Why should B2B companies invest in creating great web content? Creating great content needs an investment in time, money and long term commitment. As an organization, you have other options for investing – you could increase your digital marketing spend, or add more people to the sales team. Compared to these other options, why should you choose content? Here are our reasons not to ignore web content, and to make sure it gets a fair share of the marketing budget.
- Great content builds your organization’s brand.
When the content is written and presented in a manner suiting your company’s positioning and audience, it helps to build your brand. This is the first step towards gaining the trust of your website visitors. - Inadequate information drives away customers.
Adequate information on company and product is a must. Websites that take the trouble to do this and explain their products with words, pictures or videos, and answer important questions about the product or service, that offer comparisons – have an edge over others according to Nielsen Norman Group research. Poor content may lead to visitors exiting the site and writing off the company. - Engaging customers with great content is more likely to get you leads.
Visitors/ prospects come to your website looking for information. Before a buying decision, 90% of B2B buyers visit about 12 websites as part of the evaluation. Refer Google Buyer Research Most B2B buyers or influencers spend only 2 to 3 minutes reading your website so it’s important to present your company and products very well and very quickly. If the content is not engaging, they will leave and go to your competitor’s website. - Search engine rankings are higher with better content:
Original, fresh and contextual content gets your organization a higher search engine ranking depending on the quantity and quality of fresh/ original content. When we talk of quality of content we mean content that is relevant to your business, content that is relevant to search terms. And if you have enough of this relevant content on your website and on social media sites – it will drive more traffic to your website and more business. - Good content can be used to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
If you have interesting content on your website, visitors would be tempted to look at it. Content like white papers, videos, research reports or webinars that are useful and relevant to your audience can be used to draw them in. This is a first level qualification that can be followed up by the Sales team; the content piece downloaded will point at the prospect’s area of interest. - Build on your design and digital marketing spend.
Investment in design, development, technology alone is not enough to get you the conversions you want. Similarly, digital marketing may drive traffic to your website, but if your visitors don’t find relevant and convincing content, you would have wasted your marketing budget. Having invested so much, it makes sense to allocate a budget for content development as well.
Do you think of content as your company’s asset that you are building over time? We feel content is an asset because it informs, educates and entertains over time. It helps build trust, loyalty and relationships with people.