B2B Online Marketing Optimisation for Buying Cycle

Although the buying cycle is typically the same for B2C and B2B online users there is usually a significantly larger commitment involved from the buyer's side in B2B transactions. This is partly due to larger costs, larger orders and personal professional credibility that a buyer stakes by choosing you to provide a product or service to their company. The best way to overcome these potential obstacles is to promote your own policies, guarantees, warranties, qualifications or certifications as clearly as possible. Include motivators such as free demo's and choice of contact medium (e.g.: callback options, contact forms and online support functions). Lastly make sure your buying process is secure, transparent and simple as well as making repeat orders easy to process for both the client and yourself.



Online Marketing Interest, Research and Buying Phases:



Before looking at your phases try to characterise typical buyers on your website by answering who, what, where, when and why questions. Keep your notes rough and try to use a mix of Google Analytics data and personal feedback from your staff to get these profiles together.



Interest Phase -

Characterised by broad searches such as "management software", "cost management" or "logistics". Quite often, but not always, the interest phase will include 1 or 2 word phrases. The key is that the interest phase is a casual one with very high search traffic potential and a very low conversion/sales rate.



Research Phase -

This phase begins the moment a potential buyer begins to get a feel for what they might want. Typically the searches will include longer tail phrases (3 phrases and more in each search) and the user will do multiple searches on topics in a similar vein until they get information that will either dispute or support a potential purchasing decision. Reviews and comparison websites are typically related more to B2C clients but it needs to be noted that such 'impartial sources' do often influence B2B buyers when they choose a service or product provider too. Users in this phase will often bookmark the most informative webpages that will help support their final decision.



Purchase Phase -

This is the most decisive of the buying cycle phases and involves action words in the search such as "buy", "purchase", "online shop", "order" as well as locations relating to availability and distribution. This phase typically has the highest sales conversion rate of the three but also involves to lowest traffic potential.



With regards to a typical buying cycle of interest, research and buying phases many B2B online marketing clients want to know when the best phase to target users at. Ideally you would want to capture traffic from all three sources but this does require a rather large marketing resource which most companies just don't have. At the same time if your website does not come up for some important Research phase searches you may be missing out on capturing some valuable new business. So if you find yourself with a small budget try to setup a strategy that targets both the Research and Purchase phases.



Create a balanced B2B online marketing campaign could start with steps as small as optimising your current product and services pages for the purchase phases whiles meeting your research phase traffic needs by continuously adding informative articles to your website. The larger your budget is the more resources you will be able to allocate to generating offsite buying motivators such as demonstrations, articles and reviews on external websites.



Inspiration Marketing Manchester specialises in B2B online marketing services such as search engine optimisation, AdWords management, newsletter marketing and web development. http://www.inspirationmarketing.co.uk