Website Design for B2B Manufacturers; a conversation with Ian Loew, Founder of Lform Design

Should your marketing agency focus on B2B Manufacturers? 

There are more than 250,000 manufacturing companies in the US, with the majority of them producing B2B products. And the buyer profiles, their motivations, and the decision processes they go through, are not the same as a B2C, or even a regular B2B customer.

Ian Loew, of Lform Design, talks about his decision to specialize his web design company on B2B Manufacturers, and explains some of the unique aspects of their website requirements: the need to integrate with an ERP system; the large volumes of data behind the scenes; and the fact that the target audience is often highly technical and prefers self-service tools like calculators and product selectors.

We talk about the pros and cons of Wordpress against a custom design. And Ian shares his thoughts on how prospective web designers can get started, whether it’s back end or front-end programming (hint: just start something).

Some of Ian's favorite resources for design inspiration:
Awwwards
Dribbble
Smashing Magazine
Colossal
Wired Magazine

To connect with Ian, or find out more about the work they do at Lform Design:
Ian's LinkedIn Profile
Lform's website

Highlights and Timestamps:

03:40    Integrating ERP systems with custom web designs for B2B Manufacturers

05:50    Exploring the benefits of WordPress vs custom website design

09:40    The website design process – Discovery, Design, Coding, Content, Launch

11:30    Design considerations for website development

14:30    Working effectively with Client requests and priorities

17:05    How to get started in web design and development

22:10    New Jersey Proud! Explaining the focus on B2B Manufacturing and NJ businesses

24:00    Ian’s go-to resources for design inspiration

25:40    Sipping a Manhattan…or a really good tequila on the rocks!

Transcript

Website Design for B2B Manufacturers; a conversation with Ian Loew

The Marketing Mix Podcast. Episode 3

Steve:

Today I'm joined by Ian Loew, who's founder of Lform Design, which is a company that specializes in website design and development for B2B manufacturers. And from the 100 or so customer links on the case studies pag, I'm guessing Ian has quite a few stories and insights to share with us around the possibilities and the challenges of website design. 

Ian, welcome to the Marketing Mix.

Ian Loew:

Hey Steve, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity and I'm glad I can be here. 

I started the company, I went off on my own in 2005. In 2006 I incorporated. It really wasn't until about 2009, 2010 that I decided to specialize. I had looked at my roster of clients and I noticed that a multitude of them were manufacturers. and especially in the B2B space. And it really resonated with me. My father was a manufacturer in Northern New Jersey. He did lamination, meaning gluing fabrics together. And I saw a lot of the struggles he had dealt with. My background was artistic graphic design, my aunt was a graphic designer, my other aunt on the other side of the nation, Seattle, she did art restoration. So it really resonated with me, the combination of the logic of web design, the confines of web design, also the specialization of manufacturing just kind of came to a head. 

At first, I was afraid to specialize because you don't know where the next client is going to come from. It really solidified my thinking when I had attended a sales seminar by Blair Enns. He’s a sales coach for agency owners, and he said specialization is the key to success for most agency owners. So I doubled down, and then when COVID hit, I changed all our messaging on our website to really solidify the fact that I am specializing in Manufacturing

Steve:

It's one of the marketing tenets - that you really want to specialize, and not try and be all things to all people. But I would imagine, as you said, it was a little scary, right? Because you're naturally then limiting your customer base. So sure, we know as marketers, it's the right thing to do, but it doesn't mean to say putting it into practice is particularly easy. But it's obviously paid off for you, as I mentioned before, you got a lot of good clients, a few well-known brands on your website. I'm curious. As you narrowed down to particularly B2B manufacturers, you said you changed the copy on your website to be very specific. So talk through some of the things that - because you're focusing for B2B manufacturers - are unique to that market, as opposed to just being a general website design company.

