I like what American Express OPEN Forum contributor, Ivana Taylor, has to say about maximizing the utility of business-to-business websites.
Your website is a huge budget-friendly untapped resource that you’ve been ignoring for too long. Maybe you haven’t had the time to invest or maybe you’re just convinced that your customers don’t use your website to make their buying decisions because your product is so technical. Regardless of what your excuse is, if you’ve optimized your costs across your operations, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t optimize the most important process in your company: getting new customers and keeping customers.
Naturally, all agency websites are B2B sites in the professional services sector. Yet, how many of our sites good at attracting new clients, or retaining current ones? Not very many. The main reason for this is the agency business is a portfolio-first proposition. “Here, look at my work!” may be relevant, but it is also a me-first proposition. To bring romance back to the dance, it’s imperative to move from an inward-looking stance to an audience-centric POV.
To make agency sites more attractive to prospective and current clients, the content therein needs to be, at least in part, about them, not us. And I don’t mean case studies, I mean find the content that’s important to clients and prospects and deliver it on a beautifully designed silver platter.
Naturally, this approach works as well for the client sites we build, as it does for our own.