Boring B2B Industries: You Can Attract Visitors to Your Site!

Some industries have all the fun…

We see it all the time. There are always industries that seemingly attract site visitors like flies to sugar.

Electronics. Clothing. Cosmetics. Toys. Kitchenware. Fitness. These are all categories that will never suffer from the lack of need or attention. And the truth is, this is commonly the case with many B2C categories.

But then, there’s the B2Bs. Parts. Software. Paper. Widgets. Much like steamed vegetables, these are all good for other business owners, but they’re not terribly attractive. The average consumers aren’t looking for these products.

These are all reasons why B2B products face an uphill battle when it comes to driving traffic to their landing pages – most products in the B2B arena, while useful, aren’t that excting. And let’s face it – humans are attracted to exciting things.

But it’s not all lost when it comes to driving B2B traffic to your site, no matter how boring it is to explain how those vats of formula or those plastic casings are important to potential purchasers. There are ways for you to amplify your site traffic that works just as well for B2Bs as they do for those glamorous B2Cs.

Focus on the Benefits

At the end of the day, people want the same questions answers from B2B products that they’d want answered by common consumer products-What’s in this for me?

Purchasing managers and small business owners want to know why your product is going to allow them to:

• Conduct business more efficiently
• Get things done faster
• Generate more revenue
• Remain safety compliant
• Help them to manage costs

…along with other concerns.

If your marketing team can create site content that answers these type of questions while taking care of any pressing questions and issues, then you’ll find that your site traffic will definitely experience an uptick.

But the problem is often this: Most of the content out there doesn’t differentiate between features and benefits.

Especially when it comes to promoting industrial products, it’s tempting to pound your prospects over the head with features without speaking about how your product will provide any beneficial value.

Neil Patel explains why taking a benefits-driven approach is the way to go about marketing in our current tech-driven era, and how that differs from times past.

The idea of “solution sales” came about in the days of the person-to-person sales rep days. A customer needed to feel their pain, hear about the solution, and then be compelled to buy the product.

In the content-driven world of online information, that game is over…customers don’t need you the way they used to.

Customers know their needs. They know what they need. It’s up to you to extol the benefits…this is all part of building value for your customer. Features and functions are the “what is it?”…As you discuss benefits, impact, bottom line, etc., you’ll get to the pinnacle of what it is that a customer really wants.

The Top Rank Blog also provides a nifty list of strategies to use for those necessary yet unpopular products your company needs to market:

Here are 5 tips to help find ways to make marketing niche and low demand products more effective:

1. Who has bought the product in the past and why? Current customers can tell you a lot that’s not revealed in analytics. Survey customers, sales people and customer service reps for the company to identify the company’s perception of their unique selling proposition and the actual reasons customers buy.

2. Segment buyers by common characteristics, pain points, goals and behaviors. Get in the mind of the customer and understand why, how and where they buy.

3. Map the buyer sales cycle from Awareness to Interest to Consideration and Purchase. What kind of content, search keywords and social topics are relevant to guide the buyer through the sales cycle (or better yet, attract them from other companies selling the same thing).

4. Optimize for a quantity of niche. Go horizontal and get creative with a wide variety of variations on keywords. A keyword with a really low popularity count that is very high on relevancy only needs one sale to be profitable in many cases. Think about that and go wide for every situation there might be for buying the product.

5. Create a cycle of continuous monitoring, measurement and refinement that allows you to adapt and scale successes.

B2B Decision Makers are People, Too

Because most B2B products are marketed for necessity, it’s tempting for B2B marketers to promote their products in a nearly robotic fashion. But keep in mind that purchasing managers and other decision makers are people, too.

There’s no need to bore them to tears by compensating for the lack of product glamour with snooze-inducing data, graphs, studies, etc. It’s perfectly fine to use emotional triggers such as humor, concern, and any other trigger that might separate your product’s brand from another.

Entrepreneur Magazine contributor Daniel Newman advises:

To make content marketing work for your brand, you need to change the way you look at B2B customers. Sure, in a B2B transaction, you’re dealing with a business. But you have to remember that every business in the world is made up of people.

Irrespective of whether it’s B2B or B2C, business transactions take place between people — and that’s where the concept of P2P (people-to-people) stems from. To engage people, your content needs to address the “human” side of businesses.

Just like consumers, an increasing number of business buyers conduct some form of online research before purchasing. In fact, according to a recent Acquity Group report, the number’s impressively high, at 94 percent. With the enormous amount of content produced daily, you can’t rely on cut-and-dry marketing anymore.

So while your products may never gain mention on Buzzfeed or the blogs of the coolest influencers around the world, you can still make changes to your content that are sure to generate the traffic you need.