Ian Loew:

One of the biggest items that we've dealt with in the past is integration with ERP systems, complex warehousing accounting systems. And oftentimes a lot of these tools, for instance, NetSuite, which is an Oracle product, Sage, which is a large accounting suite, they have all this information stored and they don't want to do double entry. So we're able to work with APIs to bring that information to the web. And a lot of these ERP systems do have kind of run of the mill e-commerce platforms that can spin up relatively painlessly, but then they don't get the customizations that they would need. And honestly, the ERP systems aren't focused on web design. They're really focused on selling the software and setting the customer up for the software. So that was one of the interesting items or services that we're able to offer that really separates us from the competition. We have the know-how, the technical prowess to do that.

The other component of this is, we understand looking at large amounts of data and interactions on websites, how manufacturers or potential clients for these manufacturers, how they go about using the website. Most of these potential clients are engineers. They want to quickly surf their website, find the information they need to have. And they honestly, engineers generally don't like talking to people. So they love looking at well-crafted websites.

Steve:

Makes sense. I'm a recovering engineer myself. So. I agree, put it in front of me, and if I don't have to talk to somebody, then I'm pretty happy with that approach. 

I've been involved in a few website builds myself and worked with agencies such as yourself. And one of the questions we always get into, is it going to be WordPress-based, or is it going to be maybe custom design? I suspect it's dependent on the situation. What you just mentioned with the ERP systems, maybe that's part of the decision process. Is that a step that you go through or do you always just do WordPress, or do you do you always go with custom design or is there somewhere in between?

Ian Loew:

WordPress runs the majority of the web. I forget the exact stat, but I want to say it's something like 30 to 40% of all websites on the internet are run by WordPress. And the reason being is that WordPress has a lot of plugins allowing you to extend its capabilities quite easily. 

However, when you're doing these complex integrations, WordPress really falls short. The reason being, it's backwards compatible. It's using old code. So if you want to go from version XYZ and go back in time, you can easily with WordPress. However, the downside of that is that it's using an older code base and the language that it's written in is PHP. I don't want to get too technical here, but long story short, PHP has evolved tremendously. Just so everybody knows, Facebook was written in PHP, back in the day. I think it's evolved since, but it's a very complex, very powerful language to do interactions. And so ultimately what I have happening is clients reach out to us, they go WordPress, WordPress, WordPress, and they don't understand the pitfalls. 

If you're doing a basic brochure website or a basic e-commerce site, because there's a plugin called WooCommerce, it's great. WordPress is awesome. Very easy. If you have some expertise, technical knowledge, anybody for the most part can spin up a website. But if you're going beyond that, then you really need to work with what's called a framework that is developer supported. We're big advocates for Laravel, which is a PHP framework, and that a lot of startups use for doing complex online apps, better known as SaaS, software as a service.

Steve:

Makes sense. So how does your customer base break down now? Is there a split between WordPress and custom, or is everything you do custom?

Ian Loew:

Lately, we've been delving into what we call drag and drop editors, where there are no code solutions. Within WordPress, you can use Elementor, which is a very powerful drag and drop. I mean, honestly, Steve, you could use it. Elementor is that easy. It's complex at first. The learning curve is pretty high. But then once you get a hang of it, you can really build a nice, decent website within a matter of a few days. And then there's another one. There's BoldThemes. Divi is another one. There's a lot of these no code solutions within WordPress. And then like I mentioned, WooCommerce, which is an e-commerce solution, is extremely powerful and very customizable

Steve:

One of the comments you made in the middle, which made me chuckle was, you know,” it's so easy, Steve, you could probably do it”. Which is a fair point. It would have to be easy for me to be able to do it! But I think it raises an interesting point. Just because I can build a website doesn't mean that I should be doing it. Because design is a large part of it, which is not my background and isn't most people's, certainly not B2B manufacturing. It's not going to be most people's background. There's optimization, there's SEO, there's a lot of other things around it beyond just the, “hey, put something together that works”. 

So from your process point of view, it's not just building the website. Presumably, you're interviewing the customer, you're trying to find out what they want, you're thinking about design, you're thinking about architecture, you're thinking about searchability. Maybe you can walk through that process. If somebody was coming in and say “hey Ian, I need a website,” What are the sort of the big steps or building blocks that you go through?

