If you’re not working to create an effective web design, forget engagement and don’t even think about conversions.
B2B is a cut-throat environment to survive in.
It takes a lot to impress fellow businesses to appreciate what you have to offer.
And don’t get this wrong, maybe you have a great product or service to offer. But, how well are you selling it, makes all the difference. A marketing strategy that shows your product in the best possible light and gives the user a desirable experience is not as easy to create as most CEOs think. Only trained marketers and UX designers understand what it takes to get valuable traffic.
Every frame, every component, every call-to-action button on your website is a doorway to a loyal clientele.
Engagement design covers the entire journey a prospect takes from a web page on your website through all the automation and goes deeper into your funnels. The goal of engagement design is to hook your lead and take charge of every component they view on your website. Optimize everything to increase engagement, and make sure they convert.
No, it’s not just about the way it looks. Let’s see why.
Why “Only Beautiful” Designs Don’t Work
Here’s the thing about “only beautiful” websites:
● They are stuffed with images and videos making them heavy and hard to manage.
● The traditional “only beautiful” website is highly likely to have no valuable content.
● It’s most probably just one web page of beauty.
● Serves small to little purpose for a B2B audience.
Now, the idea here is to not discourage you from creating good looking websites. Sure, by all means, your website should look beautiful, but it should certainly not be just that. In fact, there are so many not so good looking websites that are making millions.
For example, Craigslist is one website that hasn’t changed much of its design since 1995. And it is pretty ugly given the scenario today. In fact, some of the new age website builder app developers would shun it as a downright bad website. But, Craigslist has a lot of valuable content that it can grab attention with.
When you have a lot of valuable textual content, you can’t really rely on beautifying your website with huge images and banners. Instead, you learn to optimize the content to your benefits and create engagement by curating your webpages for conversion.
Especially in the B2B world of affairs, click graphics, stop motion videos, typographic moving fonts don’t make the cut. No designated business operation managers will be blown away by stick figure animation background on a CRM tools page unless it has the exact right content and engagement design to supplement the quirks.
A beautiful website design doesn’t need to be a useless website design. You can have good looking websites, without compromising the engagement design value to it. An overtly beautiful website is not always aesthetically pleasing. If you can manage to create an aesthetically pleasing website that gets the traction you desire then you have a valuable marketing asset at your disposal. Here’s why you need to relook at your website design.
B2B Companies Need To Make A Shift In Their Online Presence Now
If you are running a B2B business and not getting the traction you deserve, you need to take a look at a few things that you might be blundering through:
● Website layout
38% of users are quick to stop engaging if the layout of a website is unattractive. Quite a big number worth of loss considering the lead was just in the first stage of the funnel, and just with the website layout, you have managed to shoo them away.
You need to take charge of the structure of your website, by focusing on the user experience. A simple thing like the website layout is actually not about your product at all. It’s just about capturing attention and reducing bounce rates through pretty standard website building best practices.
Once you somewhat have a decent website layout, then you can start exploring engagement design more thoroughly. With Openthrive, you can create an easy to navigate, smooth flow website that truly taps into the advanced user impression profile.
● What’s the goal of your website?
You can’t even begin to think about sales or marketing without having a set goal. What are you trying to achieve through your business? And subsequently through your online presence? And no, “conversions” is not a desirable answer.
Whether it is a product or a service, your website has a designated goal to achieve. It could simply be to build brand value or to explore a new set of markets. You can use your website, or online presence to do almost anything. Most of all, to create a unique space for your business and aid performance.
Set your goals to match your larger vision. If you already have an established market, you can create your website to promote thought leadership content, and build a reputation for being the experts at what you do. Depending on your buyer persona, and level of growth you can choose a set of goals.
Remember, the website effectiveness, and engagement design works to achieve these goals. Pretty much everything you will do will be aimed towards these. And your success metrics and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) will be drawn from this.
● Are you giving your leads the right messages?
Every webpage acts like the mouth of a funnel in its own right, and is optimized as such to drive the lead further into the overall funnel. To that extent, everything from the messages, to images, to the content placement to even the navigation bar is optimized.
For example, according to Hubspot, 86% of viewers expect to see the product or service on the home page. If you are looking to generate marketing qualified leads that will eventually convert, you need to optimize the messages you put out for every phase of inbound and account based marketing.
So, if your end goal is, in fact, to explore a new market for your already established product, it is best to show testimonials and product value on the first page, or the landing page. If you are just starting out, you might want to focus on brand building and credibility.
● What’s your credibility?
Credibility is a tricky subject when it comes to marketing. Once you start generating a high volume of cold leads, then you might be at fault for generating some unnecessary doubts. Prospects look at your brand image before engaging with you.
And a whopping 48% of those prospects cite website design as the foremost factor in deciding the credibility of your brand or business. Almost any business, even a large amount of fraudsters and scamsters can create a website within hours. What does it take to stand out as a credible business with a good enough product value proposition?
