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Video for B2B Websites

Video can have powerful impact for your business. You are probably aware of video on major consumer websites such as the New York Times, MSN, CNN or video sharing sites such as YouTube. Video that provides information to your customers helps establish credibility in for your knowledge and expertise.

Content
Information that is valuable to your customers, such as how-to, training, or news updates will be best received. Videos are more likely to be watched if they are short: 2-3 minutes at the most. If you have more information, split it up into separate videos. Quality of the video does not have to be perfect. Thanks to sites like YouTube, Internet viewers accept lower-quality pictures. Investing in a good mic and making sure the lighting is adequate are worthwhile.

Technical
Videos can be in many formats, including Windows Streaming Media (WMV), Quicktime (QT), avi, mpg, mpeg, and Flash Streaming (FLV). I prefer Flash because most people have the plugin already installed and it has good compression (quicker to download). For Windows, there are several relatively inexpensive video software packages to try: Adobe Premiere Elements, ROXIO Easy Media Creator and Ulead Video Studio. All new Macs come with iMovie. Hosting a popular video can eat up your alloted bandwidth so you may want to consider having video hosted elsewhere, such as YouTube, which has disadvantages as a consumer-oriented site, or Cache-fly.

Promotional
If you’ve spent the time and effort to produce a video (even if its only one), you’ll get the more response if you promote it in ways other than just posting it on your website. Consider an email or an eblast to your customers letting them know about it (check with anti-spam regulations). Ads linking to the video on your search engine marketing programs and B2B publications can also help with visibility. If you post the video on YouTube, it will be included in their searches (which are mostly consumer based).

Measurement
How do you tell if your video has been successful? Your analytics program should be able to tell you how many people have viewed the video (at least to start it). Tracking whether they have watched it all the way through is more difficult and requires more advanced (and expensive) software. Keep in mind that if you pre-download the video to allow for faster viewing, that may count a view for every load – not necessarily when people are clicking on it.

Once you’ve created a few, using video to increase your credibility and image can be very rewarding (and hopefully fun).

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Measuring Your Success in the B2B Marketplace

You have a spiffy website with engaging content organized in an easy-to-find manner. How do you know what is and isn’t working on your website? Where are your visitors coming from?

Analytics. Otherwise known as web statistics. There are three types of basic information for a website: page views, visits, and unique visitors. Page views are the number of web pages viewed on your website. Visits are the number times people visit the website. They can view multiple pages (page views) each visit. Unique visitors are the number of people who visit the website (usually as near as possible to ascertain).

There are a lot of packages out there: Omniture, Web Trends, Unica, Coremetrics, VisiStat, Google to name a few. The type of information they offer is wide ranging and so are the prices. How they gather stats can also be quite different, but there are two general camps: log-based, or tag-based.

Log-based packages:
Log-based packages take all of the logs from your web servers and crawl through them periodically to count up all the stats from your website. These logs usually contain all the traffic that comes to your website including search engine crawlers and bots. Search engine crawlers and bots are computers which visit and index your site, usually for purposes of adding you to the listings on their own website. This can be good for getting your website out in front of potential customers but it doesn’t tell you what the people who visit your site are doing. Most packages get around this by having a list of bots and crawlers to ignore in the stats – keeping this up to date can be a bit of work. Due to having to crawl through logs for stats, these stats packages usually cannot report ‘live’ data. They are usually at least a few hours behind.

Tag-based packages:
Tag-based packages work by placing a bit of code on all the pages on your site. When a visitor visits your site, this code activates and updates a count on your stats server. Most tag-based software is coded in such a way that automatically ignores all search engine and bot traffic. They may also ignore real traffic from people who have security software or a firewall that blocks the code – but this is usually a very small portion of your traffic. Many software providers have ways around this limitation by using tiny images instead. Tag-based packages can often deliver real-time stats.

Which to choose?
I’ve been using both types of packages for stats at the publishing company: Unica Web Analytics – log based and Google Analytics – tag based. My preference has been for the Google stats because we have a lot of difficulty keeping the search engine crawler and bots filter list up to date. Google analytics is easy to install and use and it is hosted so they keep the software up to date. The disadvantage to Google is that it is very difficult to get your stats out of it if you want to use them in another application for data mining purposes (we’re actually looking an Urchin which was bought by Google for this purpose). There are also some packages which use a combination of both methods. These can provide the advantages of both and negate most of the disadvantages, although they tend to be more expensive.

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Website Content for the B2B Audience

Now that we have some design ideas, what content should you put on your website? How should it be organized? Again it helps to put yourself into your visitor’s shoes. What would you be looking for if you were a customer? It probably falls into one of three categories:

  1. Information about a product or service (including cost and how to buy)
  2. Contact information for someone at the company (sales, support, service, etc.)
  3. Information about the company.

1. Information about a product or service (including cost and how to buy). Visitors are usually somewhere in the buying process (researching, actively buying) or are already a customer.

If they are in the buying process, they want information about a specific product or service or are looking to see what you offer. A link called ‘Products’ or ‘Services’ right on the homepage is a clear indicator to this type of information. You may even want to spotlight your best-selling products or those you want to market right on the homepage. Once visitors click on ‘Products’ or ‘Services’, they should be able to see a full list of your products or services without clicking further. The option to buy (either via eCommerce or email or phone) should be on every product and service page.

For visitors who are already your customers, they are probably looking for how-to information on use, service, or support. If you have any manuals, tutorials, or other information about your products, it is a good idea to have them on your website. The more information that customers can use to help themselves, the happier they’ll be and the less time and money you will have to spend on support.

2. Contact information for someone at the company (sales, support, service, etc.). Sometimes it just is easiest to talk to someone. Visitors look for contact information when they want to make a purchase, need more information, or need help. Make it easy for them to find your contact information. A link on all pages called ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Contact’ gets the point across, or you can have your basic contact information on all your pages. Customers who can find your contact information when they need to and can actually contact you will be happier – even if they have a problem. Happier customers are more likely to stay customers.

3. Information about the company. As part of the research process many buyers want to know more about your company – your history, your expertise and your contact information. While this usually seems like the most important information, it almost always is secondary to product or contact information. An ‘About Us’ page is a good place for general information and portion on the homepage for important information can help buyers understand how your company can help them.

The business to business (B2B) audience is busy trying to run their businesses. Time is valuable. Providing information that your customers are looking for and placing it where it is easy to find, will make your website a valuable resource and improve your customer loyalty.

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