7 Ways To Know You NEED a New B2B Website

It’s my job to sell B2B website redesigns. It’s what we do at Red Branch Media and I am pretty darn good at selling them. That being said, they are hard, exhausting, fun, rewarding and a huge pain in the A$$ all at once. We’re currently in the middle of three of them!

So trust me when I say, if you don’t need a website redesign I won’t try to sell you one. If you’re also working with us on content and strategy, I will try even harder because I want a beautiful and functional home for my content babies to live in. I want all the things that any great CMO would want for you, like awesome plugins, great SEO, integrations with the stuff you use to sell and sexy little icons.

Pretty much everyone today is working with people outside of their home base. I know NONE of my current clients live in Omaha, Nebraska. Most went and checked out not just my website but my web presence before hiring me. As they should and as YOUR customers are doing. My old website was well-written but ugly as homemade soap. If yours is too, please consider getting it fixed. It’s a really bad first impression.

If you don’t know what is going on behind the scenes at your website, you are missing out. Firstly, because it’s super fun to check analytics, figure out what content is making people’s day and seeing leads come in every day (yup, every single day!) If your website is too intimidating or hard to use or you don’t have marketing automation software hooked up, you need to rethink that. Stat.

I think my first three jobs were a direct result of some overinflated designer’s ego. I have more than one client who has had their site, marketing materials, fonts and design files held hostage. Some even had to pay exorbitant prices to get things like a twitter button added (real life). Many business people are, you guessed it, busy, so they don’t take the time to track these people down and get what should be their property. If you are owner “in name only” it’s time to build yourself a site you can use.

This is actually a great place to be. If you’re successfully selling your product or service without a functional or attractive website (or even one that just needs to be more functional or attractive) then you are way ahead of the pack. Some might assume that you don’t need a perfect website to be functional. True, but you do need a website that speaks to your current and future customers. That is, you need a site that is scalable. Because word of mouth only lasts so long.

This does not mean that your website encourages follow up, it means that your navigation and user experience is confusing and poor. Which means…you need to fix it. The good news is, unless your website is fugs, you can get away with hiring a smart UX person to help you fix it — cheaper than an overhaul.

It’s frustrating for small business owners (and medium business owners too!) to have to change their site every time Google changes their search algorithm or to have to adjust to a new video format just when they finished paying off their old videos (pssst! video used to be pricey!) That’s why you look for an agency that’s going to build for the future in terms of responsiveness, training and SEO.

I get lots of business from people who hired a “real” agency before coming to Red Branch Media. They hired someone used to designing sites for bakeries or F500 or automotive resellers or online e-commerce. It doesn’t matter. Those people didn’t know how to design for a B2B buyer and thus, the beautiful website sits there, never getting asked to the sales prom.

So before you buy into the hype, think about whether your website really needs an overhaul. Oh! Bonus tip: If your website is not responsive, then you will start being penalized by Google very soon. So get on it.