By Rob Hamshar
In this day of the attention economy, most B2B companies have bolted electronic publishing houses onto the front of their marketing engines. For many, it’s constructed out of little more than a marketing agenda, a keyword index, and reluctant technical staffers-cum-copywriters. Given its emerging status as the divine path to high-quality sales leads, the online content manufacturing business is burgeoning across nearly every industry. But to the potential buyer conducting research online, this development has been a blessing and a curse, as picking through such a swelling mass of relevant style-over-substance content leads to frustratingly few instances of “I’m glad I read that.” More often it leads to feelings of boredom combined with a vague sense of being misled with hype, slanted content, unsubstantiated claims, and complex arguments. Why?
Amidst this flurry of content production, most marketers optimize their content according to search engine algorithms (deeming it highly “relevant”) rather than to buyers’ information needs. You may conclude that such marketers care more about luring visitors to their site (and coercing them to hand over their contact information in exchange for content viewing privileges) than actually presenting meaningful, useful content to potential buyers. If Marketing’s value to the enterprise is solely measured in number of qualified leads produced, this is expected behavior—the incentives explain it all.
But most Marketers are actually accountable for a much broader measure of commercial performance. Therefore, rather than merely attracting attention and collecting lead data, they should instead focus online content production and web design to provide actual decision-support (i.e., prioritize usefulness over relevance). The savviest B2B online marketers are building decision support portfolios—a content portfolio which fills information gaps at key points across a buyer’s purchase experience, and presents a clear path for progressing with the supplier across each decision point.
How does your decision support portfolio measure up?
MLC Members: See the framework for structuring an online content portfolio in our recent work on understanding B2B Web Site effectiveness.
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