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B2B Hackers Ltd, 86-90 Paul Street, London, England, EC2A 4NE
© Copyright 2024 B2B Hackers - All Rights Reserved • Educational Resources for B2B SaaS Digital Marketing • By Team4
Your company's website is your digital shopfront. Nearly all of your sales and marketing efforts will utilise your website in some form or another, especially if you work in a B2B SaaS company.
As we all know retail stores come in different shapes and sizes, they can be small and simple or grand and elaborate. You can spend a little or you can pay expensive design and build agencies to outfit them - you can even install AI tracking tools to monitor your customers behaviour to ensure your layout and production selection are optimised.
There are definitely parallels with B2B SaaS websites. With a website you can also spend a little by using tools like Wix, WordPress and Webflow to build your own website - on the other hand you could employ a large digital marketing agency in London or New York to build it for you with a team of experts - with all sorts of cool functions.
You could spend $100 or $100,000, and even more if you wanted - but what for, and what's the best approach?
In this guide, we’ll draw on years of experience of building websites for $100 and $100,000 for B2B SaaS & technology companies around the world. From start-ups to large enterprises, the specification and scope of your website depends on you and your company's objectives - but we’ll try to cover off as much as possible.Not to mention the way websites are built has changed and is still changing, making great websites more accessible and easier to do for the majority of companies. So let’s dive in.
If you’re reading this then you likely already understand the importance of your website for your business, but let’s hammer that point home if you bear with me.
For B2B SaaS and software companies, your website is extremely important because it’s the gateway to your product - especially if your product uses a freemium model or has a free trial that you can sign-up to.
Before someone signs up for the product they will always look through the website first. Helping buyers find your website is a whole other story that we’ll cover in the ‘getting traffic’ section. You could have an amazing product, but if it's hidden behind a poorly designed and built website, no-one will ever know.
So when you’re thinking about investing in your website, think about how important it is for your business and that it will play an important role in nearly every business transaction you have moving forward.
As you may already know, most modern websites are built with a Content Management System (CMS). This is where you’ll manage the content that is published on your website (and potentially other channels too) - choosing one is an important fork in the road because it can have big impacts on how your website works and how easy it is to change and scale in the future.
Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) is an important part of your website strategy. It can influence who you choose to build your website, as many agencies specialise in certain CMS’s - it can also influence how your website integrates with other tools and even impacts downtime.
In this section we’ll cover off the most popular CMS choices, their pros and cons and how this can impact your website. However, we’ll start off by getting a bit more technical and talk about ‘headless’ CMS solutions, and yes it is a weird name but stick with me.
If you have started researching CMS’s for your business you may have come across the term ‘Headless CMS’ but what is that, what has it got to do with heads anyway?
The term "headless" in "headless CMS" refers to the lack of a "head," which in this context means the front-end or presentation layer of a website. The front-end is often referred to as the "head" because it is the visible part of the CMS that users interact with.
In traditional CMS systems, the back-end (where content is created and managed) and the front-end (where content is presented to users) are tightly integrated. Think solutions like SquareSpace where you can visually edit the content on the page so you see how it looks.
In a headless CMS, this "head" is removed, leaving just the back-end for content storage and management. This content is then delivered (via APIs), and developers are free to build the "head" using any technology they prefer.
This decoupling allows for greater flexibility and control over how and where the content is displayed. Many in-house developers prefer this approach because they can build a marketing website using the same component library as the actual SaaS product.
Headless CMS solutions are used by more technology leaders than marketing leaders simply because they understand the technology better, but with better collaboration between engineering and marketing headless CMS solutions can be a great solution.
For SaaS companies that have a well resourced in-house development team, utilising a headless CMS can be a great way to ensure the marketing website and the product are seamlessly integrated and developed using the same development methodologies.
It also means you can serve up content in the headless CMS into your product if you want and anywhere else for that matter - the content is sitting there ready to be used and pulled into whatever system you want.
SEO - one of the benefits of a headless CMS is that they tend to perform better because of the way they are served, this performance improvement means that they can have more SEO potential because the websites are not marked down by slow pages.
