Steve Woods, author of the