B2B Experiences in a Consumer-Oriented Web World
Tips for designing world-class corporate web experiences without going broke
- Chicago: Monday, November 3
- Amsterdam: Monday, November 17
Hoa Loranger
Full-Day Tutorial
Is your business-to-business (B2B) website converting visitors into paying customers, or is it letting sales slip away? Make sure your organization maximizes the power of the Web to drive business and increase sales.
We’ve rigorously tested a broad range of B2B sites—aimed at customers in small, medium and large companies—to bring you this course, which will teach you how to effectively support customers’ purchase decisions throughout the entire buying process.
Simply put, B2B customers have unique needs and expectations that differ from business-to-consumer (B2C) websites. That’s because the processes involved in making a business purchase differ from a consumer purchase. For example, researching a B2B purchase may take several weeks and involve multiple people from both the purchasing and vendor companies. Consequently B2B websites must anticipate customers’ different needs at each stage of the process.
What You’ll Learn
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Attract business customers and keep them on your site
- Turn leads into paying customers
- Avoid pitfalls that tarnish brand and customer loyalty
- Create websites that meet both business and customer needs
Course Outline
- The B2B basics
- How do B2B and B2C websites differ?
- How do business customers shop and buy?
- What are their expectations and pain points?
- Who is involved in the purchasing process, and what do they want?
- Designing a successful B2B Web strategy
- Critical success factors
- Giving prospects what they need, when they need it
- Supporting new and existing customers
- Appealing to both business and consumer customers
- Sales and marketing strategies
- Cross-selling/up-selling
- Promotions and campaigns
- Registration and surveys
- Showing prices
- Solutions and features
- Product and service comparison tools
- Configurators
- Product demonstrations and tours
- Photos and multimedia
- Webinars, technical reports, and white papers
- Search
- Kits and tools to help your advocates convince their boss
- Product listings
- Design of product pages
- Product descriptions and specifications
- Product organization and information architecture
- Testimonials and user groups
- Content management, writing style, and formatting
- Relationship-building strategies
- Corporate information
- Contact information
- Supporting a long sales cycle and the entire user experience
Format
This full-day tutorial includes discussion and exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend?
Anyone who works on B2B website design or strategy, whether for e-commerce or for a company site. The tutorial contains guidelines both for sites that sell online and for sites that sell indirectly through offline channels.
Instructors
Hoa Loranger is a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office.
Loranger has consulted with many large, well-known companies in such industries as finance, customer support, intranets,
e-commerce, entertainment, and technology. She has conducted international usability research worldwide and has given
keynote presentations and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including user testing, paper prototyping, and fundamentals
of Web usability. She coauthored the book
Prioritizing Web Usability
(New Riders Press) and has written reports on design for
Flash-based
applications,
investor relations,
“about us” pages,
B2B websites,
location finders, and
teens.
Before joining NN/g, she served as human factors lead for Intuit’s Consumer Tax and Small Business Division,
where her group was responsible for user-interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW
(now part of Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational
applications and computer configurations in military vehicles. Loranger earned an M.A. in human factors and applied
experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Irvine.
