Make your B2B website suck less by Burns Marketing

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Make your B2B website suck less 5 opportunities for web excellence

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Let’s get real: Who loves their own website? That’s right. Damn near nobody. The reasons are obvious enough. Despite all the time, money, and “working groups” we throw at our websites, they can feel incomplete or disjointed. Often, we struggle to say anything particularly useful on our sites, and we muddy them with bells and whistles to the point that they’re unnavigable. We don’t spend enough time with SEO to make them findable. The list goes on. In B2B, people are essentially practical. Users, whether they’re established leads or just Internet lurkers, want your site to answer their important questions and solve their problems. Then they want you to give them reason to act. Simple as that. This eBook is organized around five actions and approaches that can breathe life into your website right now – without sucking up a whole lot of resources. Just like becoming a great pitcher or learning the ukulele, you’re 90 percent of the way there if you can get the fundamentals right and practice them regularly. Resist bandwagons, folks. Here, we’re going to introduce those fundamentals so you can do several things: • Mitigate the cost of building and rebuilding and rebuilding your website. • Save precious time so you can devote it to innovating and becoming a better company. • Help create brand integrity and allegiance among your users.

CONTENTS

Opportunity 1 Start with problems and desires. Opportunity 2 Stop offering so damn much content. Opportunity 3 Give your UX a dose of science. Opportunity 4 O your SEO. Opportunity 5 Make sure your conversions arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually diversions. Case study See how SleepImage turned a sleepy brand into a bold online presence.

Start with customers’ problems and desires.

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Rule Number One: You’re not writing your website for your CIO; you’re writing it for your audience. At the outset, you need to think like an editor, not a technologist. Your messages, however carefully crafted, won’t hit the mark unless they speak to customers’ needs, pain points, and desires. These needs and pain points are probably clear if you’ve ever done a meaningful brand audit or audience assessment, and they should provide you with a mental filter anytime you’re writing something new:

Why does this audience care? Am I solving a problem or just pontificating? Is this stuff really distinctive? Maybe most of all: Is this jargonny crap ever going to be

read by a human? If you can’t force yourself to embrace this kind of clarity and purposefulness, your customers will happily click away to the other guys’ site. Enlist your writers’ creative brains here: What’s your customers’ story? What’s at stake for them? What positive, victorious outcome will slip away if they don’t convert with you?

A word about desire We don’t always acknowledge it in B2B, but we’re emotional beings. The rational side of our brains only gets us so far in decisionmaking – even if we’re considering something that seems coldly practical, like hypervisors or cloud services. In web writing, facts give people a sense of task completion, but emotion moves them to act.

In the current era of “made for me” content, it’s ideal for you to target. Many companies use personas for this. In fact, you should aspire to be so targeted that your site feels like it was created just for your key audience members. Consider whether now is the time to (re)explore personalized content based on user roles and other discernible customer traits.

Data says... Question:

“If a company personalizes your experience and the information on their website by catering to your specific interests/ preferences, how much more likely are you to do the following?” Answer1:

50% Return to website

46%

38%

Buy products/services from website

Recommend the website to others

33%

Make purchases in-store

Super bonus: Read our earlier eBook, Building Online Audiences, for more detail on how to pivot toward your real audience and politely move past those that don’t matter to your business.

In B2B web writing, facts give people a sense of task completion, but emotion moves them to act.

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Blue Research

What can you do right now? ACT NOW

Build your content for personas. Define your primary, secondary, and tertiary demographics and create personas based on their goals and motivations. Make sure theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re based on pain points and business needs, not useless demographics like city, hair color, and number of dogs owned. Put those personas to use by writing and structuring your website so barriers to entry are low and conversions are high.

Map your sales funnel/customer journey. By defining the different stages leading to conversion, you can envision the state of mind people will approach your website with, which allows you to purposefully change specific interactions and get to the point with your content.

Build a long-term content plan. In all likelihood, your website is only one arm of your outreach strategy. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll need to come up with integrated messaging and a plan for disseminating these messages. Start by thinking about your key media types (web, blog, print, podcasts, etc.) and how they complement each other.

Stop offering so damn much content.

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Most web users, essentially, are fickle pains in the ass. We have no time, and even less attention. We’re much too busy and important to read full paragraphs. Science knows it’s true. Our friends across the pond at The Telegraph recently reported2 on a study showing that smart phone-equipped humans have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

This space intentionally left blank. (We’re opting for brevity.)

