Four Jobs of a B2B Website
Balance acquisition, brand, support, and recruitment on one core website
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 94%
A B2B website must perform four foundational jobs: generate traffic and leads, build the brand and position the product, support customers, and attract talent. The framework turns those jobs into an audit scorecard rather than allowing the preferences of one executive or department to dominate. Teams inspect whether each audience can understand the company, complete its intended task, and move into the broader customer or employee journey. Copy is evaluated in the language customers actually use, while campaign-specific content remains connected to the core domain so authority, links, and navigation are not fragmented. The output is a prioritized website plan that balances acquisition, communication, service, and recruitment.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain during a discussion of the foundational reasons B2B companies create websites.
Core principles
- 01Treat the website as shared infrastructure for multiple business goals
- 02Balance competing stakeholder interests instead of optimizing for one department
- 03Use customer language rather than internal jargon
- 04Keep focused campaigns connected to the core domain
How to run it
- 1
Map acquisition paths
Identify how visitors arrive, what information they seek, and how traffic becomes qualified demand or leads.
Pro tip Review search, content, thought-leadership, and conversion paths together.
Watch out Do not treat raw traffic as the final outcome.
- 2
Audit positioning and brand
Check whether visitors can quickly understand the company, product, differentiation, and intended customer.
Pro tip Test the copy with language taken directly from customer conversations.
Watch out Internal terminology can make an accurate page incomprehensible to buyers.
- 3
Evaluate customer support
Confirm that customers can find answers through documentation, knowledge bases, chat, or guided assistance.
Pro tip Prioritize the recurring questions that create the most support friction.
Watch out Do not restrict the site to pre-purchase information.
- 4
Assess recruitment
Review whether prospective employees can understand the mission, culture, roles, and reasons to join.
Pro tip Give recruitment content a clear path without letting it obscure buyer journeys.
Watch out Generic culture claims provide little decision value.
- 5
Balance and consolidate
Resolve conflicts among the four jobs and keep focused pages within the core website whenever practical.
Pro tip Redirect retired campaign pages into relevant core pages to preserve accumulated links.
Watch out Optimizing exclusively for one executive's priorities creates an unbalanced website.
In the wild
A SaaS company finds that its website contains detailed feature pages but weak positioning, no accessible knowledge base, and an almost invisible careers section. The team scores the site against all four jobs, rewrites the homepage in customer language, adds guided support resources, and creates clearer recruitment paths while preserving strong product detail.
→ The website supports buyers, customers, and candidates without sacrificing product depth.
Common mistakes
Letting one executive dominate
A product-led, brand-led, or sales-led executive can cause the entire site to reflect one function while neglecting the other jobs.
Writing in company jargon
Employees understand internal terminology, but customers may not recognize their own problems in it.
Fragmenting authority across microsites
Separate campaign domains add friction and distribute links, traffic, and brand context away from the core website.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for B2B teams planning a website redesign or diagnosing an unbalanced existing site.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal for temporary personal pages or single-purpose transactional applications.
From the transcript
“there's traffic and Lead gen right”
“then there is really like brand building and product positioning”
“customer support really that's a big way that we offer customer support through knowledge base through chat through these different things and then recruitment”
From the episode
Do You Even NEED A Website?