us. We’re optimizing the user experience through a new design and an underlying infrastructure that will get prospects what they want more quickly, and effectively scale as our business expands.
For us, the new design isn’t about a new look. It is about delivering a better experience, improving conversions and driving more revenue.
If you’re a B2B company, it’s never too late to turn your website into a high-performing sales and marketing asset. When we started this process, here were the major considerations that influenced our decisions:
Design by Data. Over the last several months, we’ve been testing numerous landing pages. We found that the conversion rates doubled for certain pages over the others. So we adopted the design cues from those top-performing pages into the look and layout of the new website. Data is your friend – use it.
Mobile First. Since our product is designed “mobile-first” – it only makes sense that our website is too. As a result, we’re making it more accessible to mobile users through responsive design. Our goal is to give prospects a familiar experience whether they are coming to us via the desktop, a smartphone or tablet. With the rapid shift to mobile computing, a mobile-friendly design is a must, not a nice to have.
Usability. This new, cleaner feel is more intuitive and more in line with what customers expect from Domo in general. As a data-driven company, we’ll continue to make improvements to the site as the data dictates.
Content is King. In today’s world of content-driven marketing, we’re ready for a more flexible CMS system that can scale with us and support a growing number of users. Most of our employees who produce content aren’t developers, which means our CMS also had to be simple to use. To most, website infrastructure isn’t as exciting as the front end, but it’s critical.
Business is Global. Today the majority of our customers are in North America. However, we are selling internationally and it’s a given that we’ll aggressively grow our business internationally. This means our infrastructure needs to have the chops to grow with us and can easily support localization for new markets.
While the above points went into our redesign, there’s one more important lesson to take from B2C: B2C knows that a website is never “done” – follow your data and continuously refine.
Your website should be a killer marketing and sales machine. It has been a significant revenue source for Domo, and it will be even more important going forward.
Here’s to taking the next step.
knows a thing or two about Idioms, Ghost writing and Rainmakers
8yVery well expressed!!
Digital Content Management | Digital Project Management | Social Media | Email Marketing | Drupal
10yCan I get a "AY-MEN"! There is no such thing as "set it and forget it" when it comes to online media today. B2B enterprises have to work even harder at getting their message out. Personal relationships can be enhanced and extended online and mobile presentations are no longer optional. Don't get me started on mobile businesses who don't have a mobile-optimized website....
Partner/VP at CoDev
10yThanks Josh! This is a great reminder about the power of an effective website. A website should go hand in hand in your sales efforts and should be a key focus of your overall marketing strategy. The key, as described in your article is tracking the data and then optimizing areas as needed.
Internet Marketing Specialist at Legacy Glass Block
10yThe new site looks great Josh James! B2B sales requires more then a credit card, it usually requires a relationship first. But the relationship will never develop if they can't get past a sub-par or in-effective salesman (The salesman being your business website).