Ian Loew:

I'll go through a recent site we launched for Pabco Gypsum, they're a large drywall manufacturer based in Vegas and California. They came to us back in  2021, we started the project. And the first thing that we do is discovery. So if you have a huge site and you want to redo it, we really need to get our hands dirty. What does that mean? Well, we need to do a content audit. We really need to go through all your existing pages to see what's there. Discovery is a paid service, we do charge the client and it ranges the gamut, you know, from a few thousand to several thousand, depending on how large the sites are. For instance, we're working with a client com line, we're combining seven sites into one, and we absolutely needed to do discovery to delve through all those seven sites to see what was there. Beyond the content audit, then we take that information and we develop a site map. Now, sitemap is just a list of all the pages that your new site's going to be made of, both really quintessential steps in order to have a successful build. I'm always perplexed about how many clients I come across who don't really - I mean, they might be marketing coordinators, they might be the head of marketing, and they really don't know their own websites. They just know the key pages that people talk about or key products that people view day in, day out, and things get lost in the sauce. So discovery is really, really important. 

The next phase is obviously design, right? Developing an aesthetic, which is subjective, let's be honest. e, I always compare design to music. Some people like classic rock, some people like country. There's nothing wrong or right with that. But what you need to keep in mind is that potential client. What is going to resonate with them? If you are selling like Pabco, if you're selling drywall, it's contractors. What are they looking for? Do they want something that has a little bit of wow factor? The answer is yes. Or is your end consumer a laboratory, scientists, researchers, if you want it to be as clean as humanly possible. Yes. You know, those are the factors that those are the different characteristics of your end customer that you need to take into account for. And we usually ask the client to give us personas. What are the types of clients that are coming to your website. And if they don't provide us with personas, if we have the budget, we'd love during this discovery to do interviews with clients, existing clients, or if we can't, if we're not allowed to speak to clients, then we'll talk to key personnel, meaning key salespeople that deal with the end consumer. And it's really insightful because they might share with us facets of their website that they're disappointed with, that they won't share with upper management because they're afraid their job might be on the line, but with us, there are no holds barred.

Steve:

I've been in a different position than you in designing websites or building websites where I've been the client.? Not with you specifically, but with other agencies. One of the situations I get caught into is - I have a vision of how I think this is going to work. I'm working with the agency to do it. Let's talk about product selectors because I ran into a specific issue once with a product selector. One of our VP of Sales out in Asia desperately wanted us to break out every power supply difference for every country in his region. And it was less than 5% of our sales for the entire region. So then when you break it down to Vietnam and Indonesia and all that, it made no sense. So I spent a lot of time trying to negotiate how we get around that. 

Is that something that you get involved in? Do you try and keep out of that? And do you make sure that the client is doing that? Or do you find that you're halfway through it? And then suddenly there's this, “ I just talked to so-and-so and now we need to put in there. Is that a lot of your process is managing out that level of complexity.

Ian Loew:

The phased approach has not been something that I've done from the onset with my company. So again, discovery, design, coding, content, launch. That phased approach really leads us to having success where we don't have those curveballs flying at us. So ultimately, we come at it from, we are the experts. Do we know your industry? No. Do we educate ourselves on why? Yes, but will we question something? Absolutely. 

So case in point, with the Pabco website, we recently launched it and they said, Whoa, the fonts look really large. Everything looks really large. And we delved deeper and we found out that on Windows 10 not Chrome, but with Edge, which is the Microsoft browser. For some odd reason, it was magnifying stuff. So it was one and a half times larger. And then we looked at the stats for that specific browser, that version on that operating system. And we found that it was less than 2% of users are using this. So I said, look, this is out of scope. This is what it's going to take to resolve this problem. I don't think it's a good investment. right? And they were in agreement. So ultimately, I don't think it's wrong to question the client, especially if you take a professional tact. And if they still push ahead, you need to make sure that you're being compensated for your time. It's that simple.

