Does Your Website Content Meet the Needs of Industrial Buyers?

When was the last time you actually read the content on your industrial website? Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and see if the current content will persuade you to take an action that will ultimately lead to an RFQ.

The answer I get most often is either a no or a may be. Your site content must match the industrial buyer’s needs if you want your industrial website to be an effective sales tool for generating qualified leads.

The tendency for most companies is to talk about their product features and available options. Those are great and technical specifications are important to engineers and a technical audience. However, one-size-fits-all content is not very effective because of two reasons. They are:

1. Industrial sales cycles tend to be long with many stakeholders involved, each with their own needs and concerns that your site content must address. The length of the sales cycle makes it critical for the content to help your site visitors make interim decisions and lead them to the RFQ in a logical manner. Along the way, you will get pushbacks that you may or may not be aware of. Your site content must address as many of these issues as you can anticipate. Your sales team can be a big help here with their input. (See my post, “Using Content to Move Prospects Forward in the Sales Cycle”)
2. Your ultimate customer – the one who signs the purchase order may have very little input in the decision making process and may visit your site once or only occasionally. I like to refer to this buyer persona as the functional buyer. The bulk of your content must address the needs of the specifier or the technical buyer. This could be design engineers, manufacturing engineers, production managers, quality control engineer/manager etc. Unless your industrial product is specified or designed in by these technical buyers, you are not going to get anywhere close to an RFQ. (See my post, “Industrial Content Marketing with Purpose”)

Your site content must address two other buyer personas. They are:

1. Executives
2. Field/Line personnel

C-suite folks are not likely to visit your site other than to check out the company background and/or your management team. Therefore, your site content must help engineers make a strong business case on your behalf to their executive decision makers who control the purse strings. Make these technical specifiers your internal evangelists who’ll carry your message to the buying authority.

Field or Production people may have very little influence over the initial buy decision. However, these people can make or break your repeat orders. Make sure your site content addresses their needs with FAQs, quick and easy access to application notes, knowledgeable technical support, user manuals, how-to videos and ordering parts.

Visit Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona Institute to learn more about buyer personas.

In short, take a good hard look at your current site content. Does it pass muster? If not, it is time to rethink your industrial content marketing strategy before you redesign your industrial website. For more on this, read my earlier post – “Why a Content BOM is Crucial to a Successful Industrial Web Design.”