Engagement design deals with all aspects of effective online presence that drives sales by establishing brand value. The idea is to deep dive into user behavior and give them what they seek at every step of your website design.
● Are you proving your worth?
Even businesses that have a good enough customer base and a decent reputation can come off as undeserving to leads due to bad web design. Simply because you are not channeling the lead’s natural instinct when they go through your website.
A simple thing like plugging a testimonial video on your landing page can make a huge difference and drive sales. The placement, and layout adds to the value of your business as a brand. You need to address things as they are and take the consumer psychology into consideration when creating your ‘About Us’ page.
At every step of the way, you have to prove to be someone your prospect can rely on. How is your customer service? Will customers that upgrade get any special offers? These are simple questions, but answering these at the right step of your funnel through the right means in your website design can have a huge impact.
B2B communications are changing at a fast pace. And most marketers are struggling to catch up. If you have fallen over, it’s best to recover using these few guiding points. Your online presence matters. Whatever your message is, it matters, and you have to give it all to get the best out of your prospects. Sit back and think upon the points listed above and set aside for yourself things that you are not really doing right.
Your leads are searching for you. The first cold outreach email they received is when they became aware. If you are able to generate interest and create hot leads, you will invariably get traffic on your landing page. But, to drive leads further deep into the funnel you have to understand this very simple thing: your leads will do their research.
They will explore through the internet, your credibility, brand value, customer success stories, bad experiences, achievements. And when they do this, you can either hold on to the reigns and keep the control or let it all loose. With engagement design you can answer every prospect query through your own website.
A well made landing page that does the job is one that converts the prospect there and then without letting them open another tab on their browser. Your website must be so self sufficient and well designed, that the user never tends to or has to look away.
Principles of Engagement Design
Engagement Design is nothing but a wholesome fruition of all your B2B sales dreams. We at Openthrive use advanced engagement techniques to transform your B2B website design. And take charge of your website development to get you ready for becoming a force to be reckoned with in the B2B ecosystem.
With engagement design you will enable best marketing practices by establishing an ABM setup (Account Based Marketing) and enablement. Engagement design operates on your website, the slickest marketing and sales funnels on your website. And to that effect, the 4 principles of engagement design are:
- Show what you say
- Prove what you do
- Deliver what they need
- Communicate what they want
All of the above bundle up to become a fireball of marketing success that leads your prospects through the funnel in the most sophisticated, undeterred manner. The idea is to keep your hot leads focused externally on the same goals as you.
B2B space allows for unbounded expansion if you tap into the right tools at your behest. With even the smallest amount of exploration can you achieve scalable marketing success strategies.
How Is Technology Enablement Integral To Implementing Engagement Design For Your B2B Company
Beyond the basic approach of UX design, and sales funnel creation, we are trying to help B2B business tap into a goldmine of scalable growth. Engagement design equips marketers to align their strategies with their online presence and get the ball rolling through the dynamic medium of the B2B sales.
We are here to tell you that you can create the impact you deserve in the sphere of competitive B2B businesses. Engagement design works for both ABM (Account Based Marketing) and Demand Generation. A growth driven approach, it is unrelenting and drives a sustainable traffic to your website.
Everything from your design to workflow matters, and we build for you an architecture designed for engagement and conversions. We create your online marketing machine, and curate every part of this moving machine to drive performance. And we go a step further with experiments, and real time performance evaluations to ensure your marketing machine is well oiled.
To create sustainable growth and the desired impact, we create a data driven design for you to build your online presence towards best sales and marketing practices. With accurate customer insights, and competitive intelligence you can create a performance machine. Engagement design has helped over 50 B2B businesses to create brand persona and drive sales.
How Engagement Design Blends With The New Marketing Imperatives In The New Normal
Our team of highly acclaimed marketers understand consumer psyche to the bone. We have established engagement design to enable businesses with growth components that improve overall performance. Engagement design ensures that your website caters to your audience in the most impactful way.
2021 will see a massive demand for focused user experience according to Forbes. Only when you engage your customers can they stay active and grow overtime. This has an exceedingly valuable impact on the ROI value from marketing. Because a connected journey with your customer using engagement design retains the customer whilst converting the lead.
Marketing imperatives point towards a smart, more targeted customer interaction. Engagement design aims to personalize user experience and smooth out the sharp edges that have not been thoroughly looked at by traditional marketers. A total customer experience involves total involvement. A task that our team of dedicated marketers take up to fruition.
With agility through strategic sourcing, you can realize a customer experience that is scalable and robust. Marketing reevaluation starts with the customer experience. And the ability to realign your marketing and sales strategies to scalable, sustainable and consistent growth is exactly what engagement design works towards.
Restructuring and small tweaks in your website design with engagement design can instantly lead you onto a path of growth. Customer experience is key to enable your business boom.
Engagement design redesigns your website to serve your goals better. Every component, every scrollbar, every popup and message has the ability to convert.
Channel into your B2B success story with our team of professional marketers. Openthrive will be the engine behind your fast speed marketing train.