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Welcome back everyone to the second part of our top 15 lists of the most consumed web material in the B2B tech-buying sphere! If you haven’t had the time to take a look at our first part I recommend you to do so!
As a quick reminder, we will be covering what material B2B tech-buyers are looking for and where you should focus your efforts. Keep in mind that with the ever-increasing pressure from competition, budget allocation for your web efforts will become more and more important.
Without further ado, lets enter our top 6, starting from #6 and finishing with the big #1!
Customers magazines / publications
Customer’s magazines are a great way to present your product offering throughout your clients lists and also offers you great potential to cross-sell and up sell products to your clients. While requiring a fair amount of efforts, those publications often are published on annual or semi-annual basis and have the advantage to have a fairly long life cycle.
On top of that, this type of publications grades #6 in our ranking with a solid 31% of the respondent having consumed customers magazines in the 6 months prior to the study of marketingcharts.com.
Video and other multimedia files
If pictures are worth a thousand words well than videos are worth a million! With the arrival of YouTube and the like, we saw a major increase in the production and consumption of videos. According to the study of Marketingchart.com, the B2B sector is also adopting this trend. With 35% of the respondent consuming video materials, this passes the mark of 1 out of 3 B2B web tech buyers. As for videos, tutorial and products videos are great evergreen content that tend to draw a considerable amount of traffic and that year round.
Detailed technology guides and implementation scenarios
Just like in B2C, B2B tech buyers want to be told not only what your product can do for them but also how your product operates and what is required to have it functioning. Customers are more and more informed and they want to know as much as possible before committing to purchase. That is especially true in B2B where the implication are larger financially but often also have a considerable impact on the business strategy.
On a different perspective, this type of very technical pieces of content use long tail keywords that tend to draw potential B2B tech-buyers who are further in the buying process. They already know about the type of technology they want and those detailed guides and scenarios tend to convert better. They somewhat act has deal closing, research wise, for your business.
Top 3
Case studies and success stories
Case studies offer direct insight into how your solution helped other companies. What is great about case studies is that it gives B2B tech-buyers something they can relate to. If you helped a company in a similar industry with similar problems and managed to solve their problems, you are a prime candidate for that potential lead.
Case studies and success stories act as seals of quality. It allows them to see what was the problem, what needed to be done, how you did it and finally they see the positive outcome your intervention had generated.
With 36% of the studied sample having consult case studies and/or success stories, it makes total sense to look into your portfolio to find the best intervention you made with clients and to start thinking about creating your own case study!
Product brochures and data sheets
The reason why people are searching online is for the amount of information they can get. Too often we see product available for sales with no description or with very little information. Don’t make that mistake. According to the study, 46% of the respondent had consumed product brochures and data sheets. Brochures are not only paper products. PDF format files and other digital format have proven to be performing well. Also, when available for downloads, those files give you an additional opportunity to track your web performance.
White papers
Is our big number 1!
No surprise to see white papers as the head of our top 15! Governments and B2B marketers mainly use them to report particular issues and provide in-depth coverage and answers. They are authoritative document aiming to be available to anyone with opinions on the exposed subject. They are the type of content requiring the most efforts but also are the one bringing the most benefit in return.
Such a document can take months up to years to produce. However, they generally become evergreen content. B2B tech-buyers will refer to these documents to take their decision and will continue to refer to it in the future.
They might even refer your document to colleague or partners. Because of their long life cycle, those articles does manage to generate traffic.
Conclusion
Always keep in mind that the true answer to success never is only one solution but rather a combination of many that together strengthen your web presence. Just like Helen Keller once said, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”.
I hope that this series of article managed to present you news ways to produce content that cater to your audience. The results can vary depending of your industry. I recommend using a combination of both your historical data, and the data presented in the article to plan for your content creation strategy. Remember, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail!
