B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Does Your Website Provide Content for All Stages of the Buying Cycle?

February 20th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

If it doesn’t, you’re in lots of company …but not necessarily good company. According to KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa’s landmark Connecting through Content joint study of over 4,000 technology marketers and buyers, 61% of technology buyers say that they look for different content types, depending on where they are in a research-to-purchase cycle. Yet 62% of technology marketers say that they do not provide such stage-differentiated content! …although a bit less than half of those say they do plan to.

At a macro level, this is a rather astonishing disconnect. At the level of your company, however, it may represent a fairly easy way to stand out from your competitors.

What to do?
It’s really not all that difficult to give your prospects what they really want. For each of your significant products or services, you can… use your website to deliver:

• a webinar featuring an industry luminary and/or company exec illustrating the industry problem and your solution, in hopefully gripping fashion
• a white paper covering mostly the same ground, but in more depth and ideally with pointers to corroborating industry research, well organized and designed for self-study
• case studies showing how your solution helped other companies in your prospect’s industry
• a brochure / sell sheet: no magic here, just a .pdf of your print collateral (extra credit if it spills more ink on benefits than on features)
• a tech doc that elaborates on how your product does what it does; your prospect’s IT folk will use it to evaluate things like probable support/training requirements and how easily your widget will fit in with the rest of the company’s infrastructure

And once you know your prospect’s industry and specific product/service interest, it’s not much of a trick to send him/her a fairly tailored sequence of emails, too. It’s really the next best thing to a real sales call; but so far, you haven’t burned any sales time. (And if your website is properly integrated with your CRM – as we’ve evangelized in the past, as for example in our blog post Is Your B2B Doing Closed-loop Web Marketing? – you’ll know exactly when to unleash the sales troops.)

Frequency counts, too
With 3 or more from the above list – plus maybe a podcast, RSS feed or blog – you’ll be hitting at least the minimum of what your prospects want. And you’ll also be mapping into another buyer behavior uncovered in that same KnowledgeStorm/MarketingSherpa survey: 85% said they needed to see 3 or more pieces of content to achieve “significant understanding” of an unfamiliar technology or solution.

Clearly, it’s worth doing whatever it takes to give your prospects what they need in order to buy from you; so hire a writer or outsource if necessary …but just do it.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Engaging Visitors