Rocket Readings: Optimizing a company website for B2B interactions

Optimizing a company website for B2B interactions:

Many social media and search engine optimization techniques are designed exclusively to cater to individual consumers. In many ways, this sort of interaction is much easier to maintain – people's keyword focuses, memory and needs are often much more limited than those of their organizational counterparts. Consequently, modified strategies are necessary to elicit the right reactions from companies and businesses.

While the amount of work and detail that must go into B2B websites is a bit more than for those aimed at singular customers, the profits and rewards that business-oriented campaigns can reap are significantly larger. Here are some tips for cutting through the traditional milieu of the internet and getting to the heart of client organizations.

What a B2B Website Should Provide

Providing value There are literally millions of websites in the online world that are designed for individual people's entertainment and enjoyment. Blogs, social networking, media news and other kinds of original content appeal to people for consumption during their leisure time and are only meant to draw individuals toward them. These web presences have no value whatsoever to businesses.

This creates a situation for companies in which their internet pickings are either feast or famine. The majority of internet provides them with no value, while a very limited number of platforms are available to provide information, news and data about their particular industries. It is imperative that B2B websites accomplish this. Be it through specialized news stories, white papers that outline new trends or research in a particular industry or even simply by writing with the style and catchphrases that a certain market understands, websites meant to increase B2B transactions must provide this sort of value.

Oriented toward data Many consumer-oriented websites are able to create marketing campaigns that focus on arguments beyond the value that particular products provide. After all – cars and technology, which nearly all serve utilitarian functions, are often discussed as if they are lifestyle choices and have emotional consequences.

No organization worth doing business with could ever be swayed by such offerings. Instead, businesses are consumed with calculations of returns on investments and profit margins. Consequently, to appeal to these groups, one must limit almost all discussions to the tangible benefits of a certain product or service. To do otherwise would be to insult the intelligence of one's target clients.

Facilitate contact When an individual customer offers contact information to a website, it is expected that such data will direct companies back toward them. That is to say – unlike an entire organization, a company will only ever speak to one person. Conversely, businesses often have multiple buying agents or supply professionals, all of whom could be on the other end of an email or phone conversation.

B2B websites should facilitate the collection of useful contact information. Include fields in forms that allow people to input their positions, departments or even responsibilities so that companies can understand who they may be speaking to and the extent to which their authority allows them to interact on behalf of their employers.

Widen the keyword spread Consumers looking for certain products often know exactly what they should search for. Tablet PCs, laptop computers, vinyl siding, health insurance and discount mattresses often don't go by many other names. This narrows the range in which the most valuable keywords could be found.

Businesses, on the other hand, often troll the internet in search of keywords with quite a lot of variation. One organization might refer to a product as "enterprise resource planning software," while another might know it better as "business materials management systems." This requires that a company completely research all the possible terms that their target clients might use and initiate search engine optimization campaigns accordingly.