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B2B marketing is tough! As you know, there are myriad ways to market your products and solutions, and you have probably tried most of them with varying degrees of success.

The B2B buying process can often be extremely complex and in today’s market it involves more and more people with different perspectives, concerns and personalities.

B2B products and solutions are often complicated, highly specialized, and require a tremendous amount of training before someone with a particular account signs the purchase. This then creates a sales cycle that can last from a few months to a year or more.

B2B relationship selling

One strategy that can make B2B marketing a little less difficult starts with building a relationship first.

When you get your prospects to see you as a resource as opposed to a salesperson, the relationship begins with providing value as opposed to just a price list, and you begin that relationship with creating value for your prospect. First, when you create value, you have a much better chance of separating you and your business from your competition.

When you and your business get separated from the competition, the chances of you being viewed as a commodity are reduced.

Relationship selling isn’t new, it’s been around as long as people have bought. What is relatively new, however, is trying to build that relationship when the buying process is so strong online.

Digital marketing has undoubtedly changed the game. The changes that digital marketing brings with it are not only affecting the marketing department, but also very much the way salespeople do their jobs.

It is difficult to get a prospect from a target account to pick up the phone to start a conversation, to say the least.

Educational information for relationship building

One of the best tools a business has today to market potential buyers is to use educational materials that demonstrate the value of your products and solutions to potential customers.

In the past, training was conducted when a seller “called” a company and spoke directly to the buyer. The nice thing about this process was that the seller interacted with the buyer in “real time”. The seller was able to adjust the conversation on the fly to address the buyer’s questions and concerns.

Few sellers today have the opportunity to meet with a buyer in person, especially during the early stages of the buying process. There are tons of statistics out there showing that buyers won’t want to talk to someone in your business until they’ve successfully completed the buying process.

Some Trust Radius B2B Marketing Stats found:

• 87% of buyers want to serve part or all of the buying journey themselves.
• 57% of buyers make their purchase decision without ever speaking to a seller.
• The average B2B buyer uses 6.9 information sources to make their purchasing decision.

We can now also see that the buying journey is not linear. B2B buyers don’t begin with the awareness phase and transition in a solid direction to the buy phase. Instead, today’s business shoppers jump from one level to the next and then back again, revisiting multiple information points to gather more data.

This information that buyers collect is of value to the businesses that provide it. Buyers find the companies who provide the information they need to make their lives easier, to be among their “trusted partners”. In fact, buyers who found the information they needed to make their jobs easier were three times more likely to make a major purchase from the company that provided the information with less regret.

Become their source of information

All of the indications indicate that you need to provide your prospective buyers with the information they need to make a purchasing decision and that is available on your website. But what’s the best way to do that?

There are two main methods of making information available. closed and ungated.

• Gated content, which is information that visitors to your website can only access by exchanging some of their personal information to view it. In most cases, gated content is hidden behind a form that your website visitor has to fill out in order to receive or view it.
• On the contrary, ungated content is information on your website that is open and visible to everyone who visits your website.

As you can imagine, both have advantages and disadvantages.

Ungated information is very easily accessible to someone, but you cannot get any information about who is accessing it. You lose the opportunity to “get in touch” with the visitor or even learn how much they are concerned with the information they have received from you.

Gated information, unlike ungated information, gives you the information of the person who requested the information (generally name and email address). The disadvantage of gated content, however, is that the form becomes a point of friction that often leads to the visitor to your website abandoning the process of requesting the information.

When a visitor to your website comes across gated content, they will consider it a transaction. They value the information they must give you in exchange for the value of the information they will receive. Ask for too much information in exchange for too little value in the information and it will leave your website and leave, often forever.

If you get the right value with gated content, you are well on your way to starting that relationship and positioning your business and a trusted place for the information your buyers need to make their lives a little easier.

Reduce the friction

For obvious reasons, most of our customers prefer their valuable information to be stored on their websites. This gives them a tremendous ability to understand who is interested in their products and solutions, who may be returning to their website for more information, and the types of products or solutions the prospect might be interested in. This data is extremely important. It is time for a seller to contact this prospect. But first you need to reduce the friction that the shape creates for the gated content.

Here are some ideas to help you reduce the friction and use gated content to generate higher quality leads and give your sales reps more actionable information about the target accounts that are so valuable to your business.

The first rule in gated content is not to request more information than the person thinks is valuable. Remember, personal information is a form of currency online. The more personal information a person has to give, the more valuable the information they will get has to be.

As an an example. Suppose you have a specification document behind a form that asks you:

• Name required
• Company name – required
• Email address: (mandatory field
• Company address – required
• Company phone – required

This is far too much information for a data sheet. Most visitors just don’t give you that much information, especially if it’s their first time on your website. In this situation, consider how much information you really need from them in order to build a relationship. I would suggest that a simple email address is more than sufficient at this stage of the relationship.

Types of gated content

Next, let’s talk about the types of content that usually work well behind a form:

• eBooks: This type of content is a good way to demonstrate your authority on a subject. An eBook is usually a long format document that deals with a specific solution or strategy in a specific industry. It takes time to put eBooks together. After completion, however, they should be able to be “updated” as required due to changes in the industry.
• White papers: A white paper is a shorter document format than the eBook. However, it has a similar goal of demonstrating your company as a subject matter expert. White papers usually focus on a specific product, solution, or topic. White papers are authored from an authoritative position and should not be used to “sell” any product, service, or solution. These are not sales items, but teaching documents.
• Webinars: In today’s marketplace, finding a company to invite you to upcoming webinars is not a very hassle. Webinars are quickly being used to replace in-person events, and their success has saved the lives of many companies. Our experience has shown that the webinars are little used after the day on which they are held. Using this high quality content as gated content is a great way to bring what you have worked so hard on to life after the webinar event.
• Templates: There are literally few types of content that attract as much interest as document templates and spreadsheets. This is a tremendous amount of content that you can provide to your website visitors to make their lives easier. Does your product require special calculations to determine either price or availability? Put together a table so that you can find out for yourself. Remember, 87% of shoppers want to do part or all of the buying journey themselves.

Personalized content

There is a lot of talk about the importance of personalization in B2B marketing today. There are several ways to view personalization. Personalization can mean adding a person’s name to the subject line of an email message. Personalization can also mean placing an image that the recipient of an email or a visitor to your website can refer to.

Personalization can also mean providing information to a prospect based on where they are in their buying process. You can use this strategy and develop your gated content and the information necessary to access that information appropriately.

With this in mind, remember to gather information for people who are just beginning their buying process. This is usually simpler information, such as general solutions that your company can creatively provide, or very basic product information.

Since this information is meant to please the buyer early in their process, the information you need should also be pretty simple. As mentioned earlier, it might just be an email address.

Next, make sure you have information relevant to a buyer as they delve deeper into their buying process. This could be information showing how to install your products, more technical information, or even a comparison of your product or solution against your competitors.

At this stage, you might start asking for a little more information like your name and possibly your company name.

As you gradually increase the value of the information you provide, you will see less resistance to gathering more information to help your business move forward in the sales process.