Is your website a revenue-producing asset or a digital brochure? If your website isn’t generating leads, your sales process isn’t synched with the modern buying process.
According to the Corporate Executive Board, the average B2B buyer completes 57% of their sales process before they ever talk with a salesperson. They research buying options with Google searches and social media referrals. So if you’re not generating leads with your website, either people aren’t finding you or they’re finding you, but they’re not finding the information they need.
But where do you start? There’s nothing more terrifying than looking at a blank page with no idea where to start. The process we use at Triario involves understanding your audience, establishing design objectives and managing technical details in the development process to create a website that sells.
Here are 4 steps to create an effective user experience that will generate the kind of sales leads you need to grow your business.
This is arguably the most important part of establishing your information architecture. You need to know your current strengths and weaknesses and how you stack up against your competition. Ask yourself questions like:
It's not enough to go with your first impression - dig deep and talk to different people in your company. A good understanding of how you fit in the competitive landscape will help you use branding, messaging and content to show off your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.
It's impossible to know how to present information to your target audience without knowing who they are. The first step is to know the types of customers that you can help best and who will be profitable customers for you. Consider the types of industries you target, the sizes of the companies you best serve and the pain points they commonly face.
Once you know the market segment you're targeting, you need to identify the buyers within those segments. Do you sell to CFOs or Production Managers? What are their personal and professional aspirations? Who are their bosses and what are they looking for? We work with our customers to create Buyer Personas and develop roadmaps of the typical buyer's journey.
This information helps us understand what information they need to address problems and opportunities in their jobs and any technological limitations they may have to access information. We take this information and create design interfaces that make it easy for target buyers to find what they need.
An experienced, effective information architect is a critical factor in building a lead generation website. When we build websites for our customers, the information architect is involved in every facet of the process. They create the navigation map and can see the full scope of the website design.
They work with designers and developers to translate the concept of the website into the final project. Remember, the goal of your website is to generate sales leads - while branding is important, it should serve your business purposes and objectives.
We think information architecture (also known as user experience or UX) is so important that we have an information architect involved in every website we build.
By now, you should have all of the tools necessary to start building out your lead generation website: a navigation map and a well-designed site template. Now that you have identified the objectives of your website and your target audience, it's time to get your hands dirty.
We suggest starting with your homepage. Start with wireframes to define the structure of the page, using the information collected earlier in the process to create a design that meets the objectives of the site, usability standards and conversion objectives. Once everyone signs off on the wireframe, it's time to start the design and development process, translating the objective into reality.