Episode summary
Your website is the foundation of all your marketing efforts. An ineffective website could mean all your other marketing investments go to waste.
Yet if you were to search for how much you can get a website for, almost all the results would tell you how cheaply you could get it.
But for mature businesses looking to grow, your website needs appropriate investment to match those ambitions.
In this episode of Websites Decoded, Phil explores the real cost of a B2B website.
Episode transcript
When it comes to the real cost or what you should spend on your B2B website, there's of course, no one answer.
Budgets vary massively, massively by business size and maturity, by industry, by functional requirements, all sorts of variables.
So there's no way to answer that question with a single figure.
But there are two things that I think about often.
Content that's misleading B2B website costs
One is that when you search for information on this important topic that's of interest to many people, the information you'll find is almost universally about how little can you spend, how cheaply can you create your B2B website?
It's not unusual to google the question, visit a high-ranking result, punch in your website factors, page count, et cetera, into a calculator and come out with a number like £2000, $3,000, $5,000 if you're pushing it.
And that may be true at the very beginning of your business journey, but I don't believe that that should be anybody's aspiration or intention of what to invest in their website.
They should actually be aiming to invest as much as they can possibly justify within their marketing budget as a percentage of their revenue or profit, because it's so critical to their growth long term.
While the content that you can find online will nearly all talk about how low it is possible to do a website for, very few people talk about how much big brands are investing in their website. And it's interesting because that investment is a large part of their success at generating demand.
There are websites that come to everybody's mind when they think of high-quality, best-in-class websites.
There's a couple of names that I could reel off that everybody would agree and nod, but no one talks about the fact that they spend millions per year creating and maintaining those websites.
But everybody's aspiration should be to invest as much as they can afford in their website so that their website is as good as it can possibly be as a generator of traffic, affinity, interest and demand, and ultimately pipeline.
How do you figure out what you need to spend on your website?
Well, no one can really tell you but yourselves, but you need to account for all the things that make up an effective website. And that too is another area where people are often overlook certain things or encouraged to not invest in certain aspects of it.
So for example, your total cost is going to be made up of things like:
- Running costs of software, infrastructure and technology
- Strategy setup and preparation work, such as figuring out what is the sitemap that I need, what is the content that my buyers require, what is the keyword strategy that I build into these pages? And so on.
And those are two things that are very often omitted or overlooked.
Website content
Content creation is one of the crucial pillars of a successful website, and yet often it's a cost that's completely overlooked when evaluating the cost of a new website.
But crisp, clear, concise copy is a key component in an effective website. So the cost of copy creation needs to be factored in.
Design and development
And then, and only then, really do you get to the costs of design and development.
And if you're thinking in a really detailed way, QA, testing and the launch process and so on.
But all of those things together make up your website cost, and you need to work out what you can budget to all of those things if you want your website to be a central, successful key in your digital demand generation.