why it is important for B2B business to have a blog? Or why it is important for B2B business to have rich contents online specific and relevant to their business offerings?
B2B business model is often selling enterprise level products to other business or providing services to another business, when the business will search for the product or service is when they have need for it, either direct need or indirect need, and in the case of direct needs, the business will look for the product or service that will solve the problem for them, in that case they will search for the companies that provide that solution, they select the companies( or product) based on the budget, how exactly the solution fits in for the solution they are looking for, and of course the brand or how trust worthy the company is to buy the solution from them, to get the answers for all these questions they have two options
- Directly approach the companies
- Do some research online.
If they are directly approached, its well and good, companies will have their marketing and support team in place to convince and add them to their invoice, but if the company choose the other way around to do the research online, they probably need to fed with proper information already, it is companies responsibility to be present where customer(company) going to do get their research details from, first place customer going to begin their search is from “www.google.com” or other search engines like bing and yahoo, their search could be anything like these:
- How do i solve problem xyz
- Who are best in providing solutions for xyz
- Reviews on abc products
- How to use abc product
As a company we need to provide contents for these topics, and ensure our information tops the list of search engine result page, and catches potential customers eye, not necessarily these contents should be provided from our blog alone, that is one mandatory step we need to make, also we need to ensure we have presence in all key areas like industry specific blogs, forums, websites etc literally wherever our potential customer goes fishing for information, we may have to write contents from third party point of view and refer to our primary website.
thats pretty much explaining why we should have blog and content presence, what if we dont do that?
Well, unless we do extensive advertising or we have super strong market presence, we are bound to get buried over the pile of information without getting noticed by the world, and if we are going to take word of mouth approach, you know how fast we are going to snail from customer to customer. When customers search for the solution exactly your product/service will solve, customer going to find the information provided by some other company merely matching their requirement, probably going to get in discussions for next stage.
we know why we need a strong content presence for the B2B company and what effect it will have when we dont, now let us see what needs to be done:
- Have a corporate blog that talks about your product, not say ‘we have product xyz, wanna buy?’ sort of contents, but explaining each and every features and how it is going to solve real world problems, who could be best to write those content than your engineer, support and marketing personnels?
- Have social media presence, not just just top three facebook, twitter and google+, but also those least popular sites even with the slightest chance of your potential customer might use it.
- Talk customers language, replicate other customers language, this cannot happen in your own blog but in relevant forums, sites etc
- Measure and channelize the flow, so your customer came to know about product/service, have proper ‘call to action’ in place.
Like always, open to learn and correct myself, let me know if you have any comments through comment section below: