If there’s one question our buyers ask us very frequently, it’s how much a B2B website redesign should cost, and with good reason.
This is one of the most important issues that any B2B has to face. After all, a B2B website is your brand on the Internet, and the user experience it gives your buyers will dictate if they move down the sales funnel all the way into converting.
You’d be surprised by how many B2Bs think that you can do a high-converting and very effective B2B website for cheap…but that’s baloney. A very effective B2B website will cost you a decent amount of money, but it’s well worth it due to the greater inbound traffic, leads and conversions you’ll obtain.
People who know what they’re talking about in this field agree.
Take Luke Summerfield, director of inbound marketing at Savvy Panda and instructor of master inbound online EDU courses:
His company estimates that you can spend anywhere from a few to tens of thousands of dollars on a B2B website redesign.
So clearly, you have to be prepared to pay a little to get a lot back. We’ll look at everything that’s involved in a consummate B2B website redesign and explore how that justifies the price tag of a brand-new, spiffy B2B website.
Not to sound too cliché or anything, but without customer research, you have nothing. Know your customers, and you know how to start to plan and design a high-converting B2B website.
What’s the best way to kick off your customer-research efforts? By understanding your customers intimately. That’s why we give our clients two surveys for their customers:
A straightforward customer survey (we want to learn about your buyers as much as we can)
A company questionnaire (we want to know where your company is today and where you want it to be)
Then, we’ll create some highly insightful buyer personas of your customers by comparing and contrasting what your buyers said and what you said.
Here are some examples of general customer surveys, just to give you an idea:
Sometimes, our clients may not have enough buyers for them to actually answer questionnaires we’ll produce for their specific situations. In these cases, we’ll just get our clients’ leadership or marketing teams to fill out our surveys—of course, the answers won’t be as reliable as if they came from actual customers.
Our buyer’s analysis and strategy will figure out how your customers make their buying decisions. This is super-important because it gives you an insider’s view on the roadmap that your customers take when they make a decision to purchase from your company.
The buyer’s analysis will include:
The buyer’s process analysis – Your personas’ buying processes will be broken down to where you can understand almost on a molecular level how your customers make their decisions about purchasing your service. You’ll get to see what specific questions your customers have at every stage of the buying process. Your site will support how you sell.
The content requirements list – Content is still and will always be king. That’s why we’ll get to the bottom of just the kind of content you need to address the questions your customers will have. Basically, we look at the content you have now, how you can use it to maximum effect, and what content you should create to help drive conversions.
Lead attributes – We’ll make it easy for you to establish what you have to learn from your buyers through your web forms. The goal is to run your segmentation and then do it through HubSpot by the use of progressive profiling.
Lead nurturing plan – It all comes down to running your marketing automation just right. We advise you on how many campaigns to use, which campaigns to use and even how they ought to be written.
Blogging game plan – Blogging is a hugely vital part of inbound marketing. It is a fantastic trust-building element, which is why you should put a high priority on getting your leads to subscribe to your blog.
We use our expertise and research to tell you:
What topics to cover
How to come up with a highly appropriate blog title and blog promise
The relevant keywords to use
How to form your social media-promotion strategy
Site architecture is a finely tuned balance between your buyers' needs and your B2B needs. More specifically, it’s about the planning and design of your B2B website in such a way that it provides highly relevant flow and content, so that your buyers will enjoy optimized site functionality.
Clearly, site architecture is something that you can’t do a rush job on. That’s why we plan it down to every last detail for our customers. Our plan includes:
Key findings summary – This is a summary of what’s going wrong with your site and insightful recommendations on how to fix it.
Site goal – Any good B2B website must always have a clear goal, which usually involves a conversion (sign up for a newsletter, try a demo, purchase, etc.). We identify the ULTIMATE GOAL of our buyers’ sites.
User flows – The user flow is the process you want your customers to follow, so that they reach the ultimate goal of your B2B website. Hence, each and every page in the user flow is an integral page in the conversion process.
Proposed architecture – To enhance the user experience for buyers, the information on a B2B website has to be organized sensibly. That’s why we generate a sitemap for our customers based on deep buyer analysis, analytics and, of course, our extensive experience as a B2B.
Design guidelines – A company’s buyer personas have to be taken into consideration when the design phase starts. Any good web-design B2B should establish the specific design guidelines that should be obeyed during that phase. That’s why we define elements like site colors, fonts, overall appearance and so much more in conjunction with our customers’ buyer personas.
Without traffic to your B2B website, no one will know your company even exists.
Without relevant traffic to your website courtesy of SEO best practices, your conversions will stagnate. Our take on SEO includes a ton of cognitive research to pick topics relevant to our customers’ buyers, research based around the planning of our customers’ sites, and an SEO-optimization plan.
Here’s how it breaks down:
1. We get a list of your buyers’ most relevant terms
2. We utilize keyword-suggest tools to validate said terms
3. We use cognitive research to ensure only relevant terms to pick your keywords
4. We cross-reference with Yahoo Analytics
5. We map the best possible terms to each area of our customer’s B2B site
6. We then finally optimize the whole sitemap, coming up with SEO parameters for the URL, title, H1, alt text and keyword density.
