Small Business B2B Marketing Blog

Most B2B small businesses struggle with placing effective copy on their web pages. By effective, we mean website content that convinces your B2B sales prospects to contact your company.

We have all heard that most websites are simply pages created from a company brochure. The result is you see a lot of small business B2B website pages that contain only a couple of hundred words on a page or less.

Typical B2B Website Content Fails to:

• Become indexed by search engines & show up when your sales prospects are searching the web for solutions to their problems 

• Engage and motivate a dialogue with your sales prospects

• Trigger visitor engagement to transform needs into wants

• Identify a client needs sufficient to stimulate a contact action

Writing for a sales brochure is much different from a B2B webpage, where you must involve your visitor’s quickly and intensify their need to seek a solution to their business problem that you can solve and be mindful of search engine requirements.

Satisfying search engine requirements is easy by including at least 400 words and preferably 600 words but no more than 1,000 words. Satisfying the needs of your prospective clients is a little more difficult and requires a customer-centric messaging focus.

The Ancient Art of Storytelling the New B2B Marketing

No longer is just listing features and benefits acceptable to persuade your sales prospects. Today, you must explain your understanding of your potential customers’ problems and how enlisting your company to help them will result in a positive outcome for them. So how is this achieved? By using the oldest form of human communication the story. Telling a compelling story motivates people to action.

We all like a good story because it has a:

• Beginning, (once upon a time there was a company that… insert your clients’ problem here) 

• Middle (intensifying the trials and tribulations faced by the client in solving the problem)

• And an end (the solution and outcomes achieved by the client). 

And, when you think about it if someone asks you, how was your day? You will tell them the story of your day with a beginning, middle and an end. There is no secret to the power of storytelling as a powerful way to engage, persuade and motivate people to action. Best part you were taught this technique in ninth grade English composition. Now you can start using it on your B2B web page copy.

Keys to Turning Client Needs into Wants

Employing the story telling process is not sufficient to create great web pages that will meet your sales objectives. The actual content in your story must be:

• Relevant - to your target audience 

• Important – to your clients’ success 

• Urgent – instill action on the part of your clients

To transform your story from just satisfying needs into client wants will require increasing the three aspects above of your website copy.

First relevance defines to what degree your business solutions are perceived to be connected to a sales prospect’s problem. In telling your story, relevance can either be internal or external depending upon the type of problems your clients’ have and you can solve.

Types of Relevance

In order to intensify the relevance of your website copy to your target audience your copy needs to be as specific as possible. First, talk about the problem(s) facing your potential clients then connect your solution(s) to the relevant problem or set of problems. Avoid generic solutions and do not focus on the solution first because your prospect my not understand its relevance to them. Using relevant internal and external copy you can connect problems that they might have just experienced to your solution.

Next importance is used to explain the degree to which your solution is critical to your clients’ success. Here you can use importance in your marketing communications by pointing out fundamental needs that your client seeks to fulfill. Needs such as:

• Security 

• Meeting expectations related to their job performance 

• Feelings of belonging to a group 

• Self-worth when their professional image or integrity might be perceived as threatened

Besides just addressing a need to know how to solve a problem adding specific copy points about the intensifying consequences of not solving the problem add to and heighten the importance of needing to engage a solution now. Also, the most significant copy points should be placed first to emphasize the link between their problem and your solution.

Lastly instilling urgency is the final tripwire needed to illicit active engagement by your potential B2B prospects. Without the urgency in your copy, there is no engagement deliverable. Urgency can be made present by either the prospects situation like a crashed computer or an artificial urgency you create like limiting time or availability of a product or service.

Takeaway:
Your B2B website content needs to work hard to convert your traffic into sales prospects. To engage dialogue with B2B sales prospects to increase your business, you need to rely on the oldest form of marketing communications, storytelling. Be sure you follow the keys to turning needs into wants, and you will be able to recoup a return on your website investment.

Related Articles

Small Business B2B Content Marketing How To

1 Simple Way to Build Initial Rapport with Your Customers 

7 Small Business Content Marketing Tips