If you have never come across headless CMS solutions you will be surprised to learn how many there are out there. We have listed some of our favourites below, from Open Source free to use ones through to more ‘productised’ versions.
Open Source
Enterprise
If you're a SaaS company in the early stages and you have limited budget and resources developing a headless website may not be a top priority, if you want to build your website yourself then you are best staying clear and sticking with Webflow or Wordpress.
If however you are a scaling SaaS company that wants a scalable website solution that is secure and fast, using a headless CMS is a great choice - you will need to find the experts to help you deliver it but that shouldn't be an issue with large communities out there.
The healing summarises what i’m about to write but to elaborate, a CMS is a means to an end - it has to fit in with how you want to work, your resources and budget. There are no wrong answers here, just badly executed solutions.
Like with many software and system implementations, you can have great quality, enterprise WordPress websites, and you can have really bad hobby blogs based on WordPress too. The same goes for HubSpot, Prismic, Webflow and every other CMS out there. The CMS doesn’t make the website good or bad, that comes down to the people building it and how well you planned it out - which brings us onto our next point, planning your website.
The objective for the majority of B2B SaaS websites is simple: Get as many people from your target market to visit and then ‘convert’.
Everything else is a side-note, the look, the messaging, everything should be geared towards this goal - a website exists to help your business grow.
Planning your website correctly will make this objective a lot easier to obtain. In this section we outline the most common steps in building your website for this purpose, this means taking into consideration search engine optimisation and conversion rate optimisation as part of the planning process and most importantly working backwards from your target audience.
If you’re embarking on your own website project and need a reliable plan to follow we created this simple template for you to follow created using all of our experience.
A functional scope is a wish list of the functions your website should have. Some things with a website are taken for granted but you may need your website to have search functionality, an e-commerce store or video hosting.
Documenting these requirements enables you to build the website with correct features as well as ensuring the scope of the work is accurate.
Without a properly documented technical specification and functionality scope of work you may end up with things you assumed would be built, are not, and important things like analytics being configured are not considered as part of the project (many developers don’t do this).
A website style guide is a set of standards and guidelines that dictate the design, tone, and overall presentation of a website. It ensures consistency across all pages and elements of the site, making it easier to maintain a cohesive brand identity.
The primary purpose of your style guide is to ensure that all contributors to a website—whether designers, developers, or content creators—adhere to a unified vision. This results in a consistent user experience, strengthens the brand, and makes future updates more efficient.
A style guide is different from brand guidelines. In essence, a web style guide is a subset of brand guidelines, specifically tailored for digital presence - re broader and encompass the entire brand identity across all platforms and mediums. They include the brand’s mission, vision, values, tone of voice, logo usage, color palette, typography, and imagery, applicable not only to the web but also to print, advertising, and other media. These guidelines ensure that the brand is consistently represented, no matter where or how it is presented.
Your developers will be able to work faster and more accurately with a defined style guide - it removes room for interpretation.
Your target audience is who you are mainly building your website for. That is why its important to document and detail who exactly you are building this thing for, this will help you create the right structure and content for your audience. Using Personas and ICP documents can be a really useful tool for starting this.
A persona is a fictional character that represents a specific type of customer you want to reach. It includes details like age, job, goals, and challenges, they can help you understand what your customers need and how they behave. Personas can guide you on how to communicate and design websites to resonate with your audience.
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes the perfect company or organisation that would benefit most from your product or service. It includes characteristics like industry, company size, and common challenges and is therefore most commonly used in B2B settings. The ICP helps businesses focus their sales and marketing efforts on companies that are most likely to become valuable customers.
Keyword research is the process of identifying and analysing the search terms or phrases that your audience uses in search engines when looking for information, products, or services related to your business.
The goal of keyword research is to understand what potential customers are searching for so that you can optimise your website's content to rank higher in search results and attract more traffic.
Keyword research helps build high-performing websites because you use this information to decide what pages to produce and what content to produce for your website - this can be combined with the messaging you want to include from a positioning stand-up.
Keyword research is a skill in itself and can be time-consuming. We've written articles here and produced some useful templates for when you are doing your own research - many SaaS SEO agencies use this process at the start of working with a new client.
