Your website is one of the most valuable assets your business owns in the B2B world.
This isn’t just true of the sexy SaaS companies that keep throwing money and people at their marketing until they give their investors the hockey stick growth they’ve been promising.
In a post-COVID world, the inability to attend industry events and do deals with handshakes means this is just as true for more traditional B2B businesses. In this rapid acceleration from the offline to the online, your potential clients are judging your company at face value alone based on your website.
If you’re thinking about reviewing your website (and you should), do so with the below 5 critical roles your website should play as a framework in mind when examining it.
Role 1: Rent vs Own
Your website is the only place on the internet where you can truly ‘own’ your content and your audience.
This is in contrast to any social media platform that you operate on, like LinkedIn and Facebook, where you’re just ‘renting’ someone else’s space and audience. Just like when you’re renting someone else’s apartment, you’re subject to their rules and regulations. It might feel like your audience, but the reality is the social platforms decide whether or not you get access to that audience.
If all of a sudden the social platform wants you to ‘pay-to-play’ (i.e. rapidly reduce how many people see your organic posts to encourage you to use their paid advertising service), you can lose access to your audience overnight.
For those that cultivated a community of their Dream Customers on social platforms, and never directed those Dream Customers to their website, this is extremely dangerous and can be fatal to your business.
This is why you need to have a strong website to send your audience to, so you can be incharge of your audience and what they see.
If you grab their email address while they’re browsing your website, you can use email to invite them back over to your website when there’s something valuable for them to check out.
Role 2: Show Your Dream Customer You’re The Expert They’re Looking For
Your sales team might be excellent at showing your potential Dream Customers that you’re the expert who can solve their problems, but we need to move that expertise and build that trust online.
So how do we do that? You’re probably going to hate this answer, but it’s absolutely true – content!
Role 3: Create Content That Makes Your Dream Customer’s Life Better
Create content that is actually helpful to your Dream Customer. What are their pain points and pleasure points? How can you help them? If you base your content around this, they have an excellent reason to return back to your website. Also, helping people is a surefire way to build trust!
Hubspot is an excellent example of how to create content that makes your Dream Customer’s life better. They’ve created content for each of the roles in a company that could find their software useful: marketers, sales teams, customer service reps, and website developers.
Check it out for yourself: https://blog.hubspot.com/
Role 4: Speak To Your Dream Customer and Build Trust
Your website should speak directly to your Dream Customer, using their demographics and language they use to inform the imagery and copy of your website.
People trust other people who look and sound like themselves. This is a neuroscience technique called ‘mirroring’ and is scientifically proven to build trust.
Role 5: Build Your Mailing List
People might absolutely love your website – however we have notoriously short attention spans and can be rather forgetful.
Do your best to capture your Dream Customer’s email address on your website so you can stay top of mind by emailing them when there’s something else valuable for them to check out on your website.
Was your B2B website built with the above framework inmind? If not, it might be time to take another look at it. Remember – it’s now one of the most important assets your business will own. Don’t be afraid to give it the investment and attention it deserves.
