technique

The Professional and the Personal: How to Differentiate between B2B and B2C Web Design

Posted on by Mario

web design for b2b and b2c

Until our A.I. overlords takes over the world, businesses are all about people. The disappearing milk bars, once a ubiquitous feature of the Australian suburbs, cater to people. Large multinational banks cater both retail customers and corporate clients. But you know what’s behind those large corporations? More people. B2B and B2C marketing aren’t diametrically opposed to each other like the Montagues and the Capulets, they’re more akin to first cousins once removed.

Understanding the subtle and the obvious differences between the two is a critical factor in marketing. While there are a lot of similarities between B2B and B2C marketing, the balance between the subjective and objective varies between B2C, B2B and companies that cater to both. In web design, now considered to be the frontline and most important part of marketing, these differences manifest themselves in a number of different ways.

The tone and aesthetics

The basic difference is of course, the look and feel of the website itself. B2B websites are usually sanitized, adopting a cooler color tones and minimalist design. B2C websites on the other hand is usually loaded with personality, especially those targeting a younger demographic.

For a direct example, take a look at the website for MSI, a Taiwanese company specializing in computer hardware for both retail and enterprise customers. The main page for retail products is heavily stylized, featuring personalized fonts and colorful banners with a black background and splashes of red. By contrast, the main page for enterprise products is heavily muted, adopting a clean and minimalist design with only the banner displaying multiple colors, which are nowhere near as eye-catching as the one from the retail page.

The call to action

If you’ve ever been in the middle of a tendering process or have worked in a procurement division, you know how laborious business purchases can be. Even for relatively small purchases, the process of bargaining with a vendor can take quite a while. B2B marketing is a slow and methodical process and as such, B2B marketing is usually independent of the sales department, compared to how B2C marketing practically doubles as the sales department.

In web design, this translates to the prominent of the call to action button in product pages. For example, take a look at this page for one of Juniper’s core routers and compare that to this page for Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro tablet-notebook hybrid. You can’t just go and buy Juniper’s routers but look at how the ‘Request a Quote’ button is placed compared to the prominence of the ‘Buy Now’ button in the page for the Surface Pro. In B2B marketing, closing the deal is usually not part of the job description.

Differentiating between choosers and users

In B2B marketing, there are moments in which the people charged in acquiring the goods aren’t the intended users. Proper division of labor is after all how large corporations work. An employee of the engineering division might be the one doing the research but the decision has to be signed off by the managers or the procurement division. As B2B marketers, understanding how to appeal to this divide is important as this is never an issue in B2C marketing.

The engineering team (the users) is purely objective, their primary goal is finding the best product they could find. The manager (the decision maker) have to look at the bigger picture and have to take into account a myriad of other factors, like cost-and-benefits or potential return of investment, product integration issues or technical support. Making sure that your product page is loaded with the relevant information could help in convincing your potential customers.

The subjective and objective appeal

In B2C marketing, appealing to the emotional core of your audience is usually the right approach. Individual customers aren’t looking for productivity; they want something that makes them feel good. That’s not to say that they lack objectivity but since doing a thorough objective evaluation of two competing products is close to impossible, they gravitate to brands that they like, brands that they feel understand them.

B2B customers on the other hand are looking for an objective valuation. They are looking for goods and/or services that could best meet their needs at a certain price range. Brand cachet is less of an importance in B2B marketing; I’ve attended enough tender bidding process to know firsthand that the value proposition is always number one.

In web design, this difference translates to what contents are displayed. Educational contents, statistics-laden contents and case studies of how your company has helped other businesses are a staple of B2B marketing. For B2C marketing, contents involving emotional storytelling are more preferable. This does not mean storytelling have no place in B2B marketing, framing a case study as a story, like the work of chipmaker Qualcomm with helping Saipan’s water problem, is one method we’re seeing more and more.

Closing thoughts

Whether it’s to a business or directly to a customer, people are the one doing the browsing, which means that the standard arguments apply. Website usability and functionality is still a key. For marketing, having a dedicated chat box for customers to drop a question or two could be particularly helpful, so long as you make sure that the response will be swift. If your business serve both B2B and B2C sector, it is advisable to have sections dedicated to both like the MSI example from above.

How to Create an Empathetic Design: A Method to Design for Users

Posted on by Mario

Are You Actually Designing for the User A Case for Empathetic Design_YWF

Some web designers might see projects as a form of self-expression, another notch in a portfolio that reflects our personal philosophy and goals. However, this approach is wrong, as designers should understand that they not only have to display their creativity to the world but also solve a customer problem. Unfortunately, many designers often ignore this concept. However, if you want to be a better web designer, you have to meet the business goals of a client by applying empathetic design. Before we discuss about how to produce empathetic design, first you have to know the meaning of user research, since both of them are related closely.

What is User Research?

User research is used to collect information about a potential target audience. There is a lot of information that can be used, but the goal is the same, to collect and analyze information about real users.  Then businessman can use this information as solutions that make the end product attractive and intuitive to the target user.

In order to create quality user research, you have to understand user needs, wants, and even psychological makeup. In fact, the information will help designers extrapolate the best colors, stylings, and interactions based on the emotions and experience of the target group.

Therefore, it is important to put empathy when designing websites, only by this can you understand what a user wants and needs from their experience.

