Building a B2B Website that Converts

Imagine your target customer at work. The CEO has asked your target customer to purchase a piece of equipment they’ve never sourced before. What do they do? It's safe to say the first thing they do is an online search for vendors of the machine. In fact, Google reports that 89% of B2B buyers use the internet during their research process. 

So, they’ve started researching online, and after some scrolling, your company pops up. They click on the link to your website. What happens next? For about 30% of the visitors landing on B2B manufacturing websites, this first experience is "poor" and hinders their customer journey. For example, the site takes too long to load or is too challenging to navigate. The content is confusing or hard to download. Perhaps the company contact information is difficult to find. What do they do next? 

If this is your target customer’s experience, they probably won’t make any further attempts to engage your company. They’ll just move on to other potential vendors. 

Your Website Should Be More Than an Online Brochure

Your website is the engine that propels marketing and sales forward. It's often the first place a potential customer experiences your company. They make a critical first impression within 30 seconds of landing on your front page. When properly designed, architected, and maintained, your site will attract, engage, and convert your target audience into customers. 

Each stage is critical. If your website isn’t built and continually updated to meet today's B2B customer standards, you'll fall behind the competition. Customers want more than a simple online product catalog. 57% of industrial buyers make purchase decisions before interacting directly with a manufacturing company, and 73% of B2B buyers surveyed said they review a supplier’s website when deciding whether to submit RFIs. 

Your website should enable your target audience to make informed buying decisions by providing informative and interactive content, strategic messaging, and custom calls to action. If it doesn’t, you may not make your target customer’s shortlist. You need a website that drives sales. As your digital front door, your website can be your most valuable conversion tool or a barrier in your customer’s buying journey. 

The WebSync™ Process

At SyncShow, we've developed a unique process for building B2B websites to be lead-generation machines that stand the test of time. We call it WebSync™. This process comes from 17 years of experience with clients in the industrial sector and our experience as a B2B marketing agency. 

We focus on maximum value, not vanity metrics. This blog will break down the process and provide real-world examples. 

There are three simple steps to the WebSync™ process. They are: 

• Research and Strategy
• Roadmap, a Strategic Blueprint for Your Website
• Build, Test, and Launch a Scalable Lead Generation Website

Research and Strategy

Syncshow built WebSync™ on a foundation of strategy informed by the client’s target audience and business goals. The first step is a set of proprietary discovery sessions designed to uncover insights that’ll help our development team build a website that engages the right audience and achieves the right goals.

This is the most critical step in any website build. Although it may be tempting to start building a new website right away, this first step allows our developers to choose features and functionalities that will create a high-performing lead-generation engine right out of the gate. Our developers also consider what the audience and client may need in the future and build in functionality that scales over time. 

The research and strategy step can lead us in unexpected directions. We may uncover a gap in marketing or sales materials or a barrier in the sales process that prospects can’t overcome. These surprises can be especially true for client resource expectations and budgets. We always tell our clients that it's important to be flexible and pivot as needed. 

At the end of the strategy sessions, the client receives an actionable deliverable to a finished website. The client will know and understand everything they need to do to bring their online lead generation engine to life. We call this the roadmap. 

The Roadmap

The roadmap is essentially a Statement of Work (SOW). It includes a list of the content, assets and imagery, templates, modules, and more to be built or created. For example, the client may need to source new imagery through stock image purchases or a photo shoot. The roadmap outlines the particular images needed and when they need to be available. 

After reviewing the roadmap, the client agrees to the project. Once the agreement is made, a timeline is set that works for both the client and SyncShow. The timeline covers the kickoff project meeting all the way to launch. 

As a team, we'll identify who needs to review deliverables and who will manage content sourcing. We'll also address questions about what to do if resources (time, talent, budget) are unavailable or running low. The roadmap keeps everyone on track and accountable for their part of the project. It also helps the team stay on time and budget. 

Build/Test/Launch 

Our developers follow the most up-to-date practices to drive sales and build a website that stands the test of time. That includes choosing the best content management platform, including mobile responsive functionality, making maintenance and updating as simple as possible, and enhancing the visitor experience through engaging content.

We'll produce content with your overall business goals in mind. Highly searchable and engaging content drives sales. The team will ensure every piece of content on your website is SEO-friendly to drive highly qualified lead traffic through search. Further into your site, we'll assist you in producing conversion-centric content, meaning it’s optimized to meet your prospects where they are in the buyer's journey and drive action. We’ll create primary and transitional conversion points in strategic places within your site.\Our developers design functionalities and features that perform immediately and can be scaled over time. To ensure performance, we'll incorporate several rounds of testing and quality assurance checks before launching. It's vital to ensure that your site looks great and functions properly from start to finish. 

North Coast Container Website Success

North Coast Container came to SyncShow with succinct and critical goals. They were:

• Drive awareness, engagement, and closed sales through an account-based marketing approach, focusing on 200 known companies.
• Drive visitor traffic and engagement through a content and messaging strategy that differentiates them from competitors.
• Generate leads and visitor engagement with content developed specifically for buyers and prospects.
• Leverage accumulated website visitor data to drive decisions and accelerate ongoing sales and marketing efforts.
• Drive new business leads to the sales team.

As part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, our development team utilized the WebSync™ process to build a new website. We launched the new site in early November 2023. So far, here's how the website is performing:

• 466% increase in traffic
• 241% increase in organic traffic
• 6% increase in engagement rate
• Page 1 ranking for two important keywords

This significant data indicates that North Coast's current audience and new prospects are finding the updated site and spending time there. All metrics involving website traffic and user acquisition growth have increased by 2 to 4 times. Our team has recently completed additional SEO work that’ll drive even more high-quality traffic in the coming months.

We Practice What We Preach

While we continuously monitor and maintain our website to keep it performing at its best, we recently realized that it had been several years since we did a strategic deep dive into the content. We went through the WebSync™ process in-house, and here’s what we discovered.

Our website offered actionable content and information, but much was hidden, buried deep in the site. On other pages, the content was front and center but also confusing and unclear. In short, we weren't telling our story to the best of our ability. It was time for a website revamp.

So, that's exactly what we did. We updated the site design and page structure and optimized for search. We rewrote and reorganized much of the content. Since the launch of the new site in February 2024, the results have been excellent.

We look forward to measuring our new website’s performance in key traffic and conversion metrics over the next year. As always, we’ll continuously iterate, test, and update the site based on our analysis. 

Benefits of WebSync

The WebSync™ process has proven to reduce costs, speed development, and produce a strong, optimized, engaging website that delivers results. With it, your website becomes an engine for business growth instead of a static online product brochure. Our clients have seen the results, and we've seen them on our own website. 

If you need help building a website that meets your target audience and business goals, contact SyncShow today.