Goldfish, people. This leaves us with an important realization: Although it’s tempting to jam in a bunch of key messages – “just so we don’t miss anyone” – that’s a destructive strategy. It’s best to distill, focus, aim, and resist fluff. This is crucial to any kind of writing, but nowhere is it more consequential than on the web. To avoid visitors bouncing from your site – and to get Google to reward you for offering valuable content – ensure that your website copy is clear, concise, easy-to-consume, and compelling. Chunk your content so anyone scanning the page can get hooked by a bullet point, pull quote, or graphic. And if you can scroll to a point on a page where you only see paragraphs, you need to cut content or reconsider your page design.

If you can scroll to a point on a page where you see only paragraphs, you need to cut content or reconsider your page design.

Leon Watson. “Humans have shorter attention spans than goldfish, thanks to smartphones.” The Telegraph, May 15, 2015.

How Google rewards good content Google is startlingly intelligent. Maybe that freaks you out, or maybe it makes you grin. Either way, our lives are largely scripted for us by our favorite search engine’s content curation. With the growth of semantic search, Google and the other engines are able to better understand the context of our content. In other words, we no longer need to create content that repeats the same terms over and over so they appear relevant to search queries. Our content is now reviewed differently, and the grouping and patterns of terms are what serve as signals to search engines. They’re getting so smart these days that Google’s machine learning system, RankBrain, is scouring the Internet, always learning and providing input on where sites should be ranked. Yes, you can plausibly call this artificial intelligence. Like it or not, the future is now.

[This space intentionally left blank. No, seriously, more content is not necessarily better content.]

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What can you do right now? ACT NOW

Write for the goldfish. • Studies show that users give websites five seconds for a first impression before deciding whether to leave. A wall of text takes more than five seconds to weed through. So did this bullet point for that matter. • Cut your copy in half. Seriously. This eBook started out with nine sections, not five. You’re welcome.

Respect your visitors. Visitors choose to come to your site – and they’re judicious with the time they’ll give you. Provide content that draws their scanning eyes, like infographics, images, and punchy bullets. Otherwise, they’ll look for the door.

A/B test. A/B testing allows you to assess your hooks. Provide copy variations, and see what performs best. The best approach might not be what you’d consider intuitive (remember, you’re not writing for yourself).

Give your UX a dose of science.

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Many websites’ user interfaces and organization leave people lost and abandoned. Part of that is web-generational. Many websites were built three to five years ago; they’re reasonably functional but have had content and features stacked onto them over the years with little or no housekeeping. They’re like your aunt’s turkey dinner: not awful, but they haven’t exactly evolved with the times. When Burns Marketing does a website for a client, two of the biggest opportunities we often find are reorganization and navigation. It’s mind-blowing how much old content is sucking up server space but never gets seen by human beings. When you jump a generation in design, you’re not just getting pretty pictures and buttons; you’re also getting modern organization. If your user interface is a mishmash of a dozen menus, or if it lacks contemporary intuitiveness and direction, neither users’ needs nor your business goals are served. Get it right, and you’ll see higher conversion and retention rates.

Let us split some hairs. Developers and commentators frequently refer to “a site’s UX” as if UX is a tangible quality – a noun that your site either does or doesn’t have. But UX is more like a verb, or action. It’s an intangible design strategy that includes tangible elements like a user interface and an organization hierarchy.

Naturally, if content marketing is part of your brand’s revenue model, the content has to be easily accessible. Pump the brakes if people who are paying for this content (subscription model) can’t locate it, or if it’s all so gated that even Google can’t get in. Mobile is required, except when it’s not. in most cases, mobile is obligatory, but a fraction of businesses still serve customers who don’t need it. So ask yourself: Is mobile functionality really an ante for me, or am I doing it because everyone else is? Thinking hard about this will help you clarify your mobile strategy.

Mobilizing for mobile Mobile website traffic has finally surpassed desktop use. As of mid-2015, “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the U.S. and Japan.”3 Now more than ever, a mobile-compatible website isn’t really an option; it’s an ante to play the game. The latest data shows that mobile digital media time in the U.S. is significantly higher (51-percent) than desktop (42-percent).4 Without a mobile website or app, businesses risk missing more customers who are on the go (or, just as likely, on their living room couch). Email campaigns that bring users back to lackluster websites are especially conspicuous, since a poor mobile experience is enough to permanently dissuade a prospect. The days of mobile meaning 320x480 screens are long gone. 72 pixels per inch? That’s out the window, too. Content should be like liquid, accommodating all screen sizes.

Ignorance is bliss. There’s an expression among UX experts that “ignorance is better than knowing.” What they mean is that it’s better to design your site to be accessible to anyone (ignorant of who’s looking) than be limited to a certain audience. Remember that accessibility isn’t the same thing as content: You want your UX strategy to offer wide accessibility, while your content should be laser-focused.

