Writing a Strategic Plan for your B2B Industrial Website – Whether Redesigning or Continuously Improving

Whether you’re embarking on a website redesign project or seeking to make agile improvements over time to an existing industrial website, starting with a solid strategic plan at the outset is the most important step. It’s what keeps the whole project pointed at your business goals rather than drifting off course.

Your plan needn’t be onerous or overly complicated, but it must be thorough enough to ensure that efforts toward a new and/or improved industrial website (whether the execution is done internally or externally) drive your business toward increased sales and marketing success. All too often, competing demands from different departments allow the primary focus and objectives to be overpowered by internal politics or individual goals. The result is sometimes a laundry list of competing requirements from different stakeholders, and execution can lose sight of big picture goals.

The best outcomes start from a strategic roadmap that’s focused on business and marketing goals, as well as the goals and needs of your key audiences. If you’re redesigning an industrial website, sometimes this type of plan is called a strategy brief, creative brief, creative strategy brief or RFP (although RFPs can often be much longer and sometimes restrictive — here’s how to write one that doesn’t backfire). If you’re making iterative improvements to an existing site, it could be simply referred to as a sprint planning document.

Before starting any efforts to improve or redesign a website, it’s important to consider:

• What are your business goals for the website? How does it need to perform as a sales and marketing tool? 
• Who is the website for? (Your ICP and key personas)
• What products or services are your primary marketing focus and the basis of your positioning?
• What are the critical actions that you want users to take, in order to enter your sales or marketing funnels?
• What key features should be made prominent to engage users and allow them to easily find what they’re looking for?
• What content is needed on the site, in order to engage, inform, create trust, and inspire users to take action?
• What is your navigation and homepage user experience strategy?

Create a strategic website redesign plan

The goal of this activity is to create clarity on your company’s needs for this effort, and create a plan for execution that keeps activities focused on what will drive your business forward. When we embark on a website redesign project with clients, this strategic planning is one of the first steps in the project. We’re sharing this thinking here as a partial preview, or a resource for those doing this work internally. There’s no need to complete all of these steps in order to begin a conversation with us about a website project—we’ll draw out the details throughout a series of conversations. However, it’s great to come prepared with notes, and this article will help you pull together many of the details ahead of time.

Why do this? With your website acting as the hub of all of your marketing, it’s important to have a strategic stake in the outcome, and be clear on what you want to get out of the effort. However, it’s also less helpful to delve into creating overly prescriptive RFPs — more on this in our article on how to write a website RFP.

Below are guidelines for the areas you should cover in an initial planning document that you can flesh out into a fully fledged creative brief or strategy brief in subsequent steps.

1) Needs and Goals

Current state: Consider your website as it is at this moment. What’s working? What’s not working? 

Competition: Which companies are your top three competitors? Take a look at their websites and figure out where you have the opportunity to gain market share with a more effective industrial website.

Top three lead generation, marketing, brand and content goals: Write them out in concrete terms. In addition, describe the desired future state.

Top three KPIs for the website: These are up to you to determine. Usually, they are an increase in lead quality, an increase in lead quantity and a traffic and/or engagement goal. You may have other goals, as well.

2) Audience (ICP & Key Personas)

Ideal Customer Profile: This refers to a company, not an individual. Think about your ideal customer’s company size in dollars and people, project size in dollars and annual budget in dollars. In addition, what are the types of projects, needs or applications your ideal customer comes to you for? Which industries or groups of industries constitute your ideal customer? Finally, is there a practical geographical limitation, or a desirable geography?

Primary Persona (Influencer) and Primary Persona (Buyer): For both, answer these questions: What is their age range? What is their day like? What keeps them up at night? What do they call a solution? How do they search for it? How do they benefit from your offering?

3) Positioning & SEO

Draft Positioning and Reassurance Statements:  What does your company do, who do you serve and what’s unique? This is your positioning statement, which, when finalized, will need to be very concise. A complementary reassurance statement is where you can include additional supporting information.

Primary Keywords: Which keywords do you know are important? Are there any keywords for which your site already ranks well? 

SEO/Positioning Notes: If SEO and positioning don’t line up yet, we’ll help provide guidance and strategy to bring the two together. Both need to be authentic to what your company actually delivers to customers, in language that resonates with them.