Based on your products and services, best practice and the keyword research you should be able to put together a well thought out sitemap using data as a reference.
Sitemaps on B2B technology and software websites tend to follow a very similar pattern, one which we have laid out below:
Your sitemap outlines the bones of your website and is the information architecture. As part of your sitemap you should make decisions around page depth, URL structure and navigation. A well thought out sitemap is really important for the success of your website.
Based on your sitemap you should now know which pages will follow the same format or design template.
Using repeatable templates on your website not only speeds up production and content generation but it also provides a familiar layout for users to consume, rather than having a new design for every page that has similar content.
Typically you will have templates for things like blog articles, the homepage, contact page, solutions and feature pages just as some examples. Once you have documented your templates you will know exactly what you need wireframes and designed.
The next step, now you have identified your templates, is to wireframe them, this means creating basic lo-fi or high-fidelity templates. Wire-framing is designed to be a quick process for mocking up the general layout of a page and starting to identify the components that will be used on the pages and across the website.
Design components are the building blocks of web pages. Thinking of pages in terms of components allows you to create reusable building blocks that can be used across the website without having to design something new for each page.
There is a reason a lot of websites have a similar look and feel. It’s because there are some best practices the most successful websites follow. Here are a few examples.
Once wireframing is done you begin designing and prototyping your web pages. This means utilising the style guide we mentioned earlier and adding this layer of colour and design on top of your wireframes and components.
At this point you may come across some popular design tools, probably the most popular currently being Figma. Others include InVision and Sketch.
This is definitely a step that is missed out in a lot of website projects but it always comes back to bite you afterwards. Measurement planning is a simple way to document and plan what you want to measure on your website so you can configure your website analytics to do that.
For example, you may want to track drop-offs on your key pages like your book, a demo or pricing page, you may also want to track button clicks etc etc. Most people want to do all these things but they don't plan in advance or implement the tracking required before launch.
Now, finally, it's time to build your website, assuming you have chosen your CMS you should have a good idea about how you are going to do this by now, but, you can of course design a website completely without building it so you can always keep the building and the design separate if you wish. We’ll cover off the build in the next section.
Like with all plans, they don’t always go smoothly but by working through the steps outlined you should be in a very good position to execute a great website project.
When it comes to actually building your website you may be considering a few different options. Your options will depend on the size of the company you work for and your internal resources - for many companies, building a website in-house is not an option, but, for some SaaS companies with internal developers - building a website in-house is a serious consideration. In this section we’ll look at the different options available and their pros and cons.
Although there are many benefits to building a website using internal development resources such as control, consistency and security - there are also some disadvantages that happen through nobody's fault, but, we have seen this in a number of occasions:
It may sound like we are suggesting building websites internally is bad, but we’re not saying that - when done correctly with the right resources it can be a great way to synchronise your product with your marketing website and ensure you are investing in both with a consistent approach.
Fairs fair and we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn't outline some of the common issues with working with an agency, so here you go:
As we mentioned in the planning section, analytics is often an afterthought when it comes to website projects, in this section we’ll talk about the best and most popular ways to monitor and track your websites performance, enabling you to continue to develop and improve your website overtime.
Believe it or not there are quite a few different types of analytics you need to consider when it comes to your website. We’ve listed the main ones to consider below:
These are the most common types of metrics you will think of when it comes to website analytics. You get this data from tools like Google Analytics with minimal to no setup. They cover things like:
Behavioural analytics are a bit more insightful, they allow you to see how people use the website, which elements they interact with and what they do when they are browsing the website. Using this information can help you create more user friendly and high-performing websites. Common elements include:
Content analytics are similar to traffic analytics but you are really focusing on how each piece of content is performing. Metrics like scroll depth are key here as they show how far someone makes it through the specific content before exiting the page.
Conversion analytics relate to your website's main Call to Action. These are some of the most important metrics to measure, a good conversion rate can mean an efficient website and it will enable you to scale more sustainably.
Search engine optimisation is a great way to generate inbound traffic and leads for your business. Monitoring your SEO performance is highly recommended to ensure you continue to invest and grow your visibility in search engines.
