Does Your Content Hit Your Prospect Where (S)he Lives?
April 10th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless
Websites are by nature evolving beasts. Initially, it may be a struggle just to get enough solid content to fully describe your B2B’s offerings in a way that captivates your prospects (and gets sufficient attention from the search engines). Then you need to win the battle to keep it all fresh. Once that’s under control, you probably want to crank it up a notch. So you ensure that much of your content is truly educational, and that your site is helping to establish your firm – and its stars – as thought leaders. And you make sure that your site supports each stage of your prospects’ buying cycle.
OK, then what?
Well, the good folks at KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa would probably say: provide content specific to each major industry and job function represented in your (target) prospect/visitor base. In fact they did, in their landmark Connecting through Content joint study of nearly 4,000 technology marketers and buyers.
The study revealed that nearly 82% of buyers preferred content that is targeted to their particular industry. Also, two-thirds of buyers said they found information appropriate to their job function to be more valuable than generic content.
These results are interesting, but also reasonably intuitive. If you were a systems analyst with a global bank, you probably would find it more helpful to read an in-depth paper on how product X handles electronic funds transfer than try to extrapolate from a brochure-level piece on product X in discrete manufacturing.
Getting started (it’s really not all that hard)…
Most sites start their industry tailoring with an “Industries” (or “Markets”) tab in their main navigation. It’s not necessary to take on the entire SIC Code scheme; just do a page for each industry that pops out when you look at your customer base, and then add new ones as they become important to your business. For each selected industry, you’ll want a welcome page (mostly demonstrating that you can speak their language) along with a relevant customer list and, preferably, a family of case studies. You might also provide pointers to the subset of your press releases relevant to each industry, so no one has to comb through pages of release titles looking for something germane. If your product is actually different (or customizable) by industry, clearly you’ll need to develop substantially more content to capitalize on that advantage.
On the job-function side… if you’ve done both top-level, benefits-oriented web pages and in-depth technical descriptions for your product/service, you’re already a good ways along on this. Over time, you’ll want to split that top-level page into one for each function impacted by your solution (IT, manufacturing, sales …whatever). And don’t forget about your site’s financial content: at some point in the buying cycle, some green-eyeshade type will vet your company from a financial perspective. So even though it’s probably not be your direct responsibility, you need to ensure that the content demonstrating your firm’s fiscal stability is easily found and always up to date.
Too much work for your overloaded staff? …well, that’s one big reason there’s outsourcing. A full-spectrum Web marketing consultancy (like eMagine) can help you structure and professionally develop the content your site most needs.
Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Converting, Engaging Visitors
