B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine

Is your website selling when it should be solving?

June 8th, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Here’s something I’ve noticed while helping improve search-engine marketing for so many clients, I’ve lost count:  too often these days websites are busy selling, when most of today’s buyers need problem-solving.

Many – perhaps most – of your website visitors require a problem of theirs to be solved …especially those already sold on the idea of buying your type of product or service.  That’s the main reason they’ve come to your website.  If all your site does is trumpet the generic virtues of your product, it won’t do much to distinguish your company from others, and you risk letting those visitors leave, in effect, empty-handed.

Start here:  What are your buyers’ problems?
Of course, you already know the half-dozen or so typical problems your buyers need to solve …problems which your product/service was built to solve.  Problems such as…

• Are you experiencing less than 99.9% uptime?
• Are you clueless about how many copies of Excel (or whatever) your firm has? …never mind where they are and when their licenses come up for renewal?
• Are you pretty certain you’re using about 8 times the disk storage and 5 times the servers you actually need?
• Are you unable to get your widgets out to your distributors expeditiously?
• Is your internal development team not able to innovate quickly enough?
• Are you losing control of your geo-dispersed development effort?

Your website should identify with your visitor by letting them find problem statements such as these;  and then lead them through a peel-the-onion content series that clearly shows how your product/service solves that problem.  Such a series might start with a single summary page, backed up by (i.e., linking to)…

• a webinar (“A look inside a typical datacenter, pre/post virtualization”)
• a white paper (“The relationship between virtualization and IT spending:  survey & rationale”)
• a case study (“How VirtualStuff helped Global Interbank cut its infrastructure costs by 35%”)

…and of course including several calls to action that lead them to a landing page and offer where you can capture their marketing information.

What not to do
What you don’t want to do is sell to your visitors;  i.e., simply extol the virtues of your company and/or product without regard to how it can solve the visitors’ problems:

• Buy from us because we’ve been in the business longer
• Choose us because we care
• We’re the best because we’ve won prestigious awards

Your customers see through this sort of thing in a New York minute;  and worse, it doesn’t give them what they came for.

Make more sales by solving your visitors’ problems, rather than boasting about things that really don’t matter to them.  Your Web marketing consultants can no doubt give you some help implementing this approach.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy