I found a good article today explaining the B2B sales cycle. There are a couple things I’d like touch on from the article. To start with, here’s an illustration showing the B2B sales cycle:

Picture courtesy of Corporate Website Marketing

“Search Engine Marketing, as a part of Corporate Website Marketing, should play a major role because it helps potential customers research possible solutions and helps ‘get on their short list’ of possible vendors.” This is why SEO is so important for your industrial website. Many of your potential customers are using the internet to choose their small list of companies to do further research on and ultimately buy from. You need SEO to have a fighting chance of being found ahead of your competition in the search engines.

Later, the article discusses the difference between how the ‘The Influencers’ and ’The Decision Makers’ and how the types of keyword phrases they use. “The influencers normally use specific searches, and they typically use three or more words.” “The decision makers, on the other hand, use the Internet search engines to perform high level searches. They typically use two or three words when they perform a search.”

This is an example of why it’s important to optimize for a broad range of keywords. For example let’s say you offer machining and gear solutions. You want to be found for the keyword phrase ‘machining services’ and ‘high volume cnc machining’ to make sure your covering both ends of the selling cycle.

The B2B sales cycle is much different than B2C. Make sure your industrial website and SEO program are tailored specifically for B2B sales and you’ll have greater success.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under General, Industrial B2B Marketing, Industrial SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.