Is your website content dull and dry? Bring it to life with these top tips

In 2019, competition between B2B companies for every new customer is likely to be tougher than ever.

Your website needs to stand out from the crowd, and as part of that you need content that’s fresh, current and which clearly communicates to your website visitors why they should buy from your business.

If your content isn’t clear, is too wordy or out of date, or is simply too dull and boring, it won’t engage potential buyers.

If you find yourself in this boat, don’t panic. Follow our recommended steps to sharpen up your content and breathe new life into your website.

Put Yourself in the Mind of the Visitor

Know who you’re writing for. That means understanding your target customer profiles and personas, the tone of voice that will appeal to them and the sorts of jobs they do. Consider also their gender and age range and where they may be based.

Most importantly of all, give them what they want! Don’t make them work hard to find the key information they need. Guide, direct and usher them in the right direction through your site towards their goal.

Keep it Brief

People looking to find a product, service or supplier on the web share three common characteristics. They’re:

• Impatient
• Short of time
• Fickle

And that means they have a very short attention span.

Keep your web content brief and waffle-free. Less is more, so try to get your message over clearly and persuasively in very few words.

Try to make every word count. A good content writer knows how to engage the reader and show the unique qualities of your business quickly — before the boredom sets in and they click away from your site.

Give People a Reason to go Further

It’s tempting to try and throw everything at the visitor the minute they land on your home page. But a carefully crafted message should provide just enough information to confirm to your visitor that they’ve come to the right place, then engage and draw them further into your site.

Appeal to your potential buyers by underlining how you can solve their problem, quickly stating what’s best, unique or different about your products or services. Give people a reason to buy from you rather than the competitor that’s next on their list

Be Genuine and Natural

Some people assume that website content needs to be ultra-formal corporate-speak, loaded with industry jargon and packed with sales copy.

It’s not true.

Buyers value honest and transparent language, not hype and “BS” in website content. What’s more, they want facts, so they can make their own decisions.

Make your content read naturally, so that it gives visitors a feel for who you are as a business and how you can help them.

Too stiff and complex, and your visitors will move on to something that’s more engaging and less formal.

That doesn’t mean peppering your content with slang and emojis, especially in B2B. Just take a deep breath, remember who you’re writing for and make your content sound genuine, just as you’d talk to people face to face.

Use Effective Layout and Navigation

Large blocks of text make readers visitors go dizzy and cross-eyed.

Just as important as writing style is the way your content is arranged on the page. Sentences should be around the 15-25-word mark, while paragraphs should be no more than two or three sentences.

On landing pages, even that may be pushing it.

To hold your reader, your website content should be broken into small, bite-size chunks and presented so that key points can be easily absorbed. A great way to do this is through bulleted lists or boxed out snippets of text.

Navigation that draws the visitor through different pages to a goal can often be achieved with on-page buttons, anchor text and graphics. Remember to keep the visitor experience in mind and make life easy for them.

Make Your Content Interesting

Boring content = bounces.

Website content needs to excite, educate, inform and engage. Sometimes it needs to provoke a reaction.

Your website is in a competition to win the attention of your potential customers. You won’t do that by boring them with dull, dry and drab content.

Instead, show off who you are and why people should buy from you. Try a story-based approach – for example, something about your team members, what you learned at a tradeshow, how you developed your expertise or how you helped a customer overcome a particular problem.

Use Images

Copy is important, but the first thing the visitor’s eyes will be drawn to on a page will almost certainly be graphics and images.

A website with few or no images will not engage visitors to read the content – or worse may be an instant turn-off, resulting in visitors bouncing away from the page in just a couple of seconds.

Of course, your images need to be relevant to what you’re saying in the copy and be well positioned.

Try wherever possible to use real photographs, rather than stock images, and always (always) include head and shoulders shots of your team members or management board on your About page. Nobody wants to work with a faceless organisation that doesn’t show its human side.

Use Clear Calls To Action

Try and visualise the path you want your visitors to take through your website. If you want them to arrive at a specific destination page where they’ll take a form of action determined by you, make it intuitive for them to get there.

You can signpost this ‘visitor journey’ by creating navigational graphics at key points on your pages, aimed at guiding your visitors down a track to your sign-up or download pages.

Every page on the journey should feature simple and obvious calls to action which pull visitors through to the next step.

For example, if you want them to download a brochure, provide a large, unmissable button marked “Download Brochure”. If you want them to contact you, direct them to a simple contact form (the fewer fields they have to fill in the better) — or simply display your phone number prominently on every page.

Need Some Help? Use Professionals!

If you think we’re making this sound easier than it is, perhaps we can help. Creating great B2B website content is a skilled job that may benefit from the input of experienced professionals. If you want to know more about the process, feel free to get in touch with us or call us 01763 877110 to find out how to make your B2B website content really work.