What requirements a modern B2B website must meet

The demands placed on websites by companies in the B2B sector have continued to rise over the past two years. Users of the very heterogeneous target groups now expect a website to provide comprehensive product data that can be found easily and quickly, personalized information, and tailored tools for their efficient work. Increasingly, customers or their fiduciaries are not only looking for inspiration, suitable products and services on their own initiative through online research in the initial phase of a purchase decision, but online information and services are also playing an increasingly important role in later phases of order initiation and execution. In the current B2B Buyers Survey Report 2021, the high importance of the rapid provision of relevant online information is particularly clear. When asked about the three main criteria that B2B customers look for on a company website, simple and quick access to relevant content and quick access to conditions and price information were named.

Customers are increasingly deciding whether to work with vendors on a project based on these experiences. Providers who do not provide the desired data in the same breadth, quality and transparency as the competition are at a clear disadvantage. Corporate websites of B2B companies must therefore change from pure image and communication platforms to functional target group-specific hubs.

What does hub mean?

A functional hub can be defined as the expansion of a website into a platform with various digital offerings and services. The website acts as an easy-to-use front end for a database, as well as an offering platform for useful software tools and other relevant content such as image data, videos and other formats. For companies, this means enormous additional challenges. They have to invest more capacity and effort in the expansion of their websites and the constant updating of these new services. The data is usually already available in the company’s various databases, but these data records have to be made available in a clean and up-to-date structured and segmented manner, and new interfaces to the internal database systems have to be programmed for this purpose. Several departments often have to be involved in setting up the hub internally with various relevant data, which greatly increases the coordination effort required to create a new website.

Another building block for an enhanced user experience is the provision of personalized information for each individual user. To ensure this, it is necessary to link the order and customer-related data records to the front end of the website and make them visible to the individual user via a personalized log-in. In this way, the user increasingly accesses data that was previously reserved exclusively for the company internally. Such information can be, for example, the status of an order processing, information about past orders or the latest downloads. Users already know and appreciate this type of information from B2C e-commerce and it is increasingly finding its way into the B2B world. For companies, there is often the challenge of deciding which offers and services are freely available and which are placed behind a log-in. It seems that there is always a competitor who provides more freely accessible data.

For key product data, several click paths should lead quickly to the target

Data records of a company’s most important products should even be able to be accessed by the target groups on several paths on a modern website to ensure that they can reach the desired data records clearly and quickly depending on the entry point. One or two click paths too many can already generate significantly higher abandonment rates. In the design phase of a new website, key stakeholders should therefore take a very close look at customer journeys and optimize them in several incremental steps. In the final phase of the conception, valuable statements from test persons should then ideally be included via A/B testing, i.e. the comparison of two options of a certain part of a website in each case.

The contact form becomes a discontinued model

It has become much more important for companies to guide target groups transparently and quickly from the homepage to digital services. New prospects, on the other hand, are usually introduced to the products and services on campaign-related landing pages. Here, it can be legitimate to want to generate a digital marketing lead, where customers can opt for access to extended information, a callback or direct contact with a sales employee via a set CTA (Call To Action) by providing personal data. However, this form of quick customer data acquisition by companies is on the decline.

When was the last time you filled out a contact form that would fill an entire DIN A4 page if printed out? It was probably a long time ago – yet many customer journeys still lead to these exit rate monsters. Feel free to write us a comment about your experience!

For a contact form, really crucial additional content with real added value has to be delivered to justify this effort. If this hurdle is built up to get regular business information, potential customers are more likely to look around at the competition.

Conclusion

Corporate websites continue to function as an image-shaping overall platform, but the importance of a neatly styled web presence has declined in the past 2-3 years and is giving way to a more functionally driven approach. As a result, more and more so-called headless systems are being used for content management, which are more flexible when it comes to integrating a wide range of content. In contrast, decentralized touchpoints such as the company’s own social media accounts, on which the manufacturers play out brand-relevant content to the target groups, are more image-building.

Contact us if you need professional expertise in the conception of a new corporate website, we will be happy to support you!