The entire point of copywriting is writing extremely persuasive copy that converts.
Because we know how integral great copywriting is to our customers’ sites, we tackle copywriting like this:
Formatting – We focus on formatting by bolding or italicizing important words and sentences, increasing font size for really important concepts, and breaking up or chunking paragraphs and lines of text into scannable copy that readers enjoy absorbing.
Tone of voice – We ensure the tone of voice of our customers epitomizes the type of company buyers want to do business with. We also make sure it crystal-clearly explains your company and what it does.
Value proposition – The value proposition should be the first thing that jumps out at your buyers because it’s what sets you apart from your competitors and explains why your buyers want your services. Our attention to crafting value proposition statements means that they make clear how they solve your buyers’ pain points, provides benefits and why only you (and not your competitors) have a unique service.
No filler copy – Filler copy is the “lorem ipsum” tripe that often acts as a placeholder in some wireframes. We never waste our customers’ time by using filler copy in our wireframes. We know that we have to both prioritize and format information for our customers’ layout and messaging, and we can’t make sense of filler copy to help us do that.
Wireframes are your B2B website’s core architectural detail layout (that’s a mouthful) of your future site. If site architecture is about planning the design and user flows of the information of your B2B website, then wireframes are about laying down the entire plan in a structured and well-organized way.
Here’s how we carefully create our customers’ wireframes:
We define each of your key page’s goals
We define your messaging
We’ll sketch out your site layout
We’ll even include notes on how your pages should function, so you understand what sorts of behaviors, imagery and functionality must be incorporated in the design and development phase
Prepare to spend between $2000 and $8000 for a comprehensive wireframe.
Good web design is way more than just aesthetic appeal that looks pretty. It must improve your brand to successfully promote your messaging as well as your brand.
That’s why we won’t base our design of your B2B website on superficial stuff like what new design trend is hot these days (which can be subjective).
Instead, we design to get your buyers to:
Perform desirable actions (scroll down, click a button, etc.)
Notice colors and imagery to stimulate their emotions
Easily find information they want
Observe a clear, visual path
A good B2B company should know their customers inside and out. Therefore, we approach web design this way:
We understand your brand thoroughly (your brand is your company, services, how your buyers perceive you)
We use design to enhance your messaging
We use heat maps to scientifically measure user reaction
We create extremely compelling calls to action as part of the design
In today’s business environment, your website has to be able to be scaled to whatever device your buyers are using to access it. In other words, responsive design should be the objective of any redesign.
Marketers should be able to see and use your B2B websites excellently on any platform imaginable. This means desktop, tablet, mobile—whatever.
Marketing automation is a reference to being able to market across different channels more efficiently than ever, especially if marketing tasks are recurring.
Marketing automation is indispensable because it maximizes your marketing power, which increases your sales.
That’s why we put HubSpot’s mighty marketing automation software to work for our clients.
They get:
Progressive profiling
Both landing pages and forms that are optimized for lead generation
Thank-you content and email autoresponders
Smart, targeted calls to action for each step of the buying process (covering awareness to decision)
Sales readiness notifications
Marketing automation is all about putting the right content in front of your buyer’s face…at the right time. That synchronicity takes careful planning, so we use smart calls to action and landing pages that have been optimized for a response.
We round out our package by establishing notifications for both your sales and marketing teams to follow up with leads when it makes the most sense.
Site usability is all about how easy your B2B website is to use, how easy it is to understand, and if it can flow logically. In other words, it’s about the user experience of your buyers: Buyers who have a good user experience will be much likelier to convert while buyers who suffer a bad user experience…well, you won’t hear from them again anytime soon.
Therefore, we want to make sure that we understand absolutely everything about how the design works or even doesn’t work before our customers’ sites go live. If anything needs to be looked at and fixed—rest assured. It will be.
Think of site usability testing this way: It comes down to finding out what parts of your site design can be kept and which parts must be improved on to provide a better user experience for your buyers.
At long last, your site’s ready to go live, but that’s not the end of it. Any good B2B should still do the following for its clients (as we do):
But wait…there’s still more that any good B2B should do as part of the website redesign. You see, things aren’t over just because your new site is now live.
We provide our clients with additional testing after the site has gone live because we want them to continue to learn about their buyers’ behavior and from real-time, conversion data.
To achieve this, we’ll rely on heuristics, A/B testing and analytics. We take all of this good stuff and use it to improve your most vital website pages.
As you can see, what you pay for a B2B website redesign really adds to more than some people expect.
Let’s just quickly recap how much you should expect to pay for each, integral component of an effective B2B site redesign:
We believe there’s really no inbound marketing per-se, but there are inbound sales. That’s why we design B2B websites with a laser-beam focus on engagement with our clients’ buyers. After all, all-important lead generation optimization and sales growth are long-term realities, not merely one-time events. We get that 100%.
Can you think of other aspects of a B2B website redesign that we maybe haven’t addressed?
How much of your budget would you set aside for a B2B website redesign?
Have we given you the insight you need to now plan a redesign with confidence?
