Four Tips for MSPs Designing Their B2B Website in 2023
Last year, I took on the dauting task of redesigning the Collabrance website. The “old” website wasn’t that old, and it wasn’t bad; it had just become overgrown with too much information. Not only was it difficult for prospective customers to find the information they needed, it was difficult for us – Collabrance – to ensure the information we most wanted our customers to see was the information being surfaced. It was time to de-clutter.
So, how did I begin? Slowly, is the short answer. I had the support and input of my wonderful team, but ultimately, I was a marketing team of one working with one other colleague to execute this arduous task. To say I often got stuck is an understatement.
Many MSPs also find themselves in this position. Small businesses with lean operations mean team members must become jacks of all trades when running their business. Web design is an overwhelming, seemingly never-ending task – and while in some ways that’s true, it is possible to create a simplified website that is still well-rounded and effective in getting information to current customers and prospects. There are hundreds of articles about how to build a B2B website; here are four lesser-known things I’d want anyone taking on this task to know:
- Start with fresh ideas
- Keep the sitemap simple
- Work in phases
- Plan time for legal review, peer review, and technical details
If built correctly, your B2B website can – and should – be your hardest-working sales and marketing tool. Read on to learn how to successfully execute these four tips.
Start with fresh ideas
When I began the process of redesigning the Collabrance website, my plan was to comb through the existing website and conduct a content audit across the entire site – not exactly a bite-sized approach. After a few failed attempts and realizing how difficult it is to sift through a mountain of content, I realized I needed to start fresh. Rather than relying on the existing website to dictate the new website, I took the existing website out of the equation altogether. I focused instead on pinpointing the information most important to our current and prospective customers, and how to present that information in a clear manner. This exercise is practiced in a book titled “They Ask, You Answer” by Marcus Sheridan. They ask, you answer is a framework for creating content that answers every question a prospective customer might have about your business – even the things you may not want to focus on, like cost. This transparent approach builds customer trust and, ultimately, loyalty. “They Ask, You Answer” is a valuable resource for building a practical website, and it continues to help me make the Collabrance website more efficient and useful.
Keep the sitemap simple
Your content should be laser-focused on what your target customer wants to know. Collabrance, for example, works with MSPs who have some maturity in the space, so our content is tailored accordingly; we steer away from material that might attract a provider who is new to managed IT. When deciding how to organize the new website, in addition to getting into the mind of our prospective customers, we analyzed traffic and page views to the existing site to identify what information was already most sought after, making sure to structure the new site in a way that made popular content visible and easy to find. Through this, we settled on four categories:
- Services – what do we offer and what’s included?
- Pricing – what do our services cost? What other costs are involved?
- Work With Us – what are the requirements, processes, and tools involved in working with Collabrance?
- Why Collabrance? – what makes Collabrance stand out from the competition?
A clean sitemap and fewer webpages mean customers and prospects can find the information they need. It also means less future maintenance for marketing: fewer pages to monitor for broken links, fewer pages to edit when information changes, fewer pages to optimize for SEO – and so on.
Work in phases
The closer my colleague and I got to completing our site redesign, sometimes, the further away we felt. You can scrutinize and make edits indefinitely and it can be a never-ending task. For Collabrance, we set a go-live date and stuck to it; we knew that as long as the core content and functionality was in place, the average viewer wasn’t going to know if a feature here or a phrase there was missing.
Getting the website launched in 2022 was my “phase one”. “Phase two” will be the priority in 2023 – making sure the site’s information remains accurate, testing new forms to generate leads, automating functionality and workflows, page optimization and SEO, refreshing and adding new content, and leveraging the site to continue to work FOR us.
These phases may look different for your B2B business, but it’s important to define the vision and ongoing goals you have for your website. You shouldn’t expect to launch the site and move on. An effective website requires continuous review, innovation, and measurement.
Related: Four Steps to Successfully Perform a QBR (Quarterly Business Review)
Legal review, peer review, and technical details
With GreatAmerica Financial Services as our parent company, it’s imperative that any content we produce for Collabrance be reviewed by our legal team. This may not be applicable to a small MSP, but it’s important to have measures in place to ensure the information you’re sharing on your website is accurate and not harmful to you or your customers.
In addition to legal review, put your website through a peer review! Ask trusted customers, industry connections, colleagues, and even friends to review your site and provide feedback. Encourage people to review the site with a critical eye: Is it easy to navigate? Is the information presented in a way that’s coherent? Invite all feedback – positive AND negative.
Lastly, there will be technical levers that need to be pulled to take a new site live. For us, that meant moving from staging URLs to live URLs, transferring our domain, and updating the DNS settings, to name a few. As a marketer, I relied on others to handle the technical details – and that meant coordinating with external teams in advance and accounting for those steps in my project timeline.
Get started on your B2B website
In conclusion, B2B website design is intimidating, but not impossible. You don’t need a big team or fancy tools. As a marketer or business owner, having a say in your website’s content and messaging is crucial, because you are the expert in knowing what your customers and prospects want (and if you’re not – start with “They Ask, You Answer”)! If you decide to outsource the engineering and build-out of the site, stay involved regardless, and remember to stick to the information your prospects and customers want to see.