4) Critical Actions

Sales-qualified leads (SQLs): What is the primary CTA (call to action) for SQLs and what critical content is missing to help guide leads towards entering your sales funnel? 

Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs): What tools, gated content, signups, or other action mechanisms would provide value to your key audiences, and encourage them to enter your marketing funnel? What content is needed to support generating MQLs?

5) Feature Prioritization

As you create a features and functionality wishlist for your website, we recommend using the MoSCoW method to prioritize these into four areas: what the project MUST include, SHOULD include, COULD include and WON’T include. 

6) Content & Content Strategy

Content generation on the client-side is often the biggest cause for delays in many website projects. While the subject matter expertise has to come from your team, there are several tools and approaches to make this process easier, whether you’re creating content internally, with external help, or both. 

It’s often helpful for our team to begin with interviews and generate a brand messaging guideline, followed by full copywriting services for key pages on the website. Sometimes SMEs are able to simply fill out a questionnaire that we provide, or send us a rough draft. Other teams feel confident writing content but simply need an editing pass. AI, used responsibly, can help expedite this process as well. 

For the purpose of the initial re-launch of a website, or first sprint of improvements to an existing website, what website content needs to be created or modified? What is a second priority that can be filled in, or updated over time?

7) Homepage and Navigation Rough Draft

Think of the main navigation as the Table of Contents for your website. What’s missing, or needs to be revised from your existing website? Do competitor websites have a more intuitive arrangement that functions better?  The homepage should also function, more or less, as an outline of your company, providing shortcut links to the different content areas that your audiences may be seeking out.

Prioritize a plan for agile rollout to an existing website

If you’ve gone through the above exercise, you have a good starting point for an industrial website redesign project, which will generally follow a fairly prescribed waterfall process (strategy and SEO, sitemap and wireframes, design/content generation/optimization, development, QA, launch). If your goal is to make incremental improvements to an existing industrial website, you’ll have the benefit of seeing smaller, impactful changes sooner, but you’ll need to do some additional planning. 

Considering all of the proposed items in the strategic plan, evaluate and prioritize based on:

• Which items will yield the biggest impact?
• Which items are the quickest or easiest to implement?
• Which items are the most urgent needs, or problems to be fixed?

This will help you put together a project plan that allows you to tackle the quickest and most important items first, before turning your attention to potentially longer-term improvements. 

Invariably, additional ideas will come up in the process of actively improving a website, and you can always evaluate whether a new idea is more important or urgent than what was already planned. If it is, it can take precedence and bump the other activity to a subsequent sprint. If it’s not more important, the new idea can be added to a backlog for future evaluation. 

As you begin to make progress, keep the original plan front and center, but don’t be afraid to treat it as a living document when new information steers the strategy one way or another. Just keep those marketing goals front and center. 

Holding regular check-ins on progress and weekly or monthly sprint meetings will help to keep everyone focused on the tasks at hand. 

Plan how marketing channels interact with your industrial website

Finally, while your industrial website is the hub of your marketing, it’s not the only element. If you’ve been following the steps above and working with an SEO specialist during the process, your industrial website should be performing well from an organic search perspective. However, it’s also important to have an ongoing and continuously improving plan for other channels that can amplify your industrial website content, drive more qualified traffic to your website and get your website, with its useful tools and content, into the hands of prospects when they’re ready to engage. This plan needn’t be complicated. Write out simple bullet points for how your website can support and/or interact with prospects and visitors from:

• Organic search (including traditional search engines and AI tools)
• Paid search / PPC – Google, LinkedIn
• LinkedIn outreach
• ABM campaigns
• Directories
• Trade shows and events
• Printed materials
• Webinars
• Training content
• Sales conversations and emails 
• Networking conversations
• Social media
• Email campaigns
• Distribution partners and retailers
• Existing customers
• Hiring and talent outreach
• Existing employees
• Vendors and suppliers

Especially when you take into account all of the channels and activities above, it’s clear that your industrial website is a living, breathing hub of your company’s marketing and communications. Your industrial website strategy is a rudder that keeps everything heading in the right direction. It should be robust and kept updated over time to remain a relevant, strategic guide.

Looking for a deeper understanding of when, why and how to redesign your B2B industrial website? Check out a webinar, or learn more about our upcoming on-demand virtual course, B2B Website Strategy for Lead Generation.