You may have heard that we recently launched the new Acoustic website – a fresh take on our brand, how we connect with customers, and how we market ourselves. In fact, if you’re reading this, you’re experiencing the new site right now – welcome!

Built using Acoustic Content, our new website is not only a hub for prospects, customers, and partners to learn about our capabilities, it’s a case study in how to build a best-in-class B2B technology website (if we do say so ourselves!).

Now, this isn’t to say Acoustic.com is perfect – yet. Like any new website, we’re catching typos and broken links that need updating. By building Acoustic.com using our tools and the best practices we recommend to customers, though, we’re demonstrating the power of our technology and putting ourselves in your shoes. We know what makes you tick because it makes us tick, too.

Using our experience building the new Acoustic website, let’s take a closer look at what makes a B2B website successful.

Curate Curiosity

One of the most important things to remember when building a B2B website is that you’re marketing to purchasing teams, not individual decision-makers. On a B2C website, brands will try to share as much information as possible to convince the user to make a quick purchase. For example, if you’re running a furniture store, you’ll want to provide dimensions, materials, weight, customer testimonials, and price at the most basic level for each piece you’re selling. With this slew of information, an individual consumer should be able to make a purchase decision.

A B2B website should function differently, just as B2B companies do. Instead of attempting to provide as much information as possible to an individual user, B2B websites should aim to equip visitors with information that resonates and can be shared with larger purchasing teams. It’s not about creating information overload, but rather sharing enough information to spark curiosity.

In order to do this, varying your web content is key. With multiple people comprising a purchasing team, there could be differing values or pain points. It’s important your website has the ability to cater to these audiences. Some people are visual learners, meaning videos or infographics will resonate with them. Others prefer to skim information on their own time, leading them to value written content like a blog post or whitepaper. Similarly, a CMO may need high-level information about how a product will drive ROI while someone on the product team may be more concerned with specific product capabilities that can help them avoid downtime.

Yet no matter what format the content takes, the journey to it should feel natural for the user.

Drive Value

Back in the 80s and 90s, there was a popular children’s book series called Choose Your Own Adventure, where readers could determine the outcome of a story by making decisions along the way. In many ways, a website should be the modern, adult version of Choose Your Own Adventure: you find the site by consuming content in your preferred manner (e.g., from social media, an email campaign, or via a Google search); you click through the content that interests you most; and you opt-in to share personal information (i.e., contact details) to download high-value assets. You’re making decisions and finding assets on your own terms, without realizing all of the backend work that went into making the user experience streamlined and consistent.

To achieve this, marketers must reverse-engineer web content. Instead of saying, “We have this piece of content, how can we get users to engage with it?” marketers should take a step back and determine who the audience is, what their specific pain points are and what information can be shared to help solve those challenges. From there, a webpage can be developed that specifically addresses customer concerns rather than one that serves up a piece of disconnected marketing collateral.

Iterate, Iterate, & Iterate Some More

Once the website is launched, your job is just beginning. Now that the site is live, you can begin testing to determine what messages are resonating and what changes need to be made to turn leads into customers. Website analytics are crucial to identifying these areas, but with so much data that can be collected, it helps to first determine what your business goals are and what the key performance indicators (KPIs) are that map to these goals. From there, you can determine which individual metrics to measure.

Website analytics can also help you determine how visitors are finding your site, which can impact how you manage resources. For example, if most traffic tends to come from email blasts rather than paid LinkedIn campaigns, you may redirect funds or determine that a new approach is needed on LinkedIn.

Sharing information like this with the sales team can enable them to have more informed conversations with prospects, making the website a true sales enablement tool. If they understand which messages are resonating with which audiences, they’ll be better equipped to serve them the right pitch at the right time.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive on how our new website came to fruition, Acoustic CMO Norman Guadagno sat down with our web agency Genuine to discuss B2B website best practices and the all-new Acoustic.com.

What makes a B2B website successful?

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