In today's digital-first economy, your manufacturing website is often potential clients’ first impression of your company. Is yours making the right impact?
Manufacturing websites have evolved significantly over the years to adapt to changes in technology, user expectations, and market dynamics. Digital brochures have given way to complex product portals that integrate e-commerce, customer service, and supply chain management. Enhanced data analytics have made it easier to track user behavior and optimize content based on data. The shift to user-friendly design has resulted in increased lead generation and customer retention.
In 2024, a well-designed manufacturing website is crucial for business growth. It can significantly impact brand perception, customer engagement, and sales. There are certain key features that separate high-performing manufacturing websites from the rest. In this article, we'll explore 10 must-have features that drive results.
1. Clear, Concise Messaging and Value Proposition
Your homepage should clearly and immediately communicate what you do and why it matters via your value proposition. This is especially important on a B2B website. A value proposition is a short statement that communicates to prospective customers why they should choose your products or services over others in the market. Essentially, it’s the specific solution you offer to solve your customers’ problems. Your messaging should be clear and concise and balance technical details with clear benefits.
For example, let’s take a look at the top of our homepage:
Visitors who land on this page can immediately see who we are (a web design company) and the value we provide (website strategy and design).
Why should people trust us? Visitors can see that we’ve been designing websites since 1996, that we’ve won numerous awards, and that we’re trusted by well-known companies like Ronald McDonald House Charities and Habitat for Humanity.
Clear and concise messaging tells visitors exactly what to do next to reduce friction and uncertainty. If they’re ready for the next step, visitors can click the “Start Your Project” button. If they need more convincing, visitors can view case studies via the “See Our Work” button.
Learn more about how to establish your unique value proposition here.
Striking the Right Balance: Engaging Visitors Without Overwhelming Them
You want to use industry-specific language on your website to show visitors that you know what you’re talking about, but you don’t want to overwhelm them with jargon. The goal is to balance clear, concise messaging with knowledge and professionalism. Here are some strategies to help you achieve this:
- Define key terms: You don’t know the level of expertise of a visitor landing on your site. That’s why it’s helpful to include a glossary or tool tips for complex terms. If you use a technical term, pair it with a brief and clear definition.
- Keep it conversational: A conversational tone helps visitors connect with your brand. You’ll have more success if you’re able to remind customers that there are real people behind your website content who can help provide a solution to the problem they came to your site to solve.
- Incorporate visuals: Use infographics, charts, diagrams, and videos to help explain complex concepts visually, rather than relying solely on text. But be sure to balance visuals with text and whitespace.
2. Intuitive Navigation and Site Structure
Intuitive navigation and site structure refer to your website’s navigation menu and layout. You want to design your site architecture in a way that allows users to easily find the information they’re seeking and click through your site pages in a way that feels natural. User-centric site architecture prioritizes the needs, expectations, preferences, and behaviors of your visitors to promote a positive user experience. This will result in more leads, more sales, and increased customer retention.
Here are a few key aspects of intuitive navigation and site structure to keep in mind when designing your manufacturing website:
- Logical navigation paths: The categories and subcategories in your navigation menu should reflect the way users think about products and services and the language they use. If you have a particularly complex product or service offering, consider whether you need to do any user testing to gain feedback regarding the intuitiveness of your website. This might include card sorting, heatmaps, interviews, surveys, and more.
- Content hierarchy: Feature your most important products and services (especially those that drive sales) prominently in your menu so they’re the easiest for your users to find. Avoid going too deep–you want your visitors to arrive at important information within just a few clicks. Use headings, subheadings, and clear labels to avoid confusion.
- Accessibility: Adhere to accessibility best practices to ensure your website is usable for individuals with disabilities, such as color blindness. For example, add alt text to images for visually impaired users who utilize screen readers. Also ensure sufficient contrast between background colors and text. You can use a free accessibility checker tool to ensure your website is ADA and WCAG compliant.
- Search functionality: Include a search feature on your site that enables users to quickly find what they’re looking for–especially if you have a large website with lots of content, a robust product catalog, or a variety of services. For example, Ford.com allows users to search products by model year, market, power source, and body style.
3. Responsive Design Optimized for Mobile Users
Taking a mobile-first approach to design means starting your website’s design process with mobile users in mind first, and then scaling up to larger screen sizes. Prioritizing your design for mobile users ensures all your content and website features are accessible and responsive on both smaller and larger screens.
Importance of Mobile-Friendly Design for User Experience
According to statistics from SellersCommerce, 80% of B2B buyers use mobile devices at some point during their buying journey. Moreover, 90% of B2B buyers who have a positive mobile experience are likely to repurchase from the same company. This percentage drops to just 50% for customers who have a negative mobile experience.
This underscores the importance of optimizing your website’s design for mobile users and ensuring a seamless transition for those swapping between different screens at various points in the purchase process.
