Is your website supporting both your sales and business goals?
In the digital age, a website is like a front door—everyone has one. But whether your site converts visitors into customers is another matter. By many estimates, today’s B2B decision makers spend the first 60% of the buyer’s journey researching online.
That means your primary opportunity to showcase your unique value is through your website. It must quickly answer customers’ questions, supply valuable information, and be easy to navigate. All these factors are essential to driving momentum through the buyer’s journey. If your website misses the mark, visitors will bounce to a competitor’s site.
How can you tell if your website effectively supports the buyer’s journey? Let’s explore six crucial elements you need for a customer-centric website that converts.
When a visitor comes to your site, they should immediately feel like they belong.
Product and service information should be readily visible. It should focus on the customer’s needs and how you solve their pain. A customer-centric site should:
Clearly connect your unique business value with customers’ most pressing needs.
Demonstrate how your product features result in tangible benefits.
Differentiate your company from your competition in areas customers care about.
Make important information highly visible and tailored to any device.
Guide customers toward a sale with relevant information at each stage of their journey.
Establish your brand as a trusted source (thought leadership).
When your site presents information from your customers’ point of view, they immediately realize that you understand their needs and can supply answers to their most pressing questions. The result? They’re more likely to return to your site and ultimately, purchase your offering.
No. 2: It’s Functional
Design flair can’t compensate for a website that doesn’t match how your customers think and navigate. The best approach is to develop research-based persona messaging that maps to customer needs and pains. With this insight--and feedback from your sales team—you can develop a website that effectively covers the buyer’s journey for multiple stakeholders.
To make a functional website for customers, ask your sales team questions such as:
How does your ideal customer realize that they need a solution like yours?
Where do they go to research such solutions?
Whose opinion do they trust?
Which pains are they trying to solve?
What goals do they have?
What objections do they have?
Who is involved in the decision to purchase the solution?
Your website should align with the answers to these questions and provide a clear path from awareness to consideration to decision. To get a full picture of the content you have—and figure out how to fill any gaps—take the time to create a content map:
At which points are visitors likely to enter your site?
Is the path toward purchase a clear and simple one? Do visitors get distracted or frustrated at any point because they can’t find information?
Is content searchable and optimized?
Take the entire scope of your site, including landing pages and customer support portals, into account.
No. 3: It’s Personalized
Whether your business is B2C or B2B, visitors expect a website to deliver useful, relevant information. With the right platform and a modern design, you can easily meet those expectations.
At the most basic level, your navigation can provide clear, simple direction so visitors can quickly and easily find what they are looking for.
For return visitors, this means creating a personalized, uninterrupted experience based on their previous visits. For example, if a prospect previously filled out a form, your site should automatically recognize this. You don’t want them to become annoyed because you’re asking them to fill out the same form twice.
Also, consider tailoring content for your ideal visitors, addressing special needs and pains. A more sophisticated experience serves content based on user location—and in their native language.
No. 4: It’s Adaptable
Creating a customer-centric experience isn’t only about the front-end. Choosing a website content management system (CMS) such as Storyblok enables ultimate flexibility for business users and developers.
For business users, Storyblok’s omni-channel content properties make it easy to create, manage, and publish to any channel. Your staff can easily change, update, or add content without coding expertise.
For developers, Storyblok allows them freedom to choose preferred technology. This flexibility empowers developers to create reliable, fast websites.
"Storyblok has helped us be more nimble and flexible as a business—we can deliver complex enterprise solutions in a shorter period of time, while being supported by an architecture that facilitates the deployment of client content anywhere, with ease.”
— Rob Bean, Refactored Partner | Marketing Strategist
No. 5: It Converts
People must be able to find your website. Achieving higher Page Rank visibility isn’t possible with a scattershot or keyword-stuffing approach. Google has become highly adept at recognizing the intent behind a search query. And it’s equally good at recognizing sites that have deep, relevant content that truly matches a searcher’s query.
To drive more organic traffic, ensure your site has a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that accounts for technical site health, on-page SEO tag and keyword optimization, and off-page SEO elements, such as backlinks.
Once they’ve found your site, make sure it supplies content that’s valuable to a buyer’s journey—enabling a vistor to move from awareness to consideration to purchase seamlessly. This is harder than it sounds and usually requires an exercise that maps your buyer personas to relevant content that clearly explains your value and benefits.
Pairing this tailored content with well-placed call-to-action (CTA) directives will guide visitors toward more engagement, ultimately leading to conversion.
Finally, to bring conversion full circle, you must implement site analytics. A good analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, will enable you to measure visitor data over time, providing visibility into content and CTAs that convert and those that don’t.
If you’re unsure of where to start, we can help. Now is a good time to lay a solid foundation and plan a move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), a major upgrade that will replace the current Universal Google Analytics in July 2023.
No. 6: It’s Fast
It goes without saying—but we’ll say it anyway: Make your site mobile friendly.
With so many users shifting between mobile and desktop views, Google’s Speed Update placed a greater emphasis on mobile-first indexing. Consider how your pages will render on mobile devices and smartphones—and how quickly readers will see the information they are seeking.
Providing a good mobile experience will also be essential to understanding user behavior across platforms as GA4 becomes the essential analytic tool next year. GA4 will feature better omni-channel tracking and measuring, providing deeper insight on traffic acquisition and how those visitors convert across devices.
Another important consideration is your Content Management System (CMS). Migrating your site to a decoupled headless CMS, like Storyblok, can offer faster image loading for users. Storyblok does this through its built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN). The CDN automatically serves an image file based on what your browser supports and tailors the file size based on device type.
Small Changes = Big Rewards
If polishing your site seems overwhelming, consider an incremental approach. Start with a website audit, optimize existing pages, or introduce a microsite. Even small changes can improve your site—and generate better results such as increased visits, time on site, and qualified leads.
Finally, remember your business never stands still—and neither does your website. Start where you are, and keep in mind that you can take incremental steps to evolve your site as your customers’ needs grow and change.
Ready to impress customers with your website? Let’s make it happen. Contact us today.
About Storyblok
Storyblok is a headless CMS that scales with your business goals. It delivers exceptional site speed, a minimal security footprint, and a flexible, intuitive system that is ideal for both developers and business users. Learn more about our Storyblok services and how we can help you build a better customer-centric website as a Storyblok certified partner.