Revamp Your B2B Website Content

Your content will be most effective if it's designed to strengthen engagement that drives interactions and results in the trust that helps your company meet business objectives. In short, the way you leverage content should be based on a strategy for market acquisition and customer loyalty extension.

To create a context that engages, consider the following questions:

• What's the most important thing you want site visitors to “get” when they arrive? Will they get that same impression no matter which page they arrive to?


• What's the feeling you want them to leave with? Does each web page reinforce that feeling and give them reasons to return?


• What do you want them to think about your company? In other words, how will you build credibility with a buyer meeting your company for the first time?


• Who are you expecting to visit your company’s website or marketing microsite?
  • How are you delivering meaning and value to each constituency?
  • Will each “persona” find clear, relevant value?
  • What about current customers?
  • What about past customers?


• How does your content pull them farther inside your company’s story?


• What's the objective of the navigational paths you're creating? Will they make sense given your buyer’s thought processes? Or do they only work from your perspective?


• What's your plan to increase relevancy over time? Do you have a content editorial plan that ensures your website evolves over time that synthesizes your older content with your new content—or plans for the retirement or updating of older content?


• What will be the metrics of success for your website? Are you using old metrics based on raw traffic numbers, or new metrics focused on engagement and scoring?


• Have you addressed your website visitor's emotional quotient? Logic is the first thing you think of with business buyers, but they’re people too. The equivalent of business emotion is trust. How are you building trust?


• What will make them want to come back? Have you invited them to participate, to opt in, to give permission for ongoing directed communications?


• If a lead receives a marketing communication, will it be in tune with your other website content if they decide to click through?


• Is the website useful to salespeople? Do you know which content salespeople use and refer to? Have you invited their feedback? If you have, are you using it?


• What methods and processes do you have in place to invite interaction? Can they ask a question without fear of sales activities? Are you presenting events along with related content, or are events kept in a silo somewhere your website visitors have to search out?


• Is your content designed to be conversational? (will it facilitate dialogue?)
  • With who?
  • How will you engage and forward the dialogue?

These are a lot of questions, but they are designed to encourage you to think from the buyer’s perspective. Website content is most effective when it not only strengthens the level of engagement but also pulls your buyers forward in their buying process and invites them to feel comfortable enough with the subject matter to facilitate a conversation.

****

B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee helps companies significantly increase their marketing momentum by generating more and better leads for their sales organizations. She helps them capture the attention of web site visitors, and strengthen engagement with high value content till they are "sales ready." Visit the Marketing Interactions website: www.marketinginteractions.com.