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Greg Sterling. “It’s Official: Google Says More Searches Now On Mobile Than On Desktop.” SearchEngineLand, May 5, 2015.

4 Daniel Bosomworth. “Statistics on mobile usage and adoption to inform your mobile marketing strategy.” Smart Insights, 2015.

What can you do right now? ACT NOW

Design for clarity, not gadgetry. Make your site pleasant to use, and watch for feature creep. Each link or action available on the site might seem like user empowerment, but usually it just increases complexity.

Make it so people don’t know they’re navigating. While look and feel is undeniably important, function lies at the core of UX. The best navigation is intuitive to the point of being almost invisible. A typical B2B user will often choose a generic-looking site that’s easy to navigate over a beautiful site that is harder to use. Make it beautiful only to the extent that it doesn’t compromise ease of use.

Perform a simple Google audit5 for mobile friendliness to fix potential issues. Question yourself through quality assurance to ensure mobile users will get what they want: • Are all actions touch-friendly? • Are you utilizing appropriate gestures like swipes, long taps, etc.? • Are hover states used purposefully, or are they just pretty features that impede use?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

O your SEO.

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Like it or not, Google is one of your most important audience members. That’s why your search engine optimization needs to be… optimized. If you’re like most organizations, your organic SEO efforts were an afterthought. It could be you didn’t have the cash on hand to do it right, or your decision-makers were more interested in fonts than on actually making the site work. (We’re looking at you, executive team.) Or, like many of us, your first priority was just getting the site live. Two things: • You need to take time on the front end to set SEO up right. • SEO is ongoing – you don’t finish it. Hurrying SEO is a mistake. If you’ve read the preceding pages, you know that shiny gadgets don’t make people convert, and being diligent about the fundamentals will make you win in the end. In a similar way, sprinting to rollout isn’t always in your longterm interest. Think about this: On average, we conduct 105 billion searches per month worldwide, and around 12 billion of those searches are on the web in the U.S.6 We don’t find content because we’re good searchers; we find content because Google pushes it to us based on how well thatcontent competes.

Comscore, December 2014.

We don’t find content because we’re good searchers; we find content because Google pushes it to us based on how well that content competes.

Engines of business7

93%

93-pecent of online experiences begin with a search engine.

up to

70%

Google owns up to 70-percent of the search engine market share.

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70-80%

70- to 80- percent of users ignore paid ads in favor of organic results.

75%

75-percent of users never go past the first page of search results.

https://www.imforza.com/blog/8-seo-stats-that-are-hard-to-ignore/

What can you do right now? ACT NOW

Do as much research as you can. Go in depth with your keyword research and pull as much data as possible. Blend your creative process with data to create content that resontates with users and ensures the engines understand what you’re talking about.

Thank your PR team. PR and positive press aren’t just good for human readers; search engines pick up on the happy buzz as well. So remind your writers that they don’t have to become technocrats – they can keep telling compelling, human stories.

Update. Update. Technical SEO is a big deal at the beginning of a site build or overhaul, but the people who get all the hits are the ones who constantly monitor and change after a deployment. Think of the apps on your phone and accept that system updates are a part of life – except with SEO, there’s no auto-update.

Eliminate conversion diversions.

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Your website’s content should help the user know what to do next. And that includes, obviously, completing a conversion task. But that’s the key idea: converting is a task, and it requires people to move around the Internet for you. So be careful about how much you ask people to do. They probably won’t do much. A conversion has two parts: 1) the transaction itself, and 2) the linking or transportation to get there. When it comes to landing pages and conversion forms, users need to feel they’re getting something, not giving something. This need is often ignored. Effective landing pages have a useful reward behind them; poor ones are just another barrier. When you’re building the page, offer only enough information so readers understand your main points. Don’t fatigue them. Focus exclusively on the carrot. Link building is a complementary skill, and it goes beyond throwing some blue text on a page. Earning links to your site from other high-traffic websites goes a long way toward pushing you into Google search results. Search engines’ algorithms light up when other websites direct people to yours. It also gives you attributed trust, since people associate you with the established brand or resource they just came from.

Converting is a task, and it requires people to move around the Internet for you.

Link-building requires aggressiveness and patience. Engage with thought leaders in your market space to get them to share your content; create brand champions within your audience who will do it intuitively. And use content marketing to stay present with people. If you’re not visible, you’re not relevant.