Steve:

That’s fair, because you could be going down the wrong alleyway for a long time. And then oftentimes I find you do it to whatever that level of detail is. And then in the end, somebody else comes in and says, well, this is way too complicated. And then you end up chopping that out anyway, which is frustrating. But from your perspective, as long as you're compensated, it's still frustrating, but you know, it's you getting paid to do it. 

I find web design fascinating. There's so much that can be done with it. I saw that you had a YouTube series or a number of YouTube videos where you are critiquing other websites, which I think is really interesting. I'd recommend people go take a look at your website and see that.

 I would imagine there's a lot of people that are interested - maybe they're junior level marketers, or maybe they have a creative degree - and they're interested in getting into web design. Any advice on people starting out in web design, anything they should be looking at doing or getting into? 

Ian Loew:

Absolutely.  So the way I learned was asking people if I could build their websites. My first website was my father's website. It's still up. You want to check it out? It's at satessa.com. It's pretty awful. But it’s still working.

I say, learn under fire. Meaning, do a website for no money, but use that as an opportunity to learnSet the expectations upfront. “Hey, I'm just learning. I would love the opportunity to build your site”. And look, don't specialize, right? When you're starting off, have some fun. So do it for a band. Maybe you have a friend who's a musician, or maybe you have an artist and you want to build a simple portfolio website. And there's a lot of like I said, there's a lot of drag-and-drop editors and then if it sparks your interest If you really are like wow, I like creating websites. I love the confines. I also love the fact that there’s logic behind it. Then go online and use Udemy has some great courses NetTuts is a great website, smashingmagazine.com has a lot of great information there. I mean there's a plethora of free courses that you can take to learn actually how to code - what we call front-end coding and then also back-end. And there's high, high demand for front-end coding. And also back-end. I can't find good developers sometimes. 

And if you decide that maybe you don't like the production aspect of this. Agencies like us, we need project managers who have what we call a user experience background or front end development background. So my point being is give it a go. I only hire people that are self-motivated. We're such a small company. I really need everybody here to wear multiple hats. and learn on their own dime. I mean I do have a stipend for courses if you want to take one here but you have to do it after hours. So, you know get off of social media and start coding the website.

Steve:

it's funny. I was actually talking to somebody over lunch today about hiring practices. And I said, my basic one is that you hire people who get stuff done. Right? I mean, to me, that outweighs a lot of skill sets and experience. If you've got somebody with the right attitude, that's willing to learn and get stuck in. It's a big part of it. 

You talked a little bit there about front end versus back end design. Can you define the difference between the two?

Ian Loew:

Front end is what you're seeing via the browser. It's the visual coding. You’re telling the browser that the logo is going to be in the top left hand corner of the browser. You're telling the browser that, this is where the address should be displayed. So it's the visual aspect of web design. One of my first hires, JiSun, she was great, she could design in Photoshop or Illustrator. Now Adobe XD is a great product for doing prototyping but then she could also take that design and code it out to the front end, which if you can do both, if you can design well and also code front ends, you're in high, high demand.

And then, back end is PHP coding, MySQL. MySQL is the database. So simply put, it's writing the code to read from a database and then writing the code to save to the database. It's simple as I can put it, but essentially you're grabbing information from someplace. and then displaying that information on the browser.

Steve:

That’s a nice way to differentiate it. 

I want to loop back to what we talked about right at the beginning, about specialization. I noticed on your website, really nice website, by the way, which I guess you would hope for as a web design company. A lot of good information. But you talk a lot about the importance of being a New Jersey design firm and how you're battling between the New York and Philadelphia mindsets. And, so you have this focus on being a New Jersey company and then presumably working with New Jersey companies. And I'm curious, was that because you wanted to specialize? Is it just because you're from New Jersey and you're proud of it? What led youin that direction?

