This Better Practice B2B marketing resource takes a look at B2B website budgets for websites designed to generate awareness, acquire prospects, nurture prospects and qualify sales readiness.
“How much should my B2B website budget be for design and development?” is a question Brainrider is often asked as companies increase their investment in digital marketing (see MarketingSherpa Benchmark Chart on the right). The answer is easier to get to than you might think. This resource looks at what you should allocate for your b2b website budget and what costs you might not have considered yet.
While website development budgets can range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars, web design and coding for a world-class B2B Marketing website should cost between $6,500 and $12,000. This cost range includes:
You can spend more if you need a graphic design update for your whole brand, require custom code modifications for the CMS, or need multiple rounds of revisions to meet complex internal decision making needs. But most B2B marketing website projects should fit this range whether you are a multinational B2B brand with millions of customers, a growth brand with a very niche audience, or anyone in-between. If you are surprised by these costs click here to check out how Web Content Management Systems work and why they have lowered costs.
The following B2B website budget items can be internal or outsourced but they are often overlooked when planning a new website project causing many challenges as the project is executed.
1. Writing a Detailed Requirements BriefWhile many website projects start with the question “What should our new website look like?” a better process is to ask:
The right answers for these questions will deliver a better website with better results and a more efficient and less expensive process.
B2B Website Budget: While requirements briefs are often included in a website project at no extra charge make sure they cover all the elements listed above.
While space on the internet is infinite, each page on the web is actually very limited. Most visitors will never get below the top of any page on your site. So building the right architecture and page templates can make all the difference between an effective website that delivers against your objectives and a pretty website that does not. Building an effective visitor experience, often referred to as UX for user experience, is both a science and an art. But without doing it there is no point in investing in a new website. The key elements in UX planning include site architecture to map out you whole site, wireframes to map out each page, and templates that take the logic of your architecture and wireframes and put it into practice.
B2B Website Budget: Site architecture costs $3,000-$10,000
3. Content developmentContent development is the biggest challenge in almost every new B2B marketing website. How you tell your credentials story is the critical element in delivering better marketing results. But because most web-developers are focused on visual design and coding, content development is often under-budgeted and delegated to a junior copywriter. Avoid this mistake by creating a content development plan. Identify your key audiences and the content they are looking for as they define their problem, fix their problem and decide to buy from you. Inventory existing content that should be migrated “as is” to your new website, existing content that can be edited and repurposed for your new site, and new content that will need to be developed. And then start your content development as soon as you start you website design and coding.
B2B Website Budget: Content development costs 2-3 times the cost of designing and coding a new website. $13,000-$36,000
Content loading is the process of loading and styling content in your website content management system. This labor intensive process can be improved with better content development practices but still requires manual loading and proofing.
B2B Website Budget: content loading costs $1,500 -$3,000
If you do business in multiple-languages than you should consider a multilingual website. There are terrific language selector and translation management technologies available that dramatically reduce the cost of developing and managing multilingual sites to less than $6,000 in additional development costs. But don’t forget to budget to translation.
B2B Website Budget: multilingual coding $10,000 plus content translation which typically runs from $200 to $500 per page.
Installing mainstream web analytics tracking such as Google Analytics should be included at no charge in your design and development project. If you are using technology such as marketing automation platforms like Pardot, Eloqua, Hubspot, or Marketo or Sales CRM platforms such as SalesForce.com or SugarCRM than you will need to integrate them into your site design and development. The basic integration should not add any cost to your design and coding budget but you will need additional landing page templates, form styling to match the design, updated HTML email templates, and page scoring rules.
B2B Website Budget: marketing automation/Sales CRM integration should add $1,000-$3,000.
If you use additional technology integration such as customer portals, support tools, catalogues, ecommerce they can often be accommodated with offsite links or iframes. But they will need detailed use-case and requirements development.
B2B Website Budget: it depends but much cheaper if build your requirements in advance.
Technical search engine optimization should be included in your website design and coding budget at no extra charge. Website content management systems now handle most of the technical side of SEO such as url structure, page titles, and metadata, but you still need to focus on better content practices including content development, content titles, descriptions and styling, and content promotion including generating high-quality inbound links.
B2B Website Budget: technical SEO should be included in your site design and coding costs
| Budget Line Item | Cost Range | |
| Discovery & Requirements Brief | N/C | |
| Site Design & Coding | $6,500 – $12,000+ | |
| Site Architecture, Wireframes & Templates | $3,000 – $10,000+ | |
| Content Planning & Development | $13,000 – $36,000+ | |
| Content Loading | $1,500 – $3,000+ | |
| Multilingual Site Versions | $10,000 – $25,000+ | |
| Technology Integration | $3,000 – $20,000+ | |
| Search Engine Optimization | N/C |
Great article. I’m planning a business that will require interactive b2 b service. This has helped in planning for cost and better understanding of what it wil take.
My web site is yet to be designed. The registered company name is Insource To America, LLC.
Does your company design?