The top 10 things B2B small business owners need to focus on for their website and digital marketing

Small business digital marketing can become complicated very quickly.

You have your website, SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn, email marketing, content, analytics, CRM, social media and whatever new marketing platform someone has decided you absolutely need this month.

The problem is that most small B2B businesses don’t have a marketing department with ten people in it.

You might have one person doing marketing. You might outsource bits of it. Quite often, the business owner is still involved.

You therefore need to focus on the things that will actually make a difference.

I’ve worked on websites and digital marketing for small and large businesses for years, and one thing comes up repeatedly: businesses often spend too much time on individual marketing activities without stepping back and looking at how everything works together.

Your website should sit at the centre of this.

LinkedIn, Google, email, paid advertising and everything else should help the right people find your business. Your website then needs to explain what you do, prove you know what you’re doing and give those people a sensible next step.

So, if you run a small B2B business, these are the ten areas I’d concentrate on.

• 1. Know exactly who you want to attract
• 2. Get your message right before worrying about design
• 3. Build a sensible website structure
• 4. Put proper effort into your service pages
• 5. Give people proof
• 6. Get the SEO basics right
• 7. Create useful content based on what you actually know
• 8. Distribute your content instead of just publishing it
• 9. Keep your website quick, simple and easy to use
• 10. Measure enquiries and improve what works

1. Know exactly who you want to attract.

“Businesses” is not a target audience.

Neither is “SMEs”.

You need a much better idea of the people you want your marketing to reach.

What sort of businesses are they working for? How large are those businesses? What job do they have? What problem has caused them to start looking for someone like you?

This matters because someone searching for help rarely wakes up wanting to buy “innovative business solutions”.

They have a specific problem.

Their existing supplier is rubbish. Their software isn’t working. Their sales have stalled. They need specialist advice. Something costs too much. Something takes too long.

Your marketing needs to meet them at that point.

If you try to appeal to everyone, the usual result is vague website copy that doesn’t say much to anyone.

I’d rather see a business confidently explain that it solves a specific problem for a specific type of client than fill its homepage with generic claims about quality, passion and customer service.

Specific beats generic.

2. Get your message right before worrying about design.

I bang on about this a lot, but your website content should come before the design.

It shouldn’t be:

Design website. Fill boxes with words later.

Work out what you need to say first.

Your homepage needs to establish what you do, who you do it for and why someone should consider using you.

Your service pages need to explain what you offer properly.

Your About content needs to establish who is behind the business.

Your case studies need to demonstrate what you’ve achieved.

Once you know what needs to be communicated, a good designer can make it look appropriate.

Trying to solve weak messaging by redesigning the website usually results in a prettier website with exactly the same problem.

I’ve never seen a B2B company lose a significant contract because its website needed a slightly different shade of blue.

I have seen websites lose potential enquiries because nobody could work out what the business actually did.

3. Build a sensible website structure.

Your website needs a proper hierarchy.

This sounds obvious, but plenty of small business websites have grown organically over several years. Someone adds a page here, a new service there and a few blog posts whenever there is time.

Eventually, the whole thing becomes a cupboard full of random stuff.

Start with your main commercial pages.

You will generally need a homepage, About section, individual service or product pages, case studies, useful resources or articles and a clear way to make contact.

There will obviously be variations depending on the business.

The important bit is that the structure reflects what your customers need rather than how your company happens to be organised internally.

Your visitor probably doesn’t care which department delivers something.

They care whether you can solve their problem.

A sensible structure also makes everything else easier. Navigation improves. Internal linking becomes clearer. Search engines can understand the relationship between pages and you have obvious places to add new content later.

4. Put proper effort into your service pages.

For most B2B companies, service pages are some of the most commercially important pages on the website.

Yet they are often awful.

You’ll see a photograph, 150 words of marketing fluff and a button saying “Learn more”.

Learn more about what?

If somebody is considering spending thousands of pounds with you, give them enough information to make progress with that decision.

Explain what the service is. Explain who it is for. Explain the problems it solves. Explain how you approach the work. Show relevant examples. Answer genuine concerns.

You don’t need to publish every detail of your process or write 5,000 words because somebody told you longer pages rank better.

You need enough useful information for the page to do its job.

There is no magic word count.

If the subject needs 800 words, write 800. If you can cover it properly in 400, stop at 400.

5. Give people proof.

Anyone can write “we’re experts” on a website.

It’s considerably more convincing when you prove it.

This is particularly important in B2B marketing because buying decisions can involve significant amounts of money, several stakeholders and a fair amount of perceived risk.

Your website should reduce that risk.

Case studies are probably the most useful way to do this.

A decent case study should explain the client, the problem, what you did and what happened afterwards.

Real detail makes it credible.

Testimonials help too, as do client logos, accreditations, awards, reviews, team biographies and examples of your work where appropriate.

But don’t chuck fifty logos across the homepage and assume the job is done.

A prospective client wants evidence that you understand businesses like theirs and problems like the one they currently have.

