Cybersecurity SaaS is a complex and technical industry. Procurement officers and executives making software decisions know that they are walking into a complicated area that has a steep learning curve. Given that it is often the point of first contact with a potential customer, your website is a place where you want to err on the side of caution when it comes to complexity. It needs to strike the right balance. You don’t want to turn off those with little understanding of the field, or, conversely, not say enough to those who are more technically minded. When it comes to web design for cybersecurity SaaS companies, follow the old maxim: keep it simple.

You want to avoid producing eye-glaze moments that mean potential customers won’t journey through your website or listen to your sales pitch. At the same time, you need to be informative about your product and in particular, the benefits of using it. Working with many clients in this field, we’ve found that cybersecurity SaaS companies struggle most with communicating the value of their products to prospective customers in a straightforward and easily digestible way. Here are some tips for web design for cybersecurity SaaS companies to entice customers to spend more time on your website and learn more about your products and services.

Simplify Your Sales Pitch in 3 Steps

One of the hardest parts of web design for cybersecurity SaaS is explaining what you do. You know what your software does, but explaining this can often be difficult. This is especially true when dealing with enterprise-level decision makers who may not have technical expertise or knowledge, and may not even be in your target industry. You need to make your website copy clear and simple. Don’t use overly technical descriptions or jargon that risk confusing and turning off site visitors instead of turning them into leads.

Short and Sweet

To achieve this, simplify and reduce your sales pitch. Keep your feature set descriptions short and sweet – you don’t want visitors to get lost in the technical details right up front. If customers want more detailed descriptions, you can provide these in white papers and product documents.

Get Visual

In addition to short descriptions, you should use eye-catching icons, illustrations, diagrams, and videos. Break down your product benefits using an explainer video or flow chart. These reduce complexity and help potential site visitors understand what they’re reading through visualization.

Layout the Value

You should also include feature sets and pricing tables, which help potential customers assess the business value of our SaaS products. Decision makers and executives want to understand how your software will impact their business in terms of cost savings and security/safety.

Even if you follow these tips, it’s still not always easy to convey what your software does. In our experience re-designing a website for BedRock Systems, we found it helpful to focus on selling or showing the outcome/application of their SaaS services. The technical details aren’t always key when it comes to selling cybersecurity. The applied use is the most important; you’re selling an outcome (safety and stability), as much as you’re selling a product. In this direction, be sure to show how specific industries are using your software. When you focus on outcomes, this means that customers in other industries will see the applications or uses in their sector too.

Simplify Website Organization to Maximize User Experience

User experience is important in any industry. Improved user experience can boost conversions by 400%, while negative experiences increase the likelihood that a visitor won’t return to your site. With web design for cybersecurity SaaS, you can use website organization to make it easier to navigate the complexities of your products and services.

Firstly, you likely have a lot of information to share. Don’t cram it all into a couple of long pages and hope for the best. This bogs down visitors without highlighting the most important parts of your sales pitch in a digestible manner. Instead, start by simplifying your homepage. Provide the basics of what it is you do and allow visitors to segment themselves by industry or application through specific pages. From here you can get a bit more technical, but remember to keep complexities to a minimum. Use submenus or module tabs on these pages to simplify user experience and keep the page length down. These allows users to explore at their own pace, making them more likely to retain the information you have presented.

There are several benefits to industry or application specific landing pages. First, visitors can immediately see that you target their industry or need and can then easily get into the more technical details. Second, they’re great for search engine optimization (SEO), as you can drive organic traffic to these pages from people searching for a specific industry or service. Third, you can potentially use these landing pages for digital advertising.

A final, but extremely important tip for maximizing user experience: make your website mobile-friendly. Mobile devices have a 53% market share, versus a 47% market share for desktop devices. If someone is interested in your service, they will likely visit your site more than once and odds are they will visit it from a desktop and mobile device. You want your site to be easy to navigate for potential customers on both devices.

Show Off Your Knowledge and Trust Indicators

While you initially want to keep your product descriptions basic, you do want to provide more depth and detail about your products and industry experience. To begin with, show that you are a thought leader in your field through a blog. No matter how big or small your cybersecurity SaaS company is, blogging is a great way to show off your products and your industry knowledge. A good way to build out your blog is to fill it with case studies. These show the many uses of your product and gives you a chance to show how it could work for potential customers in similar industries or with similar cybersecurity needs. You don’t have to call it a blog. We like the term “insights” for SaaS companies. Second, write and post white papers. White papers are a great way to describe the more technical details and use cases for your services. As we discuss in the next section, they’re also a great way to get lead information.

Your website should also highlight trust indicators, like accreditations, certifications, and big-name partnerships. Put these on your homepage, and not at the bottom of the page either. You want them either above the fold or just below it. These should be front and center when someone visits your page. People should immediately know that you are a company they can trust, as certification boards and industry leaders trust your products. You should also include testimonials from current or past clients. In addition to building trust, testimonials also illustrates the use cases for your products. You can use snippers from testimonials on the homepage and have a page that displays all testimonials in full.

Build a Lead List and Analyze Lead Acquisition

Not every visit to your website will be a sale. But every visit is an opportunity to try and turn that person into a potential sale. Ultimately, you need to use visits to build a lead list and get these leads into your marketing funnel. To do this, include calls to action on every page of your website. You can do this in a number of ways, such as:

• Encourage people to book a free consultation – Require that they submit their email address in order to download a free information pack.
• Use gated white papers – Have prospective clients submit their email address in order to access your newest or most popular case studies.

You should also include an obvious contact link on your header menu bar. You want it to be easy for people to contact you, no matter where they are on the site. And remember to create a warm and appealing thank you page for when they do submit a contact form.

You also need to analyze and track your lead acquisition to understand what is and isn’t working with your website. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are invaluable tools for completing this task. They allow you to track site visits, including how the visitor got to the site, what pages they visited, how long they visited each page. Set up “Form Submission” as a goal in Google Analytics. You can analyze the path that visitors take to become leads. This will allow you to see if your marketing plan is working and allow you to tweak it if it isn’t.

Product Description Through Visuals – Keep it Fresh and Avoid Clichés!

Your organization works in cybersecurity, so obviously hackers are your archnemesis. But that doesn’t mean you need to use images of Anonymous hackers with bright green code flashing across their foreheads or ominous gloved hands typing on a computer.

These types of images are overused and they don’t fully encapsulate what you do. Using them fails to distinguish you from every other cybersecurity company using the same stock images. Unfortunately, choices are limited when it comes to stock cybersecurity images. To get around this, you need to think outside of the box. For example, we focused on solutions and outcomes for BedRock’s website, so we used images of what the company was protecting. For BedRock this was critical infrastructure and government assets. These help customers visualize the benefits your software provides. The point is: avoid falling into overused clichés; keep your site fresh, modern, and true to your business.

RFDM for Cybersecurity SaaS Web Design

If you would like a free consultation on web design for cybersecurity SaaS, please feel free to contact us.