Something that is normally reserved for developers but should also be monitored by marketing teams is the technical performance of the website. The speed of the website impacts all of the other metrics we covered and so it should be monitored closely.
We mentioned a couple already but from our experience as a digital marketing agency we see very similar setups across the board so we’ll lay down what we think is a solid web analytics setup for a B2B SaaS company:
Cookies are currently used a lot for digital marketing and advertising, a lot of the analytics tools we mentioned use cookies to track user behaviour on your website - it’s important when implementing these tools that they are put in place alongside a comprehensive privacy and cookie management tool - we would recommend CookieBot.
CookieBot scans your website for tools using cookies and then builds out a banner that you can customise on your website - you can configure the consent settings on it yourself but its a really useful tool that saves you building a custom solution.
CookieBot is also a Google-certified Consent Management Platform (CMP) which means it works in tandem with Google Ads and Analytics to manage user consent.
One common issue marketers are often faced with is how to track form submissions on your website. There are a lot of different tools companies use for forms on websites and tracking them depends on what tools you are using and how they are implemented (iframe etc.).
We’ve covered a couple of scenarios in this post about tracking HubSpot form submissions and this one about using non-hubspot forms. In this section we will cover off some of the most common form and website setups and how you can accurately track form submissions.
Proving or showing how your marketing campaigns are generating revenue is top of the list of priorities for most B2B SaaS marketers - after all that is the main goal of what you are doing. And if you are working in a funded SaaS business you will know how important growth is to your investors!
Marketing attribution is the name given to the process of identifying and assigning credit to the various marketing touchpoints that contribute to a conversion or sale.
In simpler terms, it helps you understand which marketing efforts (such as ads, emails, social media posts, or other campaigns) are driving the most value in the customer journey.
Marketing attribution can be simple but can also be extremely difficult, which sounds odd but it depends on your marketing campaigns. There are also different models of attribution, choosing one has a big impact on how you measure your marketing impact.
An attribution model is a way of measuring your marketing campaigns impact. It's worth mentioning that attribution models are not one or another, you can use all of these models to measure your campaigns and they all give you a different insight to different elements of your buyer's journey.
There are use cases that each of these models suit better than others, we’ll list them down below for your quick reference:
Use Case: Balances the importance of both the first interaction and the final conversion step, while still acknowledging other interactions.
Marketing attribution is one the most challenging aspects of marketing in a B2B SaaS company. One of the main reasons it is so difficult is because as a marketer, most of the time you are walking into a situation where lots of systems have already been configured but without proper analytics, attribution then becomes like trying to untangle a ball of string.
Marketing attribution is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and improving the overall strategy. By selecting the right attribution model and overcoming challenges related to data and tracking, marketers can gain valuable insights into how different touchpoints contribute to conversions and optimize their campaigns accordingly.
Monitoring the performance of your website is important. The performance of your website directly affects the performance of your business. But what does good look like when it comes to website performance for a B2B SaaS company?
Here are some key benchmarks for website metrics:
Proving or showing how your marketing campaigns are generating revenue is top of the list of priorities for most B2B SaaS marketers - after all that is the main goal of what you are doing. And if you are working in a funded SaaS business you will know how important growth is to your investors!
The whole point of a website is to act like a digital store for your business, and as we know, a store doesn’t perform very well if no-one ever visits. The same goes for your website, if you want your website to generate business you need to attract more visitors to it.
Getting traffic, specifically the right kind of traffic to your website starts with your website and how it is built. Building your website with an SEO front of mind will pay dividends in the future. It’s not, however, a silver bullet and there are some core continuous strategies that you should be taking to help to increase the amount of traffic and leads your website gets until you get to a point of predictable inbound lead generation.
The challenge here is getting the right people to a) find your website b) convert when they do. Again to use an analogy of a physical store, if your shop is located down a side street with little to no foot traffic, no-one will ever know you’re there without you having to spend money on advertising.
The same goes for a website, in the digital streets of the metaverse, websites are discovered by search engines like Google and AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Here is the challenge and opportunity for B2B SaaS companies, getting your website found online by the right buyers and then converting them when they do find you.
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