Why is Empathetic Design so Difficult?

During project, designers and users have to work together, but in most cases, it happens that the teamwork damages user experience. Each party is so focused on getting their own opinion across; they don’t take time to absorb what the other person is saying. If this situation is so you, as a solution, you can design the most attractive and intuitive end-product in the world, but it won’t matter unless your target audience receives the intended experience.

That is why design takes practice and hard work, since you have to combat the bias and take the time to incorporate user research thoughtfully, but you will see that it’s well worth the effort.

How to Become a More Empathetic Designer?

As explained above, empathy is the ability to understand and connect with someone else’s emotions, goals, and motivations. It doesn’t mean that you have to feel what other people feel. In fact, it’s the process by which you apply user research to your own thinking and execution in your web design projects. The ultimate goal of these exercises should be to increase open-mindedness, reduce self-as-user bias, and collaborate. Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey Rayport outline an “empathetic design process” that proceeds as follows:

  • Step 1: Determine your target users, this means you have to know who must be observed and which behaviors we must observe to create a better product.
  • Step 2: Collect user research which is often qualitative in nature and establish the actions, behaviors, methods, as well as approach the target population uses to identify and solve problems.
  • Step 3: Analyze the data. Team members discuss what they learned from the user research and attempt to understand and identify with their target customer’s needs and wants.
  • Step 4: Brainstorm solutions. Using the data, designers can create innovative solutions that address problems for the user.
  • Step 5: Prototype. As the last step, you will put your solutions into implementations where you apply your empathetic design to the test.

If you’re struggling to apply empathetic design to your products, try the following simple suggestions:

  • Listen Consciously

You can hear what your users say, but that doesn’t mean that you are listening to them. You may appear smiling and nodding to every words they said, however listening what the other person is saying is something that you must hone. This is because listening is the essential legwork to practicing empathy in everyday life.

  • Get Rid of Distractions

It is easy to get distracted nowadays. Maybe, you find yourself understanding nothing to what they are saying, because you are busy surfing the web or checking your social media while talking with your users on the phone. If this thing always happens, you have to learn how to be fully present when collecting and analyzing user information. Staying focused will result in a better end product.

  • Don’t Make Assumptions

Whether we realize it or not, we all make assumptions about many things. In product design, we might make assumptions about a user based on age or income level. However, your preconceived notions will take you away from a target user and will cloud your interpretation of data. Therefore, as a solution, you have to approach your user research with an open mind and leave your own ego out of it.

Hopefully, by following some simple tasks above, you can learn how to design for users by arousing your empathy towards them. This will surely make your design process better as well as your end product.

3 Techniques on How to Optimize Your Website for Multiple Keywords

Posted on by Mario

How-to-Optimize-Your-Website-for-Multiple-Keywords

With so many updates, nowadays SEO puts more priority on context. This makes context is above keywords. But, this doesn’t mean that you will neglect keywords relevancy and authority. Therefore, as a SEO engineer who works for SEO service, you have to understand and combine what Google wants and what users want.

If you assume that Google will understand the context of your content while you build a strong brand and positive user experience, you will still have to consider about the hierarchy of your content, how to organize it, and how to build context that can rank for multiple keywords, so that it will meet your conversion goals. Below are several tips on how to optimize and focus on keywords.

  1. Know Your Current Content

After determining your conversion goals, you may need to set your analytics house, and conducted keyword research, then you’re ready to organize your keyword data into meaningful topics. Instead of stemming or use all of the literal variations of the terms and its plural or singular versions, you can find sets of terms on the same topic and group them together.

Usually we often fall into the most general topics of the niche or industry when running an e-commerce site. Most B2B sites follow a pattern as well with top-level business industry terms, product or service categories and the products or service themselves.

As keywords grouped into topics, so it is possible to take the important next step of mapping your keywords to existing pages of content or conducting a content audit. As the first step you can run a crawl of the existing site structure with screaming Frog, download the HTML page results into Excel, and then get to work putting topics and terms out to the side of specific pages.

When you know you have content gaps and need to create more, that’s when you can turn around and quickly search to see which websites own the top of the SERPs for those topics and draw inspiration (without copying them) for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and draw inspiration for ways to fill the gaps with your own content and make decisions based on priority.

  1. Optimize Site Architecture

Even though, you can start once you know where you stand with content, then having a plan for filling gaps but first you need to figure out how to organize the content. This means balancing user experience, with product/service offerings and topical keyword search volume. Moreover, build out your site hierarchy working top to bottom going from most general to most specific. Even though, mostly sites are already built this way. However, site navigation and structure is often dictated by an internal or organizational view when SEO isn’t involved.

Besides, you are able to cast a wider net in terms of rankings and visibility, by taking an approach that looks at essentially any page at any level on the site as an entrance point and landing page for one or more topical keywords. In fact, all of your efforts will destruct your message, when you try to rank for too many terms with a single page or section of the site.

  1. Do Your On-Page Optimization

It is surprising that there are so many SEO campaigns that neglected the basics of on-page optimization. In fact, these SEO basics still apply. However, you need to look at it deeper than just trying to merely produce content and organize it well top to bottom in the site. Besides, you need to ensure proper categorization, when you’re building context for the user and Google. Another power in the on-page variables is having all factors working together with architecture and on-page optimization.