When making purchase decisions in the B2B landscape, logic typically trumps emotion (though some may debate this). Given the large price tag that comes with many solutions and services, buyers perform extensive research on a vendor before initiating any contact.
B2B buyers want to ensure that a vendor is credible, trustworthy and speaks directly to their business’ needs before making the investment. They need to be convinced that your solution is the best fit. And with numerous vendors to choose from — all who may offer seemingly similar solutions to the next — brands need to clearly communicate their value proposition, competitive differentiators and credibility to prospects in a helpful, compelling way.
This is where websites become invaluable. Your website is your digital storefront — a critically important representation of your brand that greatly influences prospects’ impression of you. Therefore providing a frictionless user experience (UX) is crucial for your demand generation strategy.
What Is UX?
UX largely comprises an organization’s digital interface, which should aim to improve the quality of the user’s interaction with, and perceptions of, the organization’s brand and offerings. Your visitors are your future customers, so creating a great user experience starts with your website.
Think about the reasons why visitors go to your website in the first place. Ask yourself: What are they looking for specifically? How do you want them to perceive your brand? What action(s) do you want them to take after they’ve landed on your website?
Various factors can influence your user experience. User experience pioneer Peter Morville states that to create a truly meaningful UX, the information and content on your website should be:
- Valuable
- Usable
- Useful
- Desirable
- Findable
- Accessible
- Credible
Here are three website elements B2B organizations are leveraging to dominate the UX game — and how you can use intent data to support them.
Related Article: Why Your Website Is Key to Accelerating Digital Transformation
1. Seamless Navigation and Conversion Paths
B2B organizations often have an extensive range of products and solutions, serving a multitude of target audiences. This can result in a labyrinth of webpages and supporting landing pages, making it difficult for users to find what they need. If prospects are unable to quickly find what they’re looking for, they won’t waste their time. According to MarketingProfs, 37% of prospects will move away from a vendor website if it has poor navigation.
Drupal, provider of many content management solutions, avoids this by building customer journeys that reduce friction, seamlessly nurturing users down the funnel. It understand its target audiences, has mapped out unique paths each group/segment will most likely take, and created relevant, personalized content.
On the homepage, Drupal organizes its various products and services into categories: job function, industry and product feature. This not only helps visitors identify the most applicable products/services for them, but it also allows them to choose how they want to navigate around content and offerings.
When a visitor clicks to learn more, they’re brought to the product’s individual page for more details. Rather than simply expanding on the product features, Drupal includes other content like case studies and an e-book offer relevant to that specific product. Those who click on a case study are more likely to have a conversation than those who chose the e-book, as they have indicated interest beyond wanting the educational content at that point.
If the user wants to view a case study, they’ll be happy to find that this content is not gated. If they read through the page’s content — which shows higher intent — they’ll find a form at the bottom asking them if they’d like to be contacted by a rep and will be more likely to convert.
How intent data can help: Intent data can reveal useful insights for creating user paths that convert. By allowing B2B marketers to analyze target accounts’ external research activities alongside your current customers’ typical buyer journey, intent data can help B2B marketers select the right messages and content to use with specific segments at different funnel stages, and organize various paths to conversion accordingly. Moreover, intent signals can be used to help score target accounts and leads.
Related Article: What Separates Intent Data Success From Underwhelming Results? Actionability
2. Educational Content
Shopify is an ecommerce platform that mainly targets small business owners trying to launch their first online store — and it knows its customers. The Shopify website does a phenomenal job of providing educational content and tools to help small businesses grow.
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Starting a business can be overwhelming. To help ease the pain, Shopify positions itself as a trusted resource for its customers who it knows are mostly beginners. The homepage aims to educate and urges users to continue learning more by including many (subtle) links that will lead them to more helpful content.
How intent data can help: Knowing what information your prospects are seeking out is important for building an effective demand gen strategy. The best B2B brands go beyond providing content that relates to their own solutions; they create a range of resources focused on helping their prospects and customers increase their overall productivity and happiness (e.g., getting more done with less effort).
Intent data can help here as well. By revealing what your target audiences are most concerned with, the solutions they’re interested in, and why, intent data can provide a roadmap of the types of resources you should be developing for them.
Related Article: How to Use Intent Data to Improve Your Customer's Experience
3. Informative Videos
While this can easily be understood as a subset of educational content, the fact that video marketing continues to grow at an exponential rate makes it important to treat it as a separate entity. According to Demand Gen Report, 72% of customers prefer learning about a product or service through a video. It’s no longer just smart to invest in video, it’s becoming a must.
Qualtrics, an online survey platform, does a great job of leveraging video to provide a UX that hits many of the above-listed criteria. Its website is highly interactive and makes heavy use of video to communicate product demonstrations, customer testimonials and more.
Using video not only makes your content more digestible, but it has also proven to drastically increase online engagement and, therefore, conversion rates … when used properly.
For example, next to the four videos above are brief descriptions to let the user know exactly what they can expect. The design itself is also effective —the colors reinforce brand consistency and small thumbnails with high-res images allow for a faster load time.
How intent data can help: Through adept topic and keyword research, B2B marketers can use intent data to identify the types of videos most likely to resonate with your target audiences.
For example, let’s say intent signals are increasingly showing that a large percentage of your target accounts is actively researching your solutions as well as those of one of your specific competitors. This is a great indication that you may want to create and publish videos that highlight your solutions’ strengths over those of that specific competitor.
Website experiences are increasingly critical among B2B marketing strategies. And while most marketers focus on the benefits of intent data around advertising and account prioritization for sales, they shouldn’t overlook the ways intent can support the website user experience.
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