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B2B Website

If you are a business-to-business (B2B) company, your website audience is quite a bit different than a company who targets consumers (B2C).  To get the most of your business website, you’ll need to account for these differences in both your design and content.

Intent

Website visitors to a B2B website are people from other companies who are also trying to do business.  Their intent with visiting your site is to help them make money – by purchasing your products or services, gathering information, etc.  The B2B audience is usually online from their workplace, so time is valuable.

Small, targeted audience

The audience for B2B sites is usually much smaller than B2C, but is much more targeted.  Keep your targeted audience in mind when designing the site and writing content.  You have an opportunity to reach just the audience that you want – your customers.

Behavior

Because they are using your website for business decisions, the B2B audience will be focused on finding the information they need to make those decisions.  If they can’t easily find it, they’ll quickly move elsewhere.  However, B2B visitors are also looking to build relationships with companies and people they can trust.  If you provide valuable information, products and services, there is an opportunity for long-term partnerships.

Expertise

Your B2B visitors are experts in their field and expect the same expertise in potential partners and vendors.  They probably know your products or services better than you, so website content and layout needs to focus on this sophisticated audience.

Buying Process

The buying process in B2B is much longer and more involved than in B2C.  B2B customers are making rational purchase decisions based on business value.  They want products that will help their business be successful.  B2C customers make emotional purchase decisions based on personal value.  Information about your products and services needs to focus on business value and information necessary to make a rational purchase decision.

Value of Sale

Purchases made by B2B customers are typically much larger than B2C customers, so there is a great deal of value in the sale to your company.  It is worthwhile to put the time and effort into providing your customers exactly what they need to succeed – they will reward you with sales.

Listen

Because your B2B customers are experts in their fields, they are a valuable resource to your company.  Listen to what they have to say about your products, services and website.  Since they are looking for long-term relationships, they are often more likely to spend the time to help you improve.  Your B2B website should include opportunities to interact with your customers and for them to interact with each other.  You’ll find valueable information that usually comes with the high costs of a customer research firm.

If you have a B2B website, how do you use your website to reach your B2B audience?

For more information:

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Understanding Content – Tips for using Joomla

For companies in the media sector, content is their stock in trade.  They understand content as a woodworker understands the grain of a quarter sawn Birdseye Maple board.   In my tenures with these companies I have learned an invaluable, oft unbendable truism that has helped me to model Content Management Systems. Content cannot actually change its representation to fit a framework, frameworks need be engineered to fit content. More simply put, articles published in monthly magazines are usually issue-based in relation to each other and need to be managed by a tool designed to handle that content representation.   They cannot or should not be shoe-horned into a blogging tool simply because its free, has a funny sounding name and you like the pretty icons that come with it.

Recently I consulted a media company on how they can use open source CMS tools to help with a sub-segment of their Content Entry work.  As I looked out at the many many many many available options, I felt a Sazbean post coming on.  Are people becoming overwhelmed by all the CMS choices out there, giving up, and settling on the first tool they can get working?  What is the likelyhood that the CMS you got working is the right one for the kind of content you have?

Joomla was one of the CMS applications that popped out early on as a tool that might help my client.  Joomla is a free, open sourced content management system forked from the Mambo server PHP code base.  If you have used Mambo, as I had years ago, you will see it continues its full featured administrator tools. While both  Joomla and Mambo have tons of components that can extend the base functions, my experience is that they tend to stretch the content to fit into the framework.  Best to evaluate it on its base strengths.  What Joomla does well is supporting post based sites such as blogs, news, and info distribution feeds.  If you content is periodic, self-contextualized and mostly text and images then this tool will scratch your itch.

Here are some tips on how to use Joomla

  • The base class in Joomla for content is an Article.
  • Joomla doesn’t really support the concept of a ‘page’.  If you want to create an ‘About Us’ page, for example, you are going to create an Article.  Then you will link a Menu item with an internal link to that article.  Using the term ‘Article’ to describe the base class for content is an example of how Joomla’s and Mambo’s designers see the world: as periodic content
  • Articles should be structured:  Sections have Categories, Categories have Articles.
  • Categories and Sections can be used as indexes, allowing Joomla to pull all Articles under a Section or Category
  • Like many CMSs, images are a separate class, allowing for the reuse of images without saving duplicates.  Use the Media Manager to upload your images and then use them in your articles by hitting the button at the bottom of the wysiwyg editor
  • Menus drive appearance of content.  When you create a menu link you can set show/hide options on different parts of content on the right.  Two menu links can have different settings and point to the same article.  The article itself is unchanged, only the display changes.
  • Blog views is usually by date, but it can be changed to order in the menu link preferences
  • Joomla has different rights levels for administrator access, so you can limit editors to only things they are allowed to break
  • Joomla also has restricted options so that only logged in people can view the content
  • Sites are made up of modules and plugins.  The menu is a module, as is a poll or a login widget.
  • Modules and plugins can be told to show up where you want them, left, right, breadcrumb, user1 etc.  These are setup by the template creator as to where they show up in the page
  • Oh, and tons of free templates are available, which some people call skins.  Use your favorite search engine for ‘joomla templates’

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Instant Widget, simply add RSS [Recipe]

Lets talk content for a second.  If you took a moment to consider the websites that you find useful in your business sector most of them are going to be text based.  In the financial industry for example, your Bloombergs, Reuters, Barons and Wall Street Journals are all brokering in letters and numbers.  Words are their currency, more than dollars, Yens, or Pounds.  Likely your corporate site, too, is trading on its reputation to educate your customers through words.  All this textual content is going stale if unused.

One idea for your websites leftover content is to make a quick content widget.  They’re delicious, non-fattening and fun at parties.

Prep time is 15 minutes.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need.

  1. Text based content
  2. An RSS feed on that content
  3. A widget automator

I take the first ingredient for granted and assume your corporate website is not just a blank page surrounding a small ‘Coming Soon’ picture.  Now with your content in hand, gently break it up into smaller pieces.  These pieces are going to be used in our RSS feed.  RSS feeds are great little additions to any website.  They help make content on your site easily available to other computers by encoding it in XML.  If you don’t know if your site has an RSS feed, go ahead and ask your web programmer.  Okay, now that we have our content broken up we can put it into our RSS feed.  The feed isn’t going to do much right now, so just let it rest on your website.  We’ll come back to it.  Now, lets create our widget using your choice of widget automator sites.  For this recipe, I will be using SpringWidgets, but you could use WidgetBox or ClearSpring.

To use SpringWidget you will need to register a free account.  Lets do that now at the top right of the screen.  Once that is done, go ahead and click on the Express Widgets button on the left of the main page.  Now its time to add your RSS feed to the mix.  Take your RSS feed and slowly enter it into the field.  Try not to spill. SpringWidget will now use your RSS feed to pull in your content, wrapping it with a decorative box pattern.  That’s it, you have a widget for your content.  Almost good enough to eat.

The serving options are endless.  You can play around with your widget, style it how you want.  Once you are ready, the bottons on the left will help you embed this widget into Social Networks like Facebook, blogging tools like Blogger and WordPress, or anyone’s web page using the Javascript code.