Ian Loew:

Both actually. I am very much Jersey proud. My parents grew up in Bergen County and I grew up in Essex County. So I am very proud of the state. Look, we have some celebrities. In fact, Stephen Colbert lives in my town. We’ve got John Bon Jovi, we’ve got Bruce Springsteen. So I'm very proud of that. And... Also, the fact is that Trenton and Patterson were both huge manufacturing hubs during the turn of the century. And we service a couple of clients who do assembly or manufacturing here in New Jersey. I have Cast Lighting, they're based in Hawthorne, New Jersey. I have Dauphin, which is a German based company, but they do assembly and some production work in Boonton, New Jersey. 

Steve:

I agree. I think there's a lot to be proud of.

 One question I like to ask people is, since we all have to keep up on all things marketing. It's always changing. You already mentioned a couple of resources for people getting into the industry, but where do you go either for inspiration or just to keep up on what's happening with, with the latest in websites?

Ian Loew:

There’s several blogs that I definitely turn to. In terms of design, I mentioned it earlier, Smashing Magazine has a lot of tutorials on web development and what's going on in tech in terms of the web design. In terms of design, pure design is a www.awwwards.com. I love going to Dribble. Dribble also is a showcase of designers and it's not manufacturing base. It's just a lot of interfaces, what are people doing with the latest and greatest designs. And then I also love just going to your standard blogs, like art blogs, like Colossal. I don't know if you're familiar with Colossal, if you're an artist, I love looking at Wired Magazine, their website. And then business-wise, I love going to Fast Company's website. I love reading about what entrepreneurs are doing in this day and age on a daily basis. That's if I have a lot of free time, I'll go to Fast Company and I'll just start reading art. It inspires me a lot.

Steve:

Wired I find interesting because that often comes up. So many people read Wired… on the last episode I interviewed Brian Cobb, he's an art director. He mentioned Wired. That's one of his go-to places. So that's great. I'll put some links in the show notes to some of those. 

Final big question. This is called the Marketing Mix and I think I described this to you when we were first talking as, “it's just like us having a cocktail and sitting down and. chatting about all things marketing”. So on that basis, what is your go-to drink?

Ian Loew:

I love a good Manhattan, love it. Like bourbon, maybe a gin and tonic now and then. And then people who know me well, I love tequila, like really good tequila on the rocks. So I just recently went to Mexico and I was in heaven.

Steve: 

I would say five years ago, people look at tequila and go “it's something you put in a margarita”, right? And now it's sort of like Scotch was a few years ago. Now people are trying the quality ones.

Ian Loew:

But I kid you not, my wife would tell you, like since the onset, so we've been together now since when we started dating 2010. So we've been together for 13 years now. From the onset, I was always a tequila guy. So, I was bucking the trend. I was before the trend started.

Steve:

That's what I claimed with scotch. I've been drinking scotch for years and suddenly it became trendy. So I agree with you on the Manhattans. That's one of my go-to’s as well. I think you're a man of good taste is what I'm going to say on that! 

So the last question. If people want to connect with you or see what you're up to, where's the best place for them to go?

Ian Loew:

LinkedIn. I'm very shy via social media, but LinkedIn lately I've been putting myself out there. I don't go on Twitter. I don't tweet. I've had a lot of tech people going, why aren't you on Twitter? Why aren't you tweeting? It just doesn't resonate with me.

Steve:

Well, I think the ship has sailed on Twitter, let's be honest. Two years ago I would have been one of those people saying, ”hey Ian, you've got to go on Twitter. Now. I'm not too sure, but...

Ian Loew:

I mean, look, Elon used to be my hero and now I don't know anymore. If he interviewed me, I'd be honored or if I had the chance to interview him.

Steve:

He's definitely gone off the rails, unfortunately. But that’s a whole other podcast, or maybe that's a discussion for us to have over a Manhattan at some point.

Ian Loew:

Absolutely. Cheers to that.

Steve:

The other thing I'll tell people, your website is lform.com, right? That would be the other place for people to go to. So thank you, Ian. I appreciate the conversation. 

Ian Loew:

It was a pleasure.