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Archives for 2007

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Business to Business (B2B) vs. Business to Consumer (B2C) Audience

Business to Business (B2B) websites audiences are much different than Business to Consumer (B2C) websites audiences. But recognizing how they are different is key to understanding how to make your B2B website work for you.

B2B website visitors (or audience) are looking for information, services, or products related to their business or profession. They sometimes are looking for news or latest happenings in their industry and sometimes for specific information related to a product, service, or how-to. Most of the time, they are on the website from their workplace during work hours and they are often business decision makers (BDMs). Depending on the specific industry, the number of people in the overall audience is usually very small compared to the overall Internet audience.

B2C website visitors are usually looking for general news and information on products and services for their personal use. They visit websites for entertainment and socialization. Some of these visits are during off-work hours from home, but some are also during work (at work) while avoiding work (or during breaks). B2C visitors are often browsing from one site to another. When they are searching for something specific they usually start with a large search engine such as Google (#1) or Yahoo! (#2).

Because the audiences are so different in not only their makeup, but also their purposes in visiting, websites in these two markets must be designed differently to meet the specific audience needs. We’ll examine more on how to do this in future articles (it’s an indepth topic!) and how to handle Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Advertising, Analytics, Content, Hosting, eCommerce, and Design (and others) for your B2B website.

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Measuring B2B Advertising Success

Advertising only works if you can reach your target audience (obviously). How do you reach that audience on the web? More importantly, how do you do that without spending a lot of money on an advertising firm?

The easiest way to advertise is through a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! They both offer services that allow you to create ads and target the ads to certain keywords or phrases that you believe your audience is searching for. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

How do you know the ad is working? Both services provide feedback as to how many times your ad was shown and how many times it was clicked on and for what keywords. You can constantly tweak your ad to try to get the best views and click-throughs and can stop at any time.

Well that’s great, I have clicks, but how do I know people are buying my products or services? This part is really up to you – a landing page specific to the ad and its message is the easiest way to really tell what’s going on. How do you do that?

For example, say you are a commercial truck outlet and have an ad for an old model truck you want to clear out of your inventory. If people visit your homepage, they see a lot of information other than the blue truck (contact info, about your company, all of your products, etc.). You could put information about the blue truck on your homepage, but how do you know visitors came from the ad or are looking at the truck information? Putting information about an item you’re promoting on the homepage is a good idea for getting more sales, but it doesn’t tell you how well your ad is working.

Take the information about the blue truck, including a form to get more information or a link right into your ecommerce checkout, and place them on a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site except from the ad. All the traffic on the page should be coming from the ad and a form or checkout process will allow those visitors to take action to contact you or purchase the truck.

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Welcome!

Welcome to Sazbean – Internet consulting for Business to Business (B2B). With a background in computer and software engineering, a MBA in eBusiness, over ten years of experience on the web (programming, design, hosting, software, etc.), and over 3 years of experience specifically in the Business to Business world, I am passionate about helping businesses use the web effectively.

Sazbean was created as the expression of this passion.

I started off out of college as a programmer working on back-end server-side scripting written for large database-driven eCommerce sites such as 1-800-Flowers and Eddie Bauer. Coding in this environment is cold. Customers have already been consulted. The design and functionality have already been created. There is nothing left but the drudgery of conjuring someone else’s vision.

Soon I started my own company, Dynalink, LLC, to be part of the entire design process; to help customers understand the web and how to best utilize it. I focused on small companies and had some luck in creating and hosting corporate sites and several custom eCommerce sites. But small companies have small budgets, and the sites were mostly informational brochures. Since the web was relatively young, everyone thought their nephew could do their corporate site, so value and return on investment was hard to establish.

Running my own company was fulfilling, but I wanted experience on enterprise-level web technologies. I found a job as an Internet manager for a B2B publishing company, responsible for over 75 websites and all technologies associated with their web presence: hosting, hardware, software, design, programming, analytics, advertising, rich media, customer needs, project management, website optimization, etc. From this position, I honed my expertise in internet consulting and how to do business on the web, specifically for business to business (b2b).

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