Your SaaS Startup B2B Website Takes a Village
Your SaaS Startup B2B Website Takes a Village
As a CEO of a new SaaS B2B start-up, you had a vision for a SaaS solution and you know there’s a demand out there for it. You finally got it built and now you have an actual customer or two, you have some reseller partnerships in the works and you’ve got at least one passionate sales person ready to help you sell it. Now you need leads and investors. It’s time for a website.
As a start-up, you’ve got limited funds and limited time. You’ve already got potential prospects and investors asking about your Website so you need something quickly. But you still need something professional and something built properly that can grow over time, as your resources become available and your sales and marketing efforts ramp up.
It Takes a Village
It will take a village of people with a variety of brand/digital marketing and technical skills to help you get the Website up and running.
Branding & Design
In terms of the content, the key web pages that will be the ABOUT, SOLUTIONS and INVESTOR pages. This should also include prospect personas, value propositions, and key differentiators. This is where it can start to feel overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be. A content specialist can come in and using a combination of executive leadership interviews, existing sales presentations/proposals and competitive research, develop all of this content for you.
As for the design, this step involves having a final logo ready go to in various formats, identifying brand’s color schemes and sourcing a handful of pictures and images to be featured on the site.
SEO/Key Words
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another one of those marketing functions that feels overwhelming, and in the long-term, it can be and can take a lot of time and some level of investment. But, there are some aspects of SEO that should be considered at the very beginning. Simply knowing what your long and short tail key words are, and incorporating those into the Website content and code, as well as your social media pages, will help build the foundation toward a more comprehensive SEO strategy in the future.
This requires someone who can do online research including competitive website research and tools such as Google Analytics and SEMRush to help identify those key words, and then finding creative ways to incorporate the key words into the Website, via page titles, internal hyperlinks, meta/picture tags, etc.
Offers, Calls-to-Action & Landing Pages
Once the Website is live, the next step is to drive traffic and create conversions (get people to contact you, book an appointment, watch your video, book time with you, etc.). Even if you have the perfect Website, you won’t get conversions without a strong offer (a reason for them to contact you e.g., a demo), and clear “calls to action.” These include telephone numbers, Website forms (integrated into a CRM), a meeting scheduler, and very importantly, a landing page (or pillar pages).
This step requires someone with strong digital marketing skills—someone who can help flesh out and then translate the offers and calls-to-action into the website, and build the automation behind it so you can receive inbound inquiries, follow-up on leads and track the effectiveness of all your activities.
The Tech Piece
The final step is pulling it all together and building the site. You’ll need someone with the technical skills needed to integrate your domain and website hosting platform with your Website design tools e.g., WordPress, as well as your business email accounts, and your CRM. They will also help execute some basic SEO tactics and ensure the site is responsive (works well on various devices) and leverages the necessary plug-ins to full optimize the site, from a technical perspective.
Since it does take a village, the whole process will need to be managed from a central perspective. The CEO or any senior leader at the company can manage this process, or it can be outsourced to an agency or contractor.
Regardless of the process, these are the fundamental steps required in order to build an effective Website for a high-growth B2B organization.