Thought Leadership Web Design

Designing an Inbound Marketing Focused Website

By ClarityDevs 01 June, 2021

Inbound marketing is one of the best ways to bring leads into your business, and so designing your website so it can support an effective inbound marketing strategy should become a top priority for all B2B technology companies.

Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the things your design and development teams needs to consider when attempting to create a digital experience platform that generates leads and sits at the heart of digital growth.

Buyer Personas & User Journeys

Before you dive into designing a new site, it’s worth doing some ‘discovery and definition’. An effective website that delivers results will user centric in its UX and design – research and marketing teams should spend a long time taking a look at your target market and identifying the most valuable buyer personas. You need to know as much as possible about the people most likely to engage and convert, and then use that information to align SEO, content, UX and design in your new website.

Similarly, it’s worth spending time mapping out the key user journeys through the site, to ensure that there is always a clear path forwards for the user to follow. This can be done using wireframes and journey flow diagrams, based on the key personas you are targeting.

Our wider discovery, definition and strategy processes often include other pieces of work including:

Sitemap and information architecture definition
Analytics audits
Heatmap analysis
SEO keyword research
User persona definition
User journey mapping
Content mapping/strategy
Technical architecture
Workshops

Content & SEO

It’s wise to design your website in a manner that helps to support organic traffic acquisition, but also support content marketing across the buyer journey. There is a wide range of content your site might need to support such as:

Blog posts
White papers
Videos
Infographics
Webinars
Images
And more

Ensuring your new site design can support this content is key. Many of our clients build out carefully designed ‘Resource Libraries’ or ‘Knowledge Hubs’ that allow content to be pulled together in once central location, and can also support data capture – for example a user might have to part with their email address in order to download your resource.

SEO is a key part of digital marketing for nearly all B2B technology companies. Yet many companies still make the mistake of trying to design and build a site and then SEO it afterwards. This approach rarely makes sense, and results in more time and money being spent than necessary in the longer term. You should look to invest in ensuring your SEO requirements are worked into your new website design from the beginning.

Aligning content, SEO, UX and design together is quite the science, but one that we’ve mastered through our own framework at Clarity Performance over the years – get in touch if you want to hear about it.

Personalisation

It is possible to personalise the information on your website in a variety of ways, based on known information about the user such as their sector or the channel they have arrived at the site from. We believe this will be an integral part of future marketing effectiveness, and has the potential to unlock enormous ROI for marketers if used effectively.

For instance, your business can make sure researchers in different industries see varied information when they land on your website. Perhaps your products or services offer different benefits to companies in various marketplaces. Use personalisation tools to ensure people see the most relevant content based on their demographics or where they are within the buyer’s cycle. We’re also exploring using firmographic databases to personalise website content based on the visitor’s IP address, which has some exciting use cases.

Speed

Speed is now more important than ever, not only because it’s part of the expected user experience of modern web browsers, but also because of how closely linked to SEO it is.

There are various tools you can use to check your site speed, and it makes sense to do that often. It’s usually possible to increase site speed by:

Reducing HTTP requests
Choosing the right host
Combining or minifying files
Enabling compression
Reducing image sizes
Enabling browser caching
Utilising a CDN

Your technical team or digital agency should be able to advise on this.

Now you know a little more about the basics of designing an inbound marketing focused website design; you can use the information to guarantee your website has the biggest impact possible and helps to generate as many potential leads as possible.

Remember that it’s possible to A/B test any changes or alterations your team makes, and that should assist in helping to highlight whether or not they work in your favour.