Impact of Mobile-First Design on SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, or the process of optimizing your website and its content to rank higher in search results and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are a few key ways in which mobile-first design impacts SEO:
- Mobile-first indexing: Mobile-first indexing means that search engines like Google use the mobile version of your site to index and rank your content. If your site isn’t mobile optimized, Google cannot effectively crawl your site and index your content. This can negatively impact your page rankings.
- Page speed: Mobile-friendly design emphasizes the importance of quick page load times. Page speed is one of Google’s key ranking factors, so it’s important that your website loads quickly.
- Voice search: Voice search continues to gain prevalence as a means of seeking products and services. In fact, 30% of internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 use voice assistants each week. Taking a mobile-first approach to your website design enables you to optimize content for natural language queries.
- Local SEO: Many B2B customers use mobile devices to search for local products and services. A mobile-first design can enhance your local SEO and make it easier for potential customers to find your manufacturing business on the go.
Looking for examples of responsive design done right in the manufacturing industry? Check out these 7 outstanding manufacturing website designs.
4. High-Quality Visual Content
Your manufacturing website should include professional, high-resolution images, videos, 3D renderings, and interactive visualizations to showcase your products, services, and facilities to prospective customers. You can use stock photos sparingly, but unique photos of your products and facilities will showcase your business more authentically and help establish a stronger connection between potential leads and your brand.
Balancing Load Times and Aesthetics
You’ll need to remember to balance visual appeal with page load speed. Incorporating too many images, images that are too large, and uncompressed images can vastly slow down your website. Slow site speed can negatively impact your search engine rankings and infuriate prospective customers who are attempting to navigate your site. In fact, consumer insights from Google reveal that 53% of mobile website visits are abandoned if the site takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
You can use a free tool like PageSpeed Insights to gain valuable insight into your manufacturing website’s load times and determine where you can make key improvements. There are also free photo compression tools you can use to shrink your images while maintaining their quality.
5. Case Studies and Project Galleries
Every manufacturing website should have a section dedicated to showcasing successful case studies and project galleries. A case study is a testimonial that explains how your product’s key features led to success for an individual customer or business. A project gallery, on the other hand, uses visual storytelling to highlight your impact on your industry and display your business’ most successful projects.
Including case studies and project galleries on your website will allow you to:
- Demonstrate your expertise through detailed, real-life examples that show your product or service in use
- Showcase diverse applications of your products and services
- Attract potential clients and educate them about your industry
- Allow clients to qualify themselves
- Increase your business’ visibility
- Differentiate yourself from the competition
6. Resource Center and Content Marketing Hub
A resource center is a designated section of your manufacturing website that houses a comprehensive set of resources related to your business, such as whitepapers, webinars, and technical resources. It serves as your central content marketing hub where visitors can find content tailored to their unique needs.
Using Gated Content Effectively
You’ll also want to strategically incorporate gated content into your website’s resource center. Gated content is digital content that website visitors can only access after performing a specific task, such as filling out a form or providing an email address. The purpose of gating a piece of content is to effectively capture information about your prospects and generate leads while offering visitors exclusive access to premium resources that add tangible value to their experience on your website. Meanwhile, ungated content is meant to improve SEO and increase brand visibility. This may be a blog, infographic, or video.
When deciding whether or not to gate a piece of content, consider the goal of your content. Is it lead generation? Page views? Brand awareness?
Also remember that the value you provide must be equal to the amount of information you’re requesting from your lead. For example, if you’re offering an extremely valuable, in-depth whitepaper or technical resource, it may be fair to request a bit more information from your prospect, such as their company name and role in addition to their name and email address.
7. Integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System and Real-Time Inventory Updates
ERP integration is the process of connecting an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with other applications and platforms to create a streamlined experience for capturing, tracking, and analyzing real-time inventory and other key data.
An ERP will allow you to:
- Connect your website to backend systems to ensure accurate stock levels and prevent overstocking and understocking costs
- Implement e-commerce functionality for B2B orders
- Balance self-service options with personalized sales support
- Automate repetitive tasks
- Better protect sensitive company data through enhanced security measures
- Analyze data across various departments to determine where you can successfully reduce costs
- Simplify financial reporting and accounting processes
- Facilitate collaboration across departments by providing a centralized data location
Discover some of the top manufacturing ERP solutions in 2024.
8. Robust Product Information Management (PIM) System
Product information management (PIM) refers to a system or software equipped with tools and features to manage product-related data and other digital assets. You’ll need to incorporate a PIM into your manufacturing website to centralize and organize your digital materials, including detailed product specifications, datasheets, and resources.
Here are four key ways in which a robust product information management system will help you present your products in a way that is both effective and engaging, ensuring a consistent experience across all product channels:
- Collecting data: Your PIM will collect data about product specifications, images, descriptions, and more through supplier data feeds, spreadsheets, and other assets.
- Managing data: Your PIM will manage and organize technical information and ensure it is standardized, up-to-date, and accurate. If you update any product information within the PIM, it will show across all channels in real time.
