As a business-to-business company you need to refresh your B2B website, but thinking through what you need can seem daunting if you don’t redesign websites on a regular basis. Of course, you’ll start by tackling some of the basic questions, like what are the main business goals of the website? And who are the main users?
Your B2B company wants your B2B website design to look good, but it also needs a great user experience, meaning that it allows your website visitors to accomplish what they set out to do. B2B website design trends are ever evolving, but these five trends have taken hold, and we believe they’ll continue to into 2020 and beyond.
Trend 1: B2B Companies Use of Long Scrolling Sites + Parallax
With the adoption of mobile phones and the subsequent rise of mobile browsing, long scrolling sites have become increasingly popular. The smaller the screen size, the more scrolling is necessary and actually easier for the browser. Think about how much easier it is to scroll on your smart phone or Apple Watch than it is to move from page to page. In fact, the crown on the side of the Apple Watch was built specifically to help us easily scroll through apps and pages.
Moo.com, our favorite place to order business cards, has a long scrolling site.
Another reason B2B companies should adopt a long scrolling site is it supports brand storytelling. As B2B companies look to humanize their brands, storytelling has replaced copy-heavy websites. Brands use the modules or sections making up the long scroll to tell their story using visuals, graphics and copy. Plus, there are great features that support the long scroll, such as parallax.
If you aren’t familiar with parallax, it is when the website background moves more slowly than the foreground. It creates a 3D effect as you scroll, and allows you to layer your graphics, images and colors to create a compelling experience—one that ideally is designed to support telling your brand’s story.
Check out the home page of C.E.K. & Partners and its use of parallax.
Trend 2: B2B Companies Need High-Quality Visuals
No doubt about it, people are highly visual, as evidenced by the rise of Instagram and infographics. Moving away from a copy-heavy website to one using more visuals allows your B2B company to better connect with your audience. We understand not all projects can support the time or budgets associated with hiring a photographer.
Today, high-quality stock photography can be purchased at relatively affordable prices. Still, we highly recommend taking the time to find and create the right collection of images that can be used across your website as well as across other channels. The C.E.K. & Partners’ creative design studio counsels brands—both B2B and B2C—that the images selected should work together in their tone and style.
Healthystate.us does a great job of using high-quality stock images.
Trend 3: Use Video on Your Website
How can you use video on your B2B company's website? In our blog post, How Can You Better Connect with B2B Buyers?, we discuss using videos on websites to showcase big ideas, such as your B2B company's brand story. Just as people enjoy films because they tap into our emotions—love, fear, hope and joy—videos provide a more emotional platform for telling your brand story. Why not take the opportunity to create a stronger impression when somebody stops by your B2B company's website? Forrester agrees,
“Video is a dynamic way to engage buyers because it showcases your company’s big ideas. It also makes complex ideas simpler for buyers to understand and helps establish emotional connections and empathy better than any other medium.”
Videos don’t have to be limited to a brand story, but serve well for customer testimonials, as well as executive leadership series and much more.
One example is the Hubspot video about their story - Inbound is Everywhere.
Trend 4: Full-Screen Landing Pages
B2B company's use landing pages as a critical tool for supporting lead generation, capturing contact information in exchange for an eBook, check list or other helpful content. Full-screen landing pages help people focus to fill out the forms since they won’t get distracted by other content on the page.
Trend 5: B2B Company Website's Use Blog's With Card Layout
We know you know, but we can’t help but remind you that for B2B companies blogs are so critical for supporting digital marketing, especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content amplification. After all, what company doesn’t want to appear on page 1 of Google results in answer to those most pressing questions?
While developing a B2B content marketing strategy and editorial content calendar is essential to getting the right content served up to your B2B company's website visitors, we are seeing more and more blogs using a Card Layout, similar in style to Pinterest. The most obvious reason is B2B companies are able to serve up more content. Another reason is social media has adopted this approach and people are increasingly comfortable finding content within this layout. Of course, you’ll want to include the basics within the “card” that shows before the option to “read more”: image, title, author, excerpt and date.
Interested in discovering more great tips about what’s influencing healthcare marketing, fintech marketing and B2B marketing at large? Subscribe to our blog, and check out our recent video showing what our clients have to say about how we have positively impacted their business!
About Carolyn Kopf
Carolyn Kopf started her career working on the world’s most known brands on Madison Ave. in New York City and continued to do so while living in Madrid, Spain, and Tokyo, Japan. She established C.E.K. & Partners, an Atlanta-based branding and digital marketing firm, to provide big-agency thinking and methodologies leveraging the power of small to healthcare companies, fintech and payment processors, purpose-driven brands and place makers. Her expert team is comprised of professionals with a deep passion for everything branding. Everyone who joins C.E.K. holds deep expertise in their specialized area, whether it is market research, strategic planning, brand strategy, product innovation, content marketing, data analytics, storytelling, copy writing, graphic design, website design, video production or media relations.
Comments