The Importance of Design for B2B SaaS Companies
There is more emphasis than ever on great design in the B2B SaaS space. In the past, you could get away with creating an okay website: you’d have marketing materials with great content but a not-so-great design. Now, with more competition and higher customer expectations, you have to put in more effort to catch users’ attention and create awareness. Cohesive branding and eye-catching design are no longer optional.
Utilizing a fantastic design and style guide goes a long way towards moving you ahead of your competition and powering people through your buying journey.
Decent design is functional — amazing design is a sales tool
Keep it neat
Having a clean, simple B2B design coupled with concise, actionable copy, makes your software offering desirable. In this digital age, both B2C and B2B SaaS buyers want to be able to easily find and understand the value that different companies provide.
If your competitors utilize neat design that simplifies their complex offering, while you offer long, wordy, difficult to understand content, your website visitors will quickly focus their attention on the former, leaving your offering behind.
Only highlight your software’s most important features
Your B2B SaaS company might be competing against 3, 5, 10 or 20 competitors, all of which have distinctly different software offerings to solve an issue the buyer is facing. Your tool has a million widgets, is extremely technical and can be personalized to any issue a user might face — this is great!
However, this makes you want to show off every facet of your offering, and that’s when you make a mistake. It’s easy to go overboard with your B2B design: adding too much detail is the most common pitfall. Overwhelming people with information leads them to leave your website without looking back, so it’s important to only highlight the specific features of your software that provide the most value over your competitors.
If you want to stand out in a sea of competition, put your focus on showcasing those amazing features no one else has.
Start small to avoid information overload
What is the main pain point that your end-user is facing? Showcase, through infographics, presentations, or other content offerings, how simple it is for your software to fix this issue. If you try to shove everything your software can do into one image, you’ll end up with a mess that’s impossible for your reader to absorb.
A good strategy to employ is to create different sets of marketing materials for each of your established buyer personas. Typically, each of these personas has a different problem or use for your software — so use this as an opportunity to focus on the features that are most valuable to each type of user.
Stand out by offering solutions, not products
Unfortunately, the need you feel to showcase every benefit of your software is an issue many B2B SaaS companies have. But fortunately for you, if you create a design for your deliverables that simplifies your messaging and highlights solutions to your main customer pain points: you’ll stand out from your competition.
Use a great B2B design to break up your content and list the solutions that your software provides in an easy to digest format. The design will help link the trust that people have in your brand with the solutions that you’re providing across various deliverables, making them more likely to buy from you!
Don’t just stick to stating ‘our software includes x, y and z’ — flesh this out into ‘our software provides a solution for a, b and c due to its use of x, y and z’.
Instantly convey simplicity with design
Your design needs to be simple because it communicates without words that your software is simple too. Your end-user might be struggling with an archaic method of doing things without your software, so don’t let them find you using an archaic design.
Maybe they’re using 12 spreadsheets at once, have a cluttered inbox or some other issue. Make an infographic that showcases their current method, and make it cluttered. Then make a neat and organized infographic that showcases your solution: when they see how clean, simple and easy to use it is, they’ll be able to visualize the positive change they’ll experience by switching to your software.
Want to see what Accelity’s designers can do for your B2B SaaS company? Request a consultation today.
