B2B Content Marketing

 I am back at home in Vermont, sitting and thinking about the B2B conference that I attended in Boston. It is clear that the use of search engines is changing how people are finding solutions and changing how suppliers must align how people want to buy products and services. Our team of experts has been defining taxonomy to define a web inquiry, a marketing prospect and a qualified sales lead; our experience in sales allowed us to develop a methodology to include indicators that show the appropriate time when marketing should send a lead over the wall to sales. Companies are scrambling to be at the top of search engine results to leverage the web and search engine placement you need to have a clear understanding of the business topics people are searching on, and have the appropriate content to show the value and benefits of your solution.From the beginning we considered ourselves as a search engine optimized marketing company; part of our value proposition was being able to find customers at their darkest hour, the time of search. I thought that was when they need information fast, because most likely, the “big guy upstairs” is putting pressure on someone to get a business issue solved quickly. The light bulb came on! What if at the time of search there is no pressing issue and that the “searcher” is looking out 12 to 24 months? What happens if he is not ready to “sign the dotted line?”  We have all seen that timing is everything and most sales people are not up for hanging around or educating the client on the process of buying. Yet articulating how your solution is differentiated and how you solve business issues can influence how easily you are able to get your product on the top of the short list. Early in my sales career I learned that there is something even more important than internal alignment; it is how we are aligned to the way clients want to buy. SEO changed the game. Some important questions to consider, “Do we have an identified buying cycle? Do we have a road map to get a prospect from tire-kicker to evaluator to purchaser? Do we have a standard taxonomy and methodology that identifies the buying stages, matches each prospect to the stage most appropriate at a given point in time, and indicates the best way to respond in order to move the sales conversation forward? In other words, how do you, as the seller, hold the client’s hand and walk him through a process that articulates how to buy your product? I was awed by the plethora of “sales alignment” tools out there and more amazed at how SEO changed how companies are addressing the care and feeding of prospects through the sales lifecycle maturity model.Bottom Line; SEO techniques are going to continue to be more and more important and will require a strategic and tactical investment of resources.