Hybrid websites: communicating services and products
A hybrid website – one that offers both services and products – can be challenging to get right. After all, a website that is purely about products is very different from a purely services-focused website.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, either, as the relationship between products and services differs from business to business. For example, there is a clear distinction in a software company between the apps it sells and its support or enterprise customisation offering. For a financial advisory firm, on the other hand, the products it sells are the service it provides.
While there isn’t a catch-all solution, there are some general principles that you should follow when developing a hybrid services and products website.
Design consistency
Having consistent branding and messaging is an important part of marketing that applies to hybrid websites just as much as any other website. Therefore, the design and branding on your website should be consistent, whether a visitor is viewing a product-related page or a services-related page.
Home page
The Home page of your hybrid website can be the trickiest part to get right. If products are the most important part of your business, how do you make sure customers understand that you also offer services? The same applies in the opposite situation.
If products and services have close to equal importance in your business, how do you present both offerings on your Home page?
While the answers to the above questions will depend on your business, these are good starting points to think about:
What is your value proposition – i.e., what sets you apart from your competition?
What is the thing that most customers are looking for when they land on your Home page? Is it a product or a service?
The above will help you decide where to place the most emphasis.
A Home page is an opportunity to provide the overarching story for your brand, so while you might start with the services you offer, the product story can soon follow, so readers gain a full understanding of your offerings once they scan the page.
Also, remember that purchasing a product and a service at the same time can often be more complicated than purchasing either on its own. If this applies to your business, you need to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to contact you for help with the process. Of course, your contact details should be on your Home page anyway (as well as all other pages on your site), but it is worth paying special attention to the contact elements of your Home page in this specific situation.
Navigation
How you set up the navigation on your hybrid website will be crucial to the customer experience. Let’s start with your main menu.
In most cases, it is best to have separate sections on your menu for products and services. So, in the simplest (and often best) approach, you will have a Products menu item and a Services menu item. These can bring the visitor to a relevant page, or they can display a dropdown with additional options.
Internal linking is also an important navigational feature in hybrid websites, particularly when the services and products you sell are connected. So, make sure you have a good internal linking strategy, so customers know exactly what you offer.
After all, if you don’t tell a customer that you offer installation services when they are purchasing a product on your website, they might not know that service is available, and you could have lost a sale.
Finally on this point, a hybrid website can often have more pages and be more navigationally complex than other types of website. As a result, adding breadcrumb navigation to your pages can help improve the user experience.
Calls to action – get a quote and buy now buttons
Calls to action are important on all websites, but you should take extra care on a hybrid website. The first point is to make sure that you have calls to action, particularly on your Home, Products and Services pages.
The text you use on your calls to action is important, too, as it should be relevant to the page. ‘Order a sample’ or ‘Book a demonstration’ always works well for products. ‘Get a quote’ or ‘Make an enquiry’ are effective options for services.
FREE CHECKLIST
Answer your customer’s questions at the right stage on the buyer journey with our content map.
Product pages
The Product pages on your hybrid website should be similar to those on a purely products website, i.e., they should have great images, a clear description, SEO keywords, a call to action, details of product variations, etc.
One addition is worth mentioning again: if the services you offer relate to the product, make sure you include information on the service that is available too.
Services pages
Similar to Product pages, the Services pages on your website should follow the same best practices as the Services pages on a purely services website.
One area to focus on specifically is social proof. With products, reviews and ratings are commonly used by customers when making a buying decision. With services, however, social proof is often more important. So, including customer testimonials on the services pages of your website can give them a boost.
Appealing to your different audiences
When creating the content for the above pages, and other pages on your website, make sure you appeal directly to your audience, keeping in mind that the audience might differ depending on whether they are interested in one of your products or your services.
We can use an IT consultancy business as an example. The audience for the product pages will be interested in practical things like networking hardware, cloud solutions, or intranet apps. A customer looking for cloud readiness assessment services or digital transformation route mapping, however, has a very different motivation, i.e., they need expertise, not products.
As you can see from the above, both are different messages, so both need a different approach.
Maximising the performance of your hybrid products and services website
As with most websites, thinking about the customer perspective and the customer journey is a good approach to take in the planning stages. With a hybrid website, doing this will help you get the messaging, emphasis, navigation, calls to action, and other important elements right.