Before Covid 19 Pandemic, Micro, Small business owners had never thought about websites playing a specific role in the business growth strategy. But, now the role of websites has changed dramatically post Covid 19 Pandemic and has given a solid push to the Digital marketing strategies. The expectations and behaviors of modern-day professional buyers have evolved, reshaping the role and functions required by the websites for SME market segments.

Adding on it, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s slogan ‘Vocal for Local’ encourage not only the use of domestically made products but also to promote and take them to the global arena.

Today, the website stands as the number one resource that buyers use for evaluating a company, its product, and services even before connecting with a sales representative. The website plays a key role as a brand ambassador, product/service educator, 24/7 digital sales representative, and customer caretaker – all in one.

This brief outlines the following top five ways to build a high-performing B2b and B2C website meeting these new buying behaviors. If you apply these concepts while planning to build new or revamp your existing website, you can jump-start desired results and maximize its potential.

1. Let the Website be the Destination for the modern-day Buyers: To make a high-performing website for your buyers, it should serve the purpose of the buyer’s journey cycle right from creating awareness, evaluation to conversion and beyond. This points out to understanding your buyers and their buying behavior. The design and messaging of your site and the subsequent content you offer should address the following key points.

1. Role / Title: Who are the concerned officials to approach within the company to address visitors’ queries.
2. What are the pain points or market challenges do they need to address? What are outcomes do they achieve?
3. The site should answer a variety of buyer categories coming under the buyer’s journey cycle – influencer, re-searcher, decision-maker or advisors, etc
4. The type of content, products, insights, etc to influence the buyers and enable them to make transactions or calls to action.

The answers to the above points will enable you to develop the right messages and content that aligns with your buyer’s needs. This will position you as an authoritative voice and the buyer will realize your value contribution. Once Value is created, trust and loyalty will follow automatically.

2. Design Your Website with Business Goals:

Set KPIs: Heading towards a destination without a pre-set goal cannot be thought. This applies to even for the website design too! Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to measure and track the established goals. The following KPIs can be examples for you to check the trends in website traffic.

1. Bounce rate – The percentage of site visits is limited to a single page.
2. Unique website Visitors – Apart from the regular visits, you need to know how many are unique Vs repeat visitors.
3. Pages Viewed Per session – indicates visitor’s interest level.
4. Average Time on Page – indicates the success of the page in holding the buyer’s attention effectively.
5. Goals and Event Completions – incomplete forms state the need of re-design, re-messaging or elimination altogether

Track Performance: Plenty of tools exist for tracking website performance and visitor trends along with so many insightful data. The following are the must-have tools

• Google Analytics – A free tool that helps you to uncover the trends of your site traffic, visitors’ profiles, site performance. etc.

• Google search console – A free webmaster tool that helps you with SEO, Site Positioning, Organic Search traffic, SEO Queries, Impression, clicks, and more.

• Hotjar – generates heatmaps and video capture tools based on the visitor movement on the website.

Monitor, Measure, and Optimize: This should be the mantra on your way to website optimization and your business growth journey

3. Make your Website Easy to Connect in a Crowded Market: If the buyer can’t land or find your website, your site can’t do its job. There are many factors that influence the site traffic like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the best practices like website design, content, and code, etc to enhance your results. The following quick tips can lead to better results.

• Incorporate Keywords and Phrases – A free Google tool helps you with keyword analysis.

• Update and promote Content regularly.

• Optimize your design

4. First Impression is the best impression: This proverb applies to website design too. When a prospective buyer land on your site, the site should be capable of capturing attention within 15 seconds making him stay on and explore. If done, your site can serve as the conduit that turns prospects into customers. If done improperly, it can be the reason to push your customers to your competitors. Making a website to create a lasting experience goes back to knowing your buyers very well and that understanding their needs and expectations can result in a longer navigation period. The following points help to deliver the results.

• Easy to Navigate

• Clear Messaging

• Visual design

• Insightful content & Resources

• Mobile-friendly design

5. Effective Engagement Techniques: The high-performing sites can play the role of engagement and nurture too. The following techniques can increase the onsite engagement experience and improve the offsite nurturing of buyers.

Onsite Engagement

• The chatbot functionality can take care of engagement by answering buyers’ quick and preliminary questions in real-time.

• Make it easy for visitors to connect with your sales team by implementing an appointment calendaring tool.

Offsite Engagement

• Calls-to-Action (CTA) – Enable future communication with visitors that encourage opt-ins and hook into marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Freshsales, or others.
• Triggering re-targeting ads once buyers leave your site.
• Sharing & promoting valuable content through other marketing channels like social media, email marketing to drive traffic back to your site to do business with you.

Conclusion:

Today’s professional buyers being busy with their hectic schedules are heavily relying on websites researching products and services to make their purchase decisions. This scenario is clearly indicating the strong need for Indian startups and business owners to be prepared to go far high performing websites. They cannot afford to ignore this 24/7 digital sales representative missing in action!