What Should You Give Visitors to Your Website?

When a visitor arrives at your B2B website, what kind of information should they find?

Obvious answers might include: “info about my company” or “a way to reach our team.” Those are good starting points, but they don’t really provide a solution. That’s because they only address your side of the equation. People don’t arrive at your home page because they want to be marketed to; instead, they come to gain information and insights.

The topic of B2B content is something I have spent a long time thinking about. In fact, it’s a big part of our G3™ Agile Marketing System, which is short for Get Eyes, Give Knowledge, and Grow Pipeline. 

Deciding what to give website visitors ties squarely into that second goal about giving knowledge. In today’s post, I’m going to give you a framework you can use to not only optimize your marketing, but make your pages more valuable to the people you want to reach.

Luckily, there is an easy place to begin…

Start Where Two Sets of Needs Come Together

Your website was built to support your business. That’s not why visitors come to it, though. They don’t have your needs or goals in mind when they follow a link from Google, a social post, or an ad. They are simply looking for solutions to the problems they face.

This perspective and realization is crucial because you can’t only offer messaging that feels like marketing content. If you do, no one will pay attention. But if you offer the advice they need while building your credibility at the same time, then you can successfully gain their attention and trust.

This isn’t a complicated point, but it’s one that you have to accept if you want to make progress in B2B web design and marketing. Far too often we see websites, blog posts, and social ads that only take the marketer’s point of view into consideration. Find the place where your expertise comes together with your customers’ needs. Then you can start mapping out tools and ideas.

Consider Value and Format

Once you know what it is your target audience needs to see or read, you can create pieces that attract and retain their interest. These should offer information and insights your potential customers or clients couldn’t find elsewhere. In fact, they should want the information so badly that they are willing to trade something else (like a valid email address) in order to gain access to it.

The possibilities are virtually endless. As B2B marketing experts, we have given ebooks that guide the web design process, videos on B2B lead generation, and blog posts that teach about SEO, along with dozens of other things. Each of these tools shows a business owner or executive how they can run their business more intelligently. Even more importantly, they don’t have the same generic tips that are floating all over the internet.

After you hit on a winning idea, you need to decide on the format. Ebooks are easy to create, while videos can be more memorable and engaging. Articles (like this one) are quick to read and let you link to other resources, but take more work than infographics and visuals.

The point here isn’t that any of these is right or wrong, and certainly not better or worse. Instead, it’s to get you thinking about what capabilities you have to create different kinds of content, as well as which ones might be most useful to your target market. Again, the idea is to find the overlap between the two – the type of content you can create quickly and affordably that will still be valuable to potential visitors.

Create a Resource Hub on Your Website for Visitors

By following the advice I’ve given so far, you can generate content that is interesting and engaging and ultimately drives marketing results from visitors. After all, if people find your media to be useful and insightful, then they are likely to learn more about your work and listen to your suggestions. Ultimately, they may even reach out to work with you. That’s the entire foundation of the G3™ Agile Marketing System.

To really make things work, though, I would suggest you shouldn’t rely on a few pieces of content. You should have dozens working for you at the same time.

The way to accomplish this is by building a resource hub on your website (even if you don’t call it by that name). This can be a collection of articles, ebooks, videos, and other materials all created to help searchers learn more while showing off your expertise at the same time.

By creating a hub, rather than a few individual pieces of content, you accomplish some important things. First, you keep your focus on providing a lot of information and perspectives in one place. That makes your website more useful to customers. You also give them a reason to stay in your website, which builds familiarity. As you will already know, getting people to know and recognize your company is incredibly important when offering B2B products and services.

Best of all, your resource hub can be built, grown, and updated over time. You can add new types of media, narrow in on a very specific buyer type, and even test different messages and formats. As you do, you won’t just be creating content, but strengthening your sales funnel and giving existing leads a reason to keep coming back and engage with your company further.

Figuring out what to share on your website isn’t just about meeting your marketing goals. Ultimately, lead generation benchmarks are important, but giving valuable insights to future customers is the best way to get them to know and trust you. And it’s what leads to those sales opportunities you wanted to create when you hired a B2B web design agency in the first place.

Learn more about our agile marketing support for companies that need a hand with marketing and not having to build their own internal full team or just want to lean on us to deliver along with your company.