Not everyone in the manufacturing sector understands how much your website contributes to your brand and your marketing plan. In this day of Wi-Fi, mobile devices and Internet research, your distributors, reps and end customers are learning about your company at least initially from your website. If your site is creaky, unwieldy and hard to navigate, you are losing business. At minimum, you are diluting or denigrating your brand. To update your website to 2016 standards, you need to reexamine it from your audience's point of view to see what they are experiencing when they visit. Here are some key areas to improve.
1. Branding
Does your website clearly reflect your brand as it is today? Or does it still show the branding that you had five to ten years ago. Slogans, images and videos are important methods of communicating your brand on your site, and easy to view on mobile devices.
How does your site represent what your company stands for? Is it attractive and drawing attention to your key values and benefits? Define your audience and redesign your site to appeal to that audience.
2. Professionalism
In any B2B company, professionalism is crucial. You are marketing to other professionals that are experienced and knowledgeable about your industry. If you want to gain key customers in your industry, then you need to provide them with reasons to trust you and your company. Infusing your company's personality and culture into your website is not mutually exclusive to having a professional site.
Don't crowd your website with lots of details and extraneous information. Maintain "white space" to make it easier to read and scan your webpages on any size device. Create a visual impact that displays a professional image.
3. User-Friendly Navigation
If your website visitor has trouble finding what they want on your website, they will get frustrated and leave. Why give your competitors a boost by making your site navigation difficult? Test your website on people who have not visited it before to see where you can improve. Improve your menu links, internal links and your search mechanism so that your visitors can find what they need in an intuitive manner.
4. Rich Content
Once you have determined what your audience wants and needs before they can buy your products or services, create a depth of useful information for your site. Brainstorm every question that your prospects ask before they buy and answer them via well-written content. A good method of digging down for these questions is to ask your sales team. They are on the front lines for these interactions.
By providing valuable information to your prospects, you are helping them research what they want to buy and beginning to qualify them before you ever meet them. It is important to have a content writer write your content for your site. Poorly written information takes away from your professionalism and dilutes your brand.
5. Calls-to-Action
What good is all that great traffic you are getting if you are never trying to convert prospects into customers? To increase conversions, include clear calls-to-action on your site including various streamlined landing pages to induce conversions. Each product or service you are selling should have a clear marketing path that drives conversions from appropriate places along the sales funnel. This technique will boost your conversions and leads exponentially.
