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B2B Competitive Analysis – An Overview

Even if you’ve never done a formal competitive analysis, you probably have at least taken a look at the competition by strolling past their booth at a trade show or picking up their brochures. How important is competitive analysis to your b2b website and what tools are available to get a view of the competitive landscape online?

Where to start? The best way to start is just to take a look at your competitor’s website. What types of content do they have on the site? Do they have a blog, a board, videos, podcasts, case studies, etc.? How often does it look like they update the site? Take a look at the design and layout of the site. Is it is pleasing to the eye? Is it easy to find everything?

Don’t know who your competitors are? A simple google search for keywords in your industry (that you would use to describe your own business) can give you a good list of competitors. Also, take a look at google local for geographically close competitors. Even if you do know your major competitors, taking a look at a couple of searches every few months can keep new ones from sneaking up on you.

Now what? Obviously you should look at your competitor’s products and services to know what they are offering. As far as their website design and content, these will give you an idea of the type of customer support they are giving. Websites with more content (useful content), that is updated frequently, are typically more customer-centric. Customers are more likely to visit their website to solve problems and keep up with what’s new. The more times a customer visits a website, the more likely they are to become repeat customers. In order to become the destination for information within your industry, you will need to invest some time and effort into useful information for your customers and potential customers.

Next we’ll take a look at a couple of tools to use in your competitive analysis.

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B2B Community Intelligence – GroupSwim

Bulletin boards, forums and wikis are a great place for your customers to get support and to form a community, but they are often difficult to use for finding information. Searches or tags that do not have any intelligence about what is truly important make it difficult to filter for relevant information. Your customers are often the most knowledgeable in certain aspects of your products and/or industry. It takes time and effort to create documentation to help and support your customers. Is there a way to tap into the expertise and effort of your customers to allow them to help themselves more effectively than you can?

GroupSwim’s unique product creates this intelligent community by tying together traditional board and forum functionality with semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise so that important information is easy to find. How does this all work?

  • Tagging – Tagging is a great way to get an overview about the subjects a post covers and is usually useful for searching. Typical boards and forums may allow tagging, but require people to add their own tags to posts, many of which do not. In GroupSwim, every post and comment (and any other content) in the system is automatically tagged using a semantic engine (you can also add your own tags) and your community can be pre-loaded with tags that are important to your industries or situation (including alternatives and synonyms).
  • Ranking – In busy communities, important posts are often missed or buried within a long list. Business readers do not have time to read an entire forum to search for answers. GroupSwim automatically brings important posts and content to the top to make them easy to find .
  • Expertise – In every community there are recognized experts in certain subjects. In traditional forums, these experts are found only through personal experience reading the forum. GroupSwim identifies experts by allowing readers to vote on posts and responses. These experts are identified for subjects and their responses and posts are ranked higher in searches and browsing. Customers can easily identify experts in each subject and build trust that they have the answers they need.
  • Search – Search is key to finding information buried in a forum, but GroupSwim combines semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise to give you intelligent answers. Searches include posts, tags, groups and member results all on one page. Search results can be ordered according to relevance, recent activity and popularity.

GroupSwim’s hosted application has member groups and privacy controls. Profiles are created automatically and contain all the activity for that person, including posts, tags, replied and ratings. Video, audio, documents, etc. can be posted and readers can create watchlists and subscribe to rss feeds to keep up-to-date on what’s going on. The addition of wiki-style pages is in the works for a future release.

Pricing is very transparent and is based on the number of users and file storage, with discounts for higher numbers of users. Starting at $150 minimum per month, this solution can be both affordable and scalable for even a small business.

If you just want a community for social networking, look elsewhere. But if you want to create an intelligent community to tap into expertise with little effort for a knowledge base, technical support site, or Intranet, add GroupSwim to your short list.

Update: I’ve created a B2B Knowledge Base & Discussion Board using GroupSwim. Please feel to check it out. I hope you consider joining if you’d like to have a discussion about the issues facing B2B Websites.

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CrunchBase Information
GroupSwim
Information provided by CrunchBase

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B2B eNewsletters – Content is King

eNewsletters can be a great way to drive traffic to your website and keep your brand in your customers’ minds. Once you have an enewsletter vendor and an audience of people who have given you permission to send them information, you need to put together content for your enewsletter. In order to be most effective, you’ll need to send out an enewsletter at least monthly, preferably more often. What types of content are valuable to your customers (and potential customers)?

Announcements

Information about upcoming product or service releases, company information, and events are easy to write about. They are good information to keep your readers informed, but keep these short and sweet as most people are not as interested in your press releases as you are. If you have longer releases, post them on your website and link to them (this is the driving traffic to your website part).

Tips

Information about how to use your products or information your readers can use to improve their own work can be extremely valuable. Again, keep this information short and link back to longer articles on your website.

Case Studies

Put together a case study (or two) which shows how your products have been used. This is a great way for current customers to get ideas on how else to use your products and excellent advertising for potential customers. If you prepare a case study for each enewsletter you put out, keep an archive of these on your website and add an archive link on your enewsletter. Longer case studies should always be put on your website, with just a short summary in your enewsletter.

Surveys

eNewsletters are a great way to reach your customers and gather information that is valuable to your business and improving your products by adding short surveys (1 question is best!). Surveys are also a great way to make your readers feel involved with your business and create a sense of community. Share your findings with your customers by posting them in your enewsletters and keeping archives on your website.

Feedback

Encourage feedback and communication with your customers by adding your contact information (email and phone) and just plain out asking for it in every enewsletter.

Summary

While you should take the time to spell check and properly format your content, keep your voice friendly and relatively informal to make it easier to read. Provide your readers with valuable and timely content in short segments which link back to longer information on your website. eNewsletters can take a little bit of effort to create and write, but are a great way to connect with your customers and drive traffic to your website.

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