What Makes A Business Website Great?

What characteristics come to mind when you try to imagine the perfect business website?

Appearance is likely toward the top - it is, after all, the first thing we “see.”

And then, you might switch focus to the details—search engine optimization with keywords in all the right places.

Neither of those answers is wrong. But if the purpose of your business website is to generate leads and drive sales, your goal should be for it to meet these four criteria:

• Seamless integration into your company’s overall marketing strategy

• Lead generation functionality with usable content and progressive forms

• Ability to expand and adapt as your business grows and the market changes

• Responsive design and dynamic content to enhance customer experience

Online research is the first stop for a majority of consumers today, including 90 percent of B2B purchasers. (Click to Tweet!)

Your website is where they get to know you. It tells your story, establishes your brand, and can be the ideal platform for either ecommerce or lead generation. But it needs to incorporate these elements that make a business website great.

Seamless integration into overall marketing strategy

Don’t let separation of duties turn into separate approaches. Communications—from PR outreach campaigns, to email marketing efforts, and even customer service follow-up contacts—should be coordinated to provide prospects and customers with a cohesive message and impression. That is one reason we believe in a comprehensive companywide content strategy.

Your website is a core part of the overall strategy, supporting other marketing tactics and tools. Its structure, appearance and content should coordinate smoothly with other communications.

When making upgrades to your corporate website, do so with the rest of your marketing strategy in mind. What elements are you using in your marketing mix? Blogging? Downloadable offers? A focus on immediate responsiveness that indicates a need for live chat features?

Avoid thinking of your website as separate from your marketing strategy; instead, remember that it is a core pillar of that strategy.

Lead generation functionality

As you consider how your website fits into the overall marketing strategy, remember that even if your business isn’t suited to direct ecommerce, your website can play a valuable role in capturing leads and contact information for prospective customers.

When your site offers quality content that potential customers want and need, they will be willing to share information with you to get it. To truly implement online lead generation you need several elements:

• Ungated content, focused on key search terms, that attracts them to your website. A business blog is a great example.

• Calls-to-action that promote more relevant content or other offers.

• Landing pages to capture lead information as prospects access the offers.

• Automated lead nurturing to instantly and automatically follow up with leads and establish communication.

Make sure your website is designed to optimize each of those elements, with an integrated company blog, the ability to expand your landing pages and resource offerings, and an automated lead nurturing program that seamlessly connects you to those who have visited your site in search of solutions to their problems. (JONES is a certified partner with HubSpot, one of the nation’s leading providers of integrated inbound marketing software.)

Ability to expand and adapt

If you are taking the time—and spending the money—to update and upgrade your website, don’t just swap one static “cookie cutter” template for another one. (See our Website Upgrade Problem/Solution paper.)

Instead, insist on a personalized site that is designed to change with your company. Rather than being trapped into what works today, a well-built website allows for improvement and growth for the future. At the least, your website should be structured to allow for simple addition of blog pages, landing pages, and a growing resource library of content, like our Inbound Marketing Learning Library.

Being able to continually add content and landing pages and adapt other parts of your site for integration with automated lead capture and lead nurturing means you don’t have to spring for a complete redesign every time you add a new product or marketing campaign.

Responsive design and dynamic content

More than 50 percent of time spent accessing the internet is now done using mobile devices. (Source)

That means your website must be functional whether view vertically or horizontally, mobile, desktop or laptop, and in all browsers. Responsive design ensures that your site will work across all platforms.

Dynamic content personalizes the experience for users. It can take many forms, from remembering what content visitors accessed on their most recent visit to showing them specific content based on their geographic location, how they arrived at your site, or other parameters. It is this dynamic content that suggests offers related to others a lead has converted on and works to move them through the sales funnel.

Does your website have what it takes to be great? What other characteristics would you add to our “must-have” list?

Find out more about our six-step approach to website design success in our JONES Website Design Solutions whitepaper.