Your B2B website plays a crucial role in driving consistent demand, for this to happen, marketers have to engage with your readers and prospects with regularly updated information and value-add topics. This is where prospects and consumers come to read more about a particular brand, service or product.
A website, when built with a well thought out plan and objective can not only support but also help achieve a company’s marketing and sales initiatives while also acting as a content magnet for key industry updates and information.
Through the years, it’s been exciting to see the various ways in which marketing tech innovations have allowed marketers and brand owners to plan creative, unconventional website flows that are not only attractive but also have a well-planned structure, allowing users to navigate with ease and find what they need conveniently. At a time when brands and marketers are expected to prioritize the customer experience across all channels that the customer engages with the brand through, marketers who use their website’s content, blog updates, even podcasts and other resources as a focal point will find it easier to build a more comprehensive, uniform multichannel messaging tactic as well.
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No B2B company can survive without a website of their own! And at any stage, there will always be a set of marketers looking at revisiting their website structure and layout. If you’re thinking of ways to optimize your existing website or give it a complete makeover, here are a few things that you should try keeping in mind:
Understand your Current Website Metrics First
When marketers or brand owners think of redoing their website, it could be due to many reasons – a need to optimize how well the website attracts and converts prospects, a need to give it an updated look and design, a need to rethink the content structure and SEO elements, the reasons could be endless.
Whatever the main reasons for a website makeover, every marketer will want their (new!) website to rank faster and perform better than the previous version. For this to happen, a marketing team needs to completely breakdown the current website metrics to see what their current users engaged with more and why. At this point, also assessing current SEO rankings and crawl or other errors with existing web pages will allow marketers to know what needs a complete overhaul and what needs actual fixing from scratch for the next version. Benchmarking data points from your current website will help compare progress later and will act as a framework to guide the next stages of the new website.
Align your Near-Term Content Strategy while Redoing your Website
Most marketers know that they have to optimize new content for their new website to ensure that they don’t lose out on past traction and past SEO efforts. During a website redesign, especially for brands that have been in-market for years and boast of bulk content, it can cause pages / links to break when older articles are moved in bulk to fit newer navigation/menus or website themes. While marketers often use the redirect option to address these issues, optimizing the older content to suit newer search engine optimization goals in the new website is one way of gaining faster traction.
But in all, when marketers are rethinking their website strategy, aligning their near-term content goals and content plans to the website design will help plan the dynamic sections (like blogs, webinars, other resources) a lot better, it will help content strategists work with marketers to optimize how they want to broadcast new content in the new design while also allowing marketers to pick the best suited theme and functionalities that can support near-future content initiatives.
For instance, a content and marketing team that wants to focus on making their new podcast a mainstay and part of their core content marketing efforts, will have to have a dedicated space on their website for users to subscribe to the podcast, listen to previous episodes, interact through Q&As, chat boxes if possible (to ask questions to the podcast guests!) and similar such other features.
Multi-Device Friendly and Dynamic
As content marketing tactics evolved over the years, companies went from focusing on having engaging blogs to using landing pages, whitepapers, eBooks and similar such models to drive lead generation efforts. Then came the need (and still growing demand) for interactive content with brands now using more of videos, reports, podcasts, webinars, online events and limitless other tactics to reach prospects where they are most active and through the type of content they prefer.
In this always-on multichannel online world, this requires marketers to now plan websites and even marketing campaigns that render well across multiple online channels and platforms with ease and without the need to manually customize too much in back end systems to suit multiple needs.
When picking a website theme for instance, testing the layout across many devices, understanding what sections can be optimized/customized to suit specific needs, seeing how the layout works by looking for other sites that use something similar are all factors that can help.
Seasoned marketers will also ensure they look for themes that are dynamic and those that are easy to change and update in the future as trends change and the need to update the website arises again.
A 2020 report by SimilarWeb found that overall web traffic to the top 100 visited sites experienced an increase led by mobile traffic. Your customers are not only on one device or platform anymore and your website has to cater to that.
Building a High Performing Website is not a One-Time Task!
A website is a brand’s virtual identity, it can be used to portray latest updates, exciting new information, it can be used to build a community for engaged customers to gather and grow (through virtual chats, social media talks, live webinars, live online events, and so much more), it can be used to plan and have relevant conversations with prospects and leads through interactive Q&As on-site, surveys, so much more.
Building a high-level, high performing website that boasts of a well-structured navigation, good content layout and menu, including engaging features like conversational chatbots and more is not a one-time task. It requires constant efforts from the marketing team through which they plan different enhancements, optimizations and updates on a regular basis to suit changing customer content consumption patterns and behaviors while also meeting current content trends.
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