In the B2B marketing realm, lead generation is the name of the game. You’ve done your due diligence, dedicated countless hours to establishing a unique position in the market, identified target personas in the buying cycle, and created rich, compelling content that lets your audience know exactly how your solution will help them succeed where others have failed.
But despite all this legwork, your site isn’t generating qualified leads at the rate it needs to be. What gives?
If your site is doing everything by the book and still experiencing lackluster results, it’s time to take a closer look at your strategy for giving a potential buyer the grand tour, then consider a few B2B web design best practices to improve your approach.
B2B sites must make far more intentional efforts than their B2C counterparts to funnel interested users as quickly as possible to the next step in the buying cycle.
There are a lot of B2B best practices in the current era for optimizing the site navigation experience, and we’ll detail some of them later in this article. But first, let’s talk about the two absolutely vital components all good web navigation has: organization and convenience.
To help people connect quickly with the right information and calls to action, your website must set them up for success from the start by answering their most essential questions upfront and giving them a clear, big-picture view of your offerings. Follow that up with seamless, low-commitment opportunities to learn more, keeping in mind that poor web navigation design will always have the opposite effect. Remember that 37% that didn’t complete CTA? That number represents users whose global navigation experience made them too impatient, confused, or simply too frustrated to complete the next step in the purchasing journey.
As you peruse website navigation design options, it’s important to note that functionality and features can (and should) vary depending on the industry you serve. For example, B2B websites serving the medical and healthcare fields will require navigation tools that look very different from, say, a website catering to the needs of cybersecurity companies clients. This is because the calls to action will invariably differ for each respective field. A medical technology site would likely provide a demo video illustrating a proposed solution, whereas being prompted to explore an ROI calculator could be more beneficial for an IT Security Manager who is contemplating the purchase of cybersecurity software.
With those site fundamentals firmly in place, you can begin examining the various site navigation options to decide which combination best fits your sales and business needs. In this phase, it’s important to be open to new navigation structure techniques and methodologies. Research tells us that with increased frequency, the website visitor ignores outdated means of providing information. In other words, it’s no longer enough to simply link users to a form and hope for the best. Today’s users understand the value of their information, and they’re not going to hand it over without receiving useful ROI calculator results, white papers or other gated content, free trials, or other value offerings in exchange.
To choose the most effective approach in current website navigation design, it’s sometimes helpful to consider the least effective practices that too many websites still employ. Starting from a “devil’s advocate” perspective, ask yourself: What could my primary navigation do that would make a visitor give up and leave?
Here are some of the most common problems users encounter in website navigation, as well as B2B website best practices for correcting each issue and keeping website visitor attention on your site longer:
1. Unorganized navigation bar with too many items and overly simplistic dropdown menu.
2. Vague, non-descriptive links that don’t give users enough information about where they are headed on your site.
3. Inconvenient or easy-to-lose gated assets and calls to action.
Website navigation was once a fairly simple exercise of organizing content and choosing the shortest pathway to get from one page to another. That’s all changing thanks to machine learning, personalized web experiences, and tech savvy visitors driving the day-to-day interactions on the web. As a result, smart navigation design has become an essential component in creating websites.
At the end of the day, lead generation still is and will continue to be the end-goal for every website design and navigation menu optimization project. As a tech company working in the B2B space, you can ensure a successful site visit and generate more leads by employing B2B website design best practices, global navigation design approaches, techniques, and features at your disposal.
Don’t be afraid to mix and match these tools to create the site navigation experience you know your users want. After all, no one knows your clients better than you. You’ve got the right solutions, a solid overall design, and compelling content in place. Now it’s time to give prospects the very best grand tour your site has to offer, and convert their interest into qualified leads for your business.
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