When it comes to manufacturing in 2020, pulling out the standard playbook on web design will no longer work. Learn about the top web design trends to consider when redesigning your manufacturing website.
Buyers who visit manufacturing websites don’t have time to wade through pretty pictures, fancy animations, fluorescent 3D artwork or split screen content. They just want answers to a couple of key questions:
- Can you meet their technical requirements?
- Do you produce quality products?
- Are you reliable, stable, and scalable?
- Are you easy to work with?
And they want to find those answers quickly and easily.
Furthermore, the tried and true methods of selling are falling by the wayside, because the way B2B buyers make purchasing decisions has fundamentally changed.
Today, buyers prefer to do their own online research before they even pick up the phone to talk with your sales team. And they start with your website.
Here are the top web design trends of 2020 that will make sure that manufacturing companies incorporate the right web design to serve all aspects of the sales process, from marketing and lead generation to sales support and customer service.
- Clean: Keep the website clean with a flat or minimalistic design. Use larger fonts, lots of white space and simple design patterns without a lot of clutter.
- Pithy: Especially on non-blog pages, keep the web copy short and focused.
- Content: Yes, you do need to create high-quality content. Benefits of a strong content marketing strategy include SEO, domain expertise, lead generation and sales support.
Read about our 3 year SEO case study
- Powerful product filtering: Spend time organizing and cataloging your products so that buyers can browse and find products that meet their requirements.
- Straightforward conversion funnels: Compelling CTA that are customized for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Integration with a CRM: No one likes data entry. Make sure that when a prospect fills in a form, the contact information is automatically loaded into your CRM and the lead is automatically routed to the appropriate sales team.
- Chat: Today we have the Boomers, Gen X and Millennials visiting your website. Everyone has a preferred method of communication, so your website should include a phone number, an email address, a contact form and chat.
- Continuous improvement: Competition is fierce, so you can no longer do a website redesign every 5-7 years. Apply the concepts of continuous improvement, kaizen and PDCA from your manufacturing floor to your website.
Learn why traditional web design is broken
- Analytics: In addition to Google Analytics, you will need other technologies like Lucky Orange, HotJar or Crazy Egg to discover whether your design is working and what needs to change.
- Find a strategic partner: The lines between web design, marketing and sales are blurring, and it’s no longer enough to hire a web design company.
Find out if you should in-house or outsource your marketing
Designing a high-performance manufacturing website isn’t about having a breathtaking design.
It’s about integrating the website into your sales and marketing processes to help your company generate more sales. It requires input from divisions you may not have thought about, including:
- Engineering, so you can correctly organize and catalog your products
- Sales, so that you can create content that answers your prospects’ questions
- Information technology, to make sure that the integration between your website, CRM, ERP, email, and quoting system works
- Senior management, so that you can have not only the funding and commitment to launch the website but also the budget for continuous improvement.