Many factors can hinder or even potentially prevent your customers from finding and viewing your product destination pages, including poor search engine marketing, a bad site structure, and poor content organization. When your customers spend the time and effort that it takes to successfully find these product destination pages, the last thing you want to do is to disappoint them by turning them away once they get there.
So, what are the key elements of a winning B2B product destination page? Are your product destination pages providing the information users are looking for? Are your product pages effective in terms of generating and capturing leads? There are 10 key elements that a winning B2B product destination page should have.
1. Product Images
On product destination pages, graphic images showing products deliver the most immediate and direct visual impression to visitors. Based on the visual impression visitors receive the moment they see a product destination page, customers make quick judgments about whether the page deserves any more of their time and attention.
Choosing the right image or visual presentation for a product destination page is extremely important to building favorable impressions. To make optimal image choices, you must first obtain an in-depth understanding of how your customers perceive your products, then select one or more images that clearly convey the right message. This is relatively easy to do for tangible products such as home-improvement products. However, for virtual goods such as IT services and products, it takes much thought to provide an illustration that conveys your message in the right way.
2. Product Overview
Although an image is worth a thousand words, in addition to product images, customers want content that quickly helps them to understand a product’s advantages and how it can help their business. A concise, but thorough product overview lets customers quickly gain this understanding. This overview should be long enough to describe what your product does, but not so long that users can’t read it through a brief scan. Try using language that contains keywords your customers would be looking for, but avoid using jargon that would confuse new customers. A well-written product overview should answer these questions: What is the product? What does it do? What are its primary selling points?
3. Content Describing the Product
While a product overview is a good start, it’s far from enough. Your customers want to see comprehensive information that provides a 360-degree view of a product and helps them conduct their initial product research and make strategic decisions. According to industry best practices, you should employ one-step shopping—promoting and marketing products through polished product images that present a product from multiple angles; giving detailed descriptions of product features, colors, and sizes; and providing downloadable documentation.
Marketers should understand that having targeted content is extremely important to your customers. Although all customers look at your product destination pages, customers in different roles want different types of content; and customers at different stages in the research/sales cycle are looking for different types of content as well. For example, on a product destination page for a medical product, doctors and nurses need different content from patients. On a cloud product destination page, strategic decision makers and IT specialists need different information. New customers look for technical specifications, product details, and customization information, while existing or returning customers need support and troubleshooting content. Developing targeted content based on a solid understanding of your customers is essential.
One thing to keep in mind is that providing the desired content doesn’t mean pushing everything onto a page at once, without any focus. Employing multiple content formats and providing content of various lengths lets you provide different types of content in whatever way helps customers’ comprehension. For example, you need not display a lengthy data sheet directly on a product destination page; in this case, a link to a downloadable document would do the trick. The key is to prioritize your content, and use appropriate visual elements to present the content in a meaningful way. Visitors can quickly scan a product destination page and decide what areas they want to spend more time on. A tab structure is in wide use for presenting extensive product content, with content on multiple tabs that are parallel to each other. Customers can easily toggle between the tabs to view content that lets them comprehend a product’s features, without getting lost.
4. User-Generated Content
These days, customers conduct rigorous online research before they make purchasing decisions. What information really helps them make a decision between your product and your competitors’ products? User-generated content such as user reviews that provide first-hand feedback can really influence customers’ decisions. One of the things I keep hearing from participants in user research is that customers are looking for third-party information about products. They want to learn from other customers who can share information that is valuable in relation to their specific needs.
While having a filtering system is useful, customers perceive reviews as biased if you show only positive reviews. The key is to provide a welcoming environment that encourages candid and thoughtful reviews. Not only does this attract potential customers and engage them on your site, it also provides a good way of collecting ideas and feedback for future improvements to your products. Enthusiastic, loyal customers are willing to share their success stories with their peers. They are eager to provide their insights to customers who are still in the exploration stage. Make use of this. Take advantage of it.
If user-generated reviews are not applicable in your business model, providing case studies and user testimonials can be similarly effective. Potential customers can learn about the challenges and success stories of other customers who have similar use cases and relate the information to their own situation.
