Website effectiveness blog

Why in the world would you dream of using your company’s website for sales and marketing?

While it’s true that most companies have a website, we find that most companies treat their websites as a required “check-off” item that never gets revisited. They redesign their website, and it lives for the next 3-6 years without being changed at all.

Your website is more than a sales brochure. The potential of your website to create business for your company is real, and you should treat your website as a profit center.

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When you were in school, you learned a few hundred rules about which words go where and why, and if you wanted to pass, you had to follow those rules religiously.

You learned that a paragraph was a collection of sentences about the same basic idea, and that they started with a topic sentence followed by supporting points.

And you learned that sentences could not start with words like “and” or “but”, and they couldn’t end with a preposition like “to” or “from”, no matter who you were writing to.

But, if you read the last few paragraphs and understood what I was saying, you’ll probably be surprised to notice I broke a bunch of rules writing them, including the fact that my sixth grade English teacher would have forced me to put them all together in one paragraph.

So what’s the difference?

Well, right now, I’m writing for the web.

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Today’s post is written and shared by Winston Chenery, our Inbound Marketing Manager.

“Beware of Ceaser! He’s a floor salesman and he’s very pushy and rude. My sister and I went in to look at living room furniture and he approached us and the first thing he asked was ‘Are you buying today?’”

That quote is taken directly from a Google review of a furniture store here in town.

I just moved to the area and am in need of a new couch, so like a lot of others, I researched some furniture stores online.  After reading that review, the thought of going into a store and being immediately harassed by an overly pushy salesman who just wants you to “buy, buy, buy!” sounded terrible and deterred me from ever stepping foot in that store.

Some B2B websites suffer from being too “salesy,” while many others aren’t pushy enough. So how does your company website stack up?

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Website design offers an interesting example of how art, science and technology combine to make something functional and beautiful. But, if you’ve been involved in a website redesign, you know that art, science and technology can clash just as easily.  When you add more than one person’s opinion to the mix, you’re almost certain to run into conflict, which is why design-by-committee can make things difficult.

So what can you do to resolve internal design conflicts as they arise?

The answer is usability testing. How does it work?

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Even after your company launches a new website, there comes a time when you may need to make some large changes on your website.  When the message that you need to communicate changes, you don’t always need to take on a complete website redesign.  Iterative web design may be a better option.

The issue, then, becomes how to change the website so that the user experience is not sacrificed.  We knew we had a challenge when Virginia Urology told us that they needed some significant changes to their homepage. We share this case study with their consent.

This blog details how our team used analytical tools to make web design decisions so that the visitor’s experience was not disrupted. Using a click tracking tool and good web design principles, we refreshed their homepage without a drop-off in user experience.

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B2B sales is a completely different animal than it was just ten years ago.

We now live in a world where information is at the fingertips of everyone all the time. Your prospects know more about your company and products than you might think thanks to search engines, and they’ve already compared and contrasted your offerings with those of your competitors before they even show up on your radar.

So what does this mean for your B2B sales team?

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