How to deal with conversion forms Many businesses live and breathe by their conversion forms – but spend shockingly little time on them. Here are some tips to help make them count. Make them visible. Put your form in a column alongside your copy, or at least make sure people don’t have to scroll forever to get to it. And pay attention to design – use splashes of brand colors, texture, etc. People don’t want a glorified Excel sheet. Don’t ask people for their favorite color and SSN. Use the form only for the transaction at hand. You’ll be able to wring more information from people later; at this point, complexity is a diversion. Get creative with your buttons. As we mentioned in our previous eBook, “Building Online Audiences,” button names are a great opportunity that usually goes untapped. Don’t just label your buttons “submit” – that’s what you do when you’re on the DMV website. Call them “Download your free eBook,” or “Reserve your spot,” or “Fire all torpedoes.”

More mobile: Some no-nos • Radio buttons should not be used on touchscreen devices because of target size. • Dropdown menus with exhaustive lists of options can be frustrating.

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What can you do right now? ACT NOW

Locate calls to action wisely. Provide CTAs in the text of your content after an important, motivating point – not just at the bottom of the page. Or utilize the pages’ visual hierarchy, positioning your CTA as the logical culmination of the page’s user experience. Never make users hunt for your CTA.

Spend time crafting your forms. When creating landing page forms, ask yourself these questions: What’s the

minimum amount of information we can gather here? Is there information that can be gathered later, when the user has more invested (this is called progressive profiling)?

Date before you attempt to marry. By contributing fresh, informative content consistently through a company blog or other thought-leadership platforms, you’ll earn listings and links from other blogs and define yourself as a desirable platform for conversation. Increasingly, all this comes before conversion. Be patient.

In summary People arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t interested in using your site. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re interested in having their problems solved. The act of site use should be as invisible and non-distracting as possible. Resist the flourishes.

If you do this, your customers will have a clear view of your distilled content, clear solutions, and pleasant conversion paths. Affiliation will grow. Conversions will lead to brand attachment. You might even be able to finally stop mucking around with your website and start innovating.

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Not sleeping on it: SleepImage embraces a new website to distill messaging and convert. SleepImage’s goal is nothing less to improve our lives, and they do it by analyzing and ultimately, correcting our sleep patterns. Many of us worry about bad sleep, but few of us have any idea how to quantify what “bad” really is. SleepImage does. Using one of the most advanced algorithms and sensor packages available to clinicians, SleepImage offers consumers a wearable device that measures sleep patterns from the comfort of home. One of their central assertions is that by keeping people out of a sleep lab, they can scientifically analyze sleep without creating so much disruption that the data becomes unrepresentative of people’s normal experiences. When the FDA approved SleepImage to sell its product directly to the consumer, the company decided to revamp its messaging and create a website that markets to both healthcare professionals as well as consumers. The SleepImage project covered much of the ground included in this eBook. Their most acute needs fell into the following categories. Customers’ problems and desires In the past, clinicians were the gateway to the product; now consumers can access

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SleepImage themselves, but they still seek their clinicians’ endorsement. The new site still caters to clinicians by explaining the clinical benefits, and offering scientific studies that back up the company’s value claims. As users, clinicians expect high-level, no-B.S. content if they’re going to adopt a product or service – so that’s what SleepImage put at their fingertips. Consumers, on the other hand, are especially concerned with lifestyle benefits. We worked with company leaders to establish those consumer value propositions and messages so that consumers can see their lives improving courtesy of this product. Cutting and clarifying content In part because of its longstanding focus on lengthy, detailed clinician content, SleepImage suffered from content sprawl. We knew that consumers – and time-strapped clinicians – would respond to chunked, concise copy packaged in an engaging design. One drastic content trim session later, the site says more with 10 words than it did before with 50. Refining the user experience Sleep products tend to be associated with images of pillows, subtle colors, and calm. SleepImage, though, stands for living fully, embracing time, and making a positive change. The website redesign showcased a dramatic

transformation in the imagery and overall theme, focusing on what it really means to feel awake and rejuvenated. Elements like the modern, parallax design and animations of active lifestyles reveal an optimistic, hopeful brand voice and promise. Providing a desire for conversion The new website successfully repositioned SleepImage by cross-marketing it to both healthcare professionals and consumers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; educating, motivating, and empowering. Moreover, the SleepImage brand is no longer associated with a health problem; instead, it is now seen as a positive, proactive addition to a healthy lifestyle. The website, at least as much as the content itself, is what delivers this important message. VISIT THE SITE

Like the answers weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve given you? Burns Marketing can help you put them in place. Info@burnsmarketing.com | 970.203.9656

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