For many B2B organizations, web design is the best sales tool at their disposal because B2B marketing presents unique challenges when it comes to building customer relationships and bringing a steady flow of prospects into your marketing funnel to generate qualified sales leads.
While B2C brands typically expect sales transactions to be completed within one website visit, B2B companies rarely expect conversions the first time prospects visit their websites. That’s because B2B sales cycles tend to be relatively long, and the customer journey often consists of numerous interactions across multiple media channels and mobile devices. That’s why the best B2B websites are designed to inform, captivate, and persuade people to engage with brands.
Designing B2B websites according to best practices is key to helping the site perform and deliver what your audience needs and expects. It’s also important for B2B companies because thoughtful web design improves engagement and SEO, leading to more organic search traffic that can convert into quality leads that grow the business. Overall, the better your B2B website’s user experience is for visitors, the more often your brand will leave positive, lasting impressions and earn new customers.
If you are seeking inspiration or guidance for great B2B web design, consider these eight examples of B2B sites that effectively follow best practices to deliver great experiences for their visitors:
8 Examples of the Best B2B Website Designs
-
- Blake Envelopes – Emphasize the quality of your product
- Asana – Perfectly placed calls-to-action
- Acme – Functional minimalism
- Zendesk – Customer service
- Grammarly – Define your value proposition
- Kao Collins InkTank – Quality content
- Adobe CXM – Design that tells a story
- Fullscreen – Captivating videography
-
Blake Envelopes – Emphasize the Quality of Your Product
The Blake Envelopes website uses vibrant colors and images to convey product quality
On a list of the Most Exciting Products, “envelopes” probably doesn’t even rank. However, you couldn’t tell by visiting Blake Envelopes. Their website has a vibrant, cheery feel, and captures the audience’s attention by featuring a variety of their high quality products. The site’s imagery uses visually appealing colors and movement to make passive products feel more active and alive, which helps to keep users engaged and interested in the brand.
-
Asana – Perfectly Placed CTAs
Asana’s homepage Call to Action is followed by engaging animations and interactive elements as users scroll
Asana does a great job directing their audience exactly where they want them to go. On their homepage, a giant call-to-action (CTA) waits in the “first fold” to convert their visitors into consumers. As users scroll, they see more CTAs positioned near animations of the product in action, including interactive design elements that prompt users to learn more and navigate to related pages.
-
Acme – Functional Minimalism
The Acme website’s homepage does a great job of using minimalist design that is also functional
Less is more. There is no need for clutter and chaos. Acme is a great example of this theory, improving their user experience with a minimalistic approach (a rare choice in B2B web design) to reduce load time and increase readability. When there is less content on a page, each element has a way of drawing more attention. Acme’s homepage design is polished and simple, making small statements–like the centered and visibly prominent “Industrial Solutions Since 1975” tagline–more impactful and resonant with users.
What’s equally impressive about Acme’s minimalist web design is how it becomes more robust and intuitive as the user interacts with the page and navigates the site. The homepage is divided by subtle vertical lines so that each section links to interior landing pages; moving a cursor across sections of the page animates and reconstructs the background, rendering new imagery to show users where they will land when they click that area of the screen.
-
Zendesk – Customer Service
Zendesk’s website design focuses on customers, much like their products and services do
Zendesk has done an amazing job with their website by focusing the design on great customer support right from the jump. From the top fold of the homepage, site visitors can sign up for a free trial, watch a demonstration of the software, and click to chat with a live sales representative while getting the full experience at the tip of their fingers.
-
Grammarly – Define Your Value Proposition
Grammarly states its value proposition upfront and includes animations that demonstrate its usefulness
What are you offering? The audience should be able to instantly identify the company’s purpose and how it will deliver. Rather than excessive attempts to drive buyer motivation, focus energy on addressing how your company will provide solutions, the way Grammarly does on their homepage and throughout their website.
At the top of their website’s homepage, the headline gives enough detail that the company’s value proposition is clear, and the call-to-action button clearly tells the user what they can expect when they click.
The homepage also includes helpful animations that demonstrate exactly how Grammarly’s product helps the end customer. This web design technique is effective because even if a site visitor does not read a single line of copy, watching the animations will still help them understand how the product provides value.
-
Kao Collins InkTank – Quality Content
Kao Collins’s InkTank blog uses vibrant colors and motion graphics to promote its quality B2B content
Offering vibrant, positive content to users will only lift your brand in a positive direction. Pick a brand voice that aligns with your company’s mission statement and run with it. Keep readers informed while portraying your company as relatable and reliable.
Kao Collins, a global ink engineering and manufacturing leader, recognizes the impact great content has when combined with great B2B web designs. The homepage of Kao Collins’s InkTank blog leads with captivating visuals and structures the links to blog content within an appealing user interface.
Want to learn more about how we designed websites for Kao Collins and InkTank? View Our Portfolio
Tips for Writing Great B2B Website Content
A beautifully designed B2B website with poor content will fail to capitalize on many valuable business opportunities for your company. We recommend following these best practices when producing content for B2B sites:
-
Briefly explain products/services upfront.
Visitors need you to get straight to the point. At the first sign of ambiguity, they will bounce from the page and move on to one of your competitors.
-
Promote the benefits of partnership.
If they decide to partner with you, what will customers be gaining? Use case studies and previous successful partnerships to show, rather than tell. Results speaks louder than words.
-
Strategically place every pixel of content within your pages.
It matters. Thoughtful placement of content is crucial to directing the focus of visitors to your call-to-action so that more of them convert. Positioning of content also establishes a hierarchy within your website, helping visitors prioritize the more important information.
-
-
Adobe CXM – Design That Tells a Story
Adobe’s CXM site effectively uses web design to lead visitors through a story about its product offerings
Instead of directing users through complex navigations and category pages, B2B sites should choose a web design that takes them on a journey. This approach, as seen on Adobe’s CXM website, moves towards conversation marketing rather than content marketing. As users scroll down the homepage, they see text and animated graphics that explain how the company and its products help customers, including testimonials from industry experts.
This website demonstrates that conversational marketing is about more than chatbots and live support; it’s also about using web design and content to reflect and understand what the user is seeking, then help the user navigate to the right page and provide the tailored information the user needs.
-
Fullscreen – Captivating Videography
Fullscreen uses video effectively on its website to show off its videography skills
Fullscreen’s website leverages captivating videography to illuminate their content with a story of “who they are” as a company that produces video entertainment and content for brands and talent so they can share it on social media. This web design trend is becoming extremely popular on home pages because videos are often more effective at conveying “what the brand is” than excessive written content on “About” pages.
Want the Best Designs for Your B2B Site?
At DBS, we have 20 years of experience designing and developing high-performing B2B websites. Contact us to get a free consultation and a customized quote for your website redesign project.
Frequently Asked Questions
Business to business (B2B) web design is the creation and optimization of a website so that it ranks for the first page of Google and brings in more traffic to generate high quality leads for businesses that sell services or products to other businesses.
To have a well functioning B2B website you should:
- To have a well functioning B2B website you should
- Emphasize the quality of the product
- Have intentionally placed calls-to-action
- Have functional minimalism, customer service
- Define your value proposition
- Have quality content
- Have a design that tells a story
- Have captivating imagery/videography.
Improving your website traffic means bringing quality users in an informative and efficient way. That being said, following best practices of web design, optimizing your website for Google search, and targeting the correct audience will help to improve your website traffic.
Tips for writing great B2B website content are briefly explaining products/services upfront, promoting the benefits of partnership, and strategically placing every piece of content within your pages.