Give them that evidence.

6. Get the SEO basics right.

SEO does not need to start with a 75-page spreadsheet.

For many small B2B businesses, getting the basics right would be a significant improvement.

Make sure each important page has a clear purpose.

Work out what someone would realistically search for when they need that page.

Use sensible page titles, headings and URLs. Link related pages together. Make sure search engines can crawl the site. Remove duplicate or useless pages. Keep the site quick.

Most importantly, make sure the content answers the reason someone searched in the first place.

Keywords matter, but they shouldn’t dictate every sentence you write.

My preferred process is simple:

Structure first. Content second. Keywords third.

Write what needs to be said, research how people search for it and then refine the copy where necessary.

You will usually find that good subject-specific content already contains plenty of relevant language because that’s naturally how someone who understands the subject writes about it.

SEO should help good content get found. It shouldn’t turn perfectly good copy into keyword soup.

7. Create useful content based on what you actually know.

A blog is not useful simply because you publish something every Tuesday.

There is already enough generic content on the internet.

Your advantage as a small B2B business is that you probably have years of real experience inside the company.

Use it.

Write about questions clients actually ask you.

Explain common mistakes you see.

Take apart problems you’ve fixed.

Write about how you approach difficult projects.

Share opinions based on experience.

Publish proper case studies.

If five prospects have asked you the same question during sales meetings, that’s probably a better article idea than whatever an SEO tool has randomly suggested you write about this week.

This is also where smaller businesses can compete with much larger companies.

You may not have their marketing budget, but you can have more useful first-hand knowledge.

Google’s own guidance places a lot of emphasis on original, useful, people-first content and demonstrable experience. Conveniently, that’s also the sort of content potential clients are more likely to find useful.

Don’t publish for the sake of publishing.

Say something useful.

8. Distribute your content instead of just publishing it.

Writing a decent article and then waiting for Google to find it is only half a job.

You already have the basis for wider marketing activity.

An article can become several useful LinkedIn posts. It can give you something worthwhile to send to your email list. Salespeople can send it to prospects who ask relevant questions. It can support proposals and follow-up emails.

This is particularly effective for B2B companies because people rarely buy after seeing one thing once.

They might find an article through Google, notice something you post on LinkedIn two weeks later, return to look at a case study and eventually contact you.

Your channels should work together.

That does not mean you need accounts on every social network known to man.

Use the channels where your customers actually are.

For many B2B businesses, doing a good job with the website, search, LinkedIn and email is considerably more useful than maintaining six half-dead social profiles.

9. Keep your website quick, simple and easy to use.

Your website exists to help people do something.

Don’t make that harder than it needs to be.

Keep the navigation straightforward. Make text easy to read. Make buttons obvious. Make pages work properly on mobile. Don’t bury useful information inside endless sliders, tabs and clever animations.

And keep the site quick.

This is one reason I’m not a fan of throwing plugins and page builders at every WordPress project. Websites can become bloated surprisingly quickly, and all that clever stuff comes at a cost.

A B2B visitor does not care that your homepage heading flew in from the left while a background video loaded behind it.

They care about getting the information they came for.

Your design still matters. A badly designed website can damage credibility very quickly.

But good web design should make the content easier to understand, not fight for attention with it.

Keep it simple.

10. Measure enquiries and improve what works.

This is the bit businesses often forget.

You need to know whether any of this stuff is producing something useful.

Traffic on its own tells you very little.

I’d rather have 500 relevant visitors and ten decent enquiries than 10,000 visitors who do nothing.

At the very least, you should have some understanding of where your enquiries come from.

Which pages do prospects visit?

Which articles generate useful traffic?

Which search terms bring potential customers?

Which campaigns create enquiries?

Which enquiries turn into actual business?

This final point is crucial.

Digital marketing should eventually connect back to commercial results.

Analytics can tell you what happened on the website. Your CRM or sales process should tell you what happened afterwards.

You don’t need fifty dashboards containing hundreds of metrics nobody looks at.

You need enough useful information to make better decisions.

If one service page consistently creates good enquiries, improve it and support it with more relevant content.

If you’ve published twenty articles about a subject and none attracts the right visitors or helps sales, stop doing more of the same.

Marketing without measurement becomes a collection of activities.

Measure the bits that matter and put more effort into the things that produce results.

Bringing all this together.

None of the things above works particularly well in isolation.

A fast website with bad copy is still a bad website.

Great content nobody can find isn’t doing much for you.

Lots of traffic to a service page that doesn’t convince anyone is just lots of wasted traffic.

A brilliant LinkedIn presence pointing people towards a confusing website isn’t much better.

For a small B2B business, your digital marketing should operate as one joined-up system.

Know who you want to reach.

Understand what they need.

Create a website that explains how you can help.

Prove you know what you’re doing.

Create genuinely useful content around your expertise.

Help people find it.

Then measure what happens and improve it.

You can add clever stuff later.

Get these ten things right first.