- Enriching data: Your PIM system will augment your product data with more in-depth product descriptions, customer reviews, images, videos, and additional specifications to provide a more comprehensive view of your products.
- Distributing data: Finally, your PIM will distribute vital product data to various sales and marketing channels, from eCommerce sites to retail stores.
9. Customization and Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) Tools
A configure-price-quote (CPQ) tool enables sales representatives to quickly and accurately configure quotes for your products and services. It operates alongside your customer relationship management (CRM) software to help populate customer contact information and other data into the quote form.
In today's competitive market, the importance of customization and CPQ tools cannot be overstated, particularly for manufacturing businesses managing complex orders. Offering online product and service customization allows customers to tailor their purchases to their unique needs, which leads to increased satisfaction and customer retention. It also enables salespeople to automate price calculations and quickly generate quotes, which reduces time spent on repetitive administrative tasks.
Balancing Automation with a Human Touch
However, it’s crucial to balance this automation with essential human touchpoints. Personal interactions allow you to address unique customer specifications and build strong relationships, ensuring a seamless and personalized experience throughout the customer’s sales journey.
Here are a few ways to humanize the quote tool experience for your leads:
- Offer live chat support: Enable live chat on your quote tool so customers can connect with sales reps if they need assistance during the checkout process.
- Use personalization: Use customer data from your CRM to provide product recommendations unique to each customer.
- Follow up: Encourage your sales agents to reach out to leads who generate a quote but don’t buy. This will help them address concerns and foster personal connections with your leads. You can also use your CRM to send automated emails to leads who don’t complete a purchase to offer your assistance or a free consultation.
10. Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs) and Lead Capture Forms
A call-to-action (CTA) is text on your website that calls for your visitor to perform a specific action. This may mean directing your customers to download an eBook, get a quote, or give you a call. A lead capture form, on the other hand, is a form on your website that collects contact information from a lead, such as their name, business, role, and email address.
Designing Effective CTAs
Having clear CTAs reduces confusion by making navigation more intuitive and straightforward. CTAs can also significantly boost your conversion rates by encouraging users to perform a desired action that supports your business goals.
Here are a few CTA best practices to keep in mind:
- Make it stand out: Create a CTA large enough that visitors can’t gloss over it. Ensure consistency with your style guide, but choose colors and a design that contrast the rest of the page and demand attention.
- Create a sense of urgency: Use phrases like “contact us now,” “get a free quote today,” and “limited time offer” to encourage visitors to act quickly.
- Align CTAs to your business goals: Ensure your CTA text aligns with your landing page copy and the visitor’s current stage of the buyer’s journey. All of your landing pages should further align with your business goals (lead generation, sales, gaining email subscribers, etc.). This will enable you to better measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and reduce confusion.
- A/B test: A/B testing is a method for comparing two different versions of web content to determine which one performs better. Experiment with different copy, fonts, colors, and placement of CTAs to determine what best resonates with your audience. Be sure to only test one element at a time for clear results.
See HubSpot’s complete checklist for compelling CTAs for more ideas.
Optimizing Form Design for Higher Conversion Rates
You’ll also need to optimize your lead capture form. The goal is to create a form that is user-friendly, engaging, and effective at converting visitors into leads.
Here are some key tips to follow:
- Limit form fields: Only ask for necessary information to increase the likelihood of your visitor completing the form. The last thing you want is to demand too much and have your lead bounce to another site.
- Use clear labels: Label each form field and use simple, clear, and direct language.
- Be persuasive: Clearly highlight what users stand to gain from filling out your form.
- Optimize your CTA button: Use compelling, urgent, and action-oriented text (i.e. “Click to Instantly Download Your Free eBook”) with contrasting colors that invite clicks.
- Optimize for mobile: Make sure your form is easy to fill out and submit on small screens.
- Remove unnecessary elements: Minimize distractions by removing page elements like your header and footer from your landing page. This will help keep users focused on completing your form.
- Incorporate trust signals: Include security badges, “as seen in” sliders, customer reviews, or privacy assurances to build trust with your potential leads.
- Redirect users to a thank you page: You want your lead to leave your website feeling satisfied about the value they received from submitting their information. Allow instant access to the content you promised and redirect the lead to a thank you page.
- A/B test: Like with your CTA, you can A/B test your form design, copy, and field placement to determine what your audience prefers.
Partner with Trajectory and Start Driving Results Today
The essential features outlined in this article are crucial for ensuring your manufacturing website stands out in today’s competitive digital landscape. By focusing on clear messaging, intuitive navigation, high-quality visuals, and robust product management systems, you can significantly enhance user experience and drive conversions.
It’s vital to regularly audit your existing website against these criteria to identify areas for improvement. If you’re looking for expert guidance in implementing these strategies effectively, you can partner with Trajectory to transform your online presence and achieve your business growth goals. Submit an inquiry to get in touch with us today.
