B2B vendors understand this intuitively as buyers, but struggle with it as sellers of their own products and services. We know how to target search but not the search process.

As the buyer, I want to start my purchase decision with a shortlist of potential solutions. I want to know if your solution meets my initial criteria before I read your white papers, case studies, and brochures.

As the seller, I only provide information about my own products and services. I’ve cleverly hidden pricing and more extensive information behind some kind of access, because if you want to know more, you must be a lead. Admit to being a lead, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.

As the buyer, I need to make an informed purchase decision. If I can’t find features, pricing, and comparative information at your site, then I’ll find it somewhere else.

As the seller, of course I know all about my competitors, but I can’t help your decision process by telling you about them.

…and that’s how vendors put the early stages of the purchase cycle in the hands of “unbiased” 3rd party sites.

The problem with this system is that we miss the chance to influence potential customers early in the purchase cycle. We nurture leads when they get to us but don’t know how many never arrived. We can’t control what happens on other sites.

We can, however, do more to accommodate an informed decision making process. As vendors, we can’t create the impartial site that we would want as buyers, but we can enhance what we have with more of what decision makers need:

• Recognize that your competitors are part of the decision making process. If you can’t put product comparisons on your own site, put them somewhere else for your customers to find.
• Add content that approaches your product from the buyer’s perspective to your mix of marketing collateral.
• Use your blog to encourage conversations and to answer questions that you would ask if you were the buyer.
• Exert some control over where customers get their information by suggesting top industry blogs and reference sites.
• Offer better pricing to customers who agree to write-ups, or penalty fees for customers who refuse.

תחשבו בכיוון של רחוב הנעלים או מכונית גרמנית

ביחד אפשר להיות יעד, להכריז על “בראנד”

רעיון גדול אבל

you gotta have faith.

הרחבה באנגלית

mika AT dunav.org.il.

“But we’re targeting decision makers!” is why vendors strive for content that sings.

A recent TechTarget survey notes that there are many roles involved in the purchase process.  It’s unlikely that the final decision maker is the same person who identifies the need or creates the shortlist of options.

However, if this were obvious, vendors would  be dressing down their content instead of dressing it up.

If you can pick only one, which voice should you use?

If it were my startup and I had to pick one, I would not chose high level decision voice, not even if I were selling to Fortune 500 companies.

More clues that vendors are getting it wrong

The report indicates that vendors aren’t keeping up with demand for the rising interest in video content. The demand is there because it’s so much easier to spend 10 minutes watching a video than to spend 30 with a white paper. It’s more prevelant in IT because vendors keep on churning out documents that most IT professionals don’t have patience to read.

Think about what kind of document you would want on your desk to help you make a purchase decision.  That’s what you should be writing.

Overall adoption to RSS is growing but still low, 11% last time I checked.  But adoption by IT professionals to some version of subscribed content is nearly 60%.  Some bypass it entirely, relying on bookmarks and twitter. With or without RSS, they prefer getting news and recommendations from blogs

Email is still the way to go for B2C, but that IT does not want technology industry content in their inboxes.
For reasons described below, I believe this trend extends to business.

The shortish explanation:
The richer the content, the less likely a recipient will be to engage with your company in real time.  Newsletters are like magazines and are treated the same way. Bills, business and personal emails will always have priority. Newsletters will be put aside for Later, which could also be never.

A B2C email  exists for the click-thru.  There’s a sale this week. Buy now.

B2B email is actually after the click and not the click thru.  B2B marketers equate the click with interest.  The problem with email is that it’s a monologue.  A recipient who doesn’t click thru from a newsletter may actually be a much hotter lead in a different part of the purchase cycle than what you targeted in your newsletter.

The third reason is that vendors just get content wrong, to be covered in a separate post.

Lead nurturing and content marketing are not going to disappear. They’re going to reinvent themselves into a more effective version.

Sometimes it will mean creating keyword rich content, but not always.

Recent A | B testing shows better results for a scientifically engineered SEO page over a best practices SEO optimized page. But at the end of the day, that content isn’t there just to pull people to your site. It has to engage them and lead them in the conversion process.

Looking at all the parameters together, the rewards are greater when you make decisions based first on what’s good for your business and only second on what’s good for SEO.

Writing content that your visitors will read is your best chance for invoking response but it’s also the content that will bring you the highest search engine rankings.

Even the most talented SEO people can only do so much without great content. You should be generating content and SEO should be integrated into everything that you write,  but customers come first.

Some companies do it backwards: they create widgets for better search engine results.  But your rewards will be greater if you create your widgets because that’s what’s best for business.

PR was always important to technology companies, but at least where I worked, it wasn’t more important than search,  content marketing, and lead nurturing. We did create press releases, but they were for SEO and visibility.  Apologies to all my former employers. I thought that follow up was nice to have but hard to do.

Today it is most important and should be at the top of your list.  Not the old PR, but the new Extended PR. A well executed influencer campaign can can do everything from enhance your search rankings to sway purchase decisions in your favor. PR is vital to your success.

Press releases, not so much.

A carefully worded press release that almost no one will read undergoes many rounds of revisions before being signed off.  A chance conversation online could go viral…

Be careful about who you pick to be out there representing your company. Don’t give in to the temptation to bring in someone off the street to do “this new social marketing stuff”.  Knowing how to find opportunities is not the same as knowing how to use them.

Social marketing may one day work like a call center, with warm bodies working from set scripts of what to write, and when. Until that happens, invest in someone who is able to make the most of the opportunities.

Keyword rich content generation is a great strategy but it’s not the only strategy, and it may not be the best strategy for your startup.

Creating this content is expensive and time consuming. Results are often disappointing.  The disappointment stems from the amount of guessing that falls on the writer. The only way to avoid this is to give writers enough information so that they can stop guessing at all the missing pieces. You may think that you are already doing exactly that, but if you’re not happy with the results, then you’re still not sharing enough knowledge with the writer.

What you don’t give more upfront comes back to you in rewriting and revisions. Either way, it’s a burden.

Blogging is a best practice for startups
Blogging can help close the knowledge gap. Your blog can “gow up” to be your marketing content.

Approached this way, content generation can be an outcome of  your existing activities and not the frustrating stand-alone process described above.