Your Website is Not About Your Product

In this post, Ian reviews 25 B2B tech websites and shares what was broken.

I’ve reviewed many B2B tech websites over the years and have observed several common challenges. At the top of the list is a focus on the product rather than the customer's problem.

Maybe my view is outdated; I feel like this is a bit of a trope, trotted out by content marketers like me over the years. To test this, using the infamous Chief Martech supergraphic and the database behind it, I pulled 25 UK-based vendors and dived into their websites.

I selected Martech companies rather than another category because, as an experienced CMO, I’m their target market, but I suspect what I found is likely the case in other B2B categories, too.    

I’m not going to mention any by name here, but it seems even the most contemporary Martech vendor sites may be getting worse, not better, especially when viewed through the lens of a senior buyer and those hidden gatekeepers who quietly kill deals.

I have grouped my observations together in the questions the buyer is likely to be silently asking themselves.

What business problem do you solve?

Most sites didn’t answer this question without some work on my part. There was some scrolling and clicking required to dig through a clever headline and some abstract value language to answer the question: how would this benefit me and my business?

They were mostly visually polished, but, in the words of user experience experts, they were “cognitively expensive”, meaning they made the visitor think, and not in a good way.

Clearly, giving a potential buyer, influencer, or sponsor the job of understanding how it helps is not a good start.

For a couple of decades, I’ve talked about website visitors “hovering over the back button”, and I don’t think that’s changed. If you make it hard, then they are a millisecond away from bouncing back to a sea of options being eagerly offered by a Google search.

What would you like me to learn?

This experience was exacerbated by some websites, which seemed to assume I understood the problem, the category, and their competitors.

Instead of addressing the problem the software solves, they focused on differentiation. Often using their internal language and that of the category, rather than the business user's, to discuss nuances of better features, functions, and promoting benefits that an early-stage buyer exploring options and visiting the website for the first time would not consider important.

Yes, you are leading, AI-powered and data-led, so is everyone. Your flippers and flappers are powerful, but what do I need to know that will help me evaluate the solutions to my problem? What are the problems people like me often stumble on?

Why should I care?

Aside from not clearly stating the problem being solved, most failed to highlight a positive commercial outcome of solving it, again, without a bit of rummaging around, particularly for a senior buyer or influencer.

Many discussed the benefits for the user or practitioner fairly quickly: it’s cooler, easier, or quicker, but what does this mean for the business? What could I achieve by implementing this solution?

Why should I trust you?

I spent a short time as an analyst, and I was taught a writing discipline that you can’t make statements about market trends or what xyz role in the business is thinking, without some research or proof to support this.

Now I am not expecting analyst-grade copy on a vendor website (although an analyst could be reading it), but making sweeping, unqualified statements about what the market is doing or what your ideal buyer is thinking needs to be qualified to build trust with the reader.

The other trust content is, of course, customer testimonials, quotes, reviews, and ratings. Again, a good chunk of these websites made me work for them, or worse, had logos with no stories behind them.

Plus, if I am going to nitpick, the quality of some of these quotes and stories could use some work; they talk about the team and product rather than the outcomes.

I don’t want a demo, so what’s next?

The theme of being product-centric and focused on the user or practitioner, rather than the broader buying group, continues with the Call to Actions (CTAs) on these websites, often limited to “book a demo”.

Sure, someone in the buying group will, at some point, want a demo, but it won’t be the first member on their first visit to the website during their initial research.

What should I do next as a senior C-suite buyer or board-level influencer?

In conclusion

In today’s zero-click and AI buyer-assisted world, a web visit from a real person is increasingly valuable. Not just valuable, but as organic traffic levels diminish and paid traffic prices rise, that visit becomes expensive.

And yet, the website is being used like a dumb, inert catalogue, describing the product and not actively helping a buyer de-risk the decision or support their job to be done.

To return to the title, your website is not about your product; it's about what the buyer needs to move forward. 

It doesn’t have to be this way, and in a future post, I’ll share an approach to make the website work harder. In the meantime, if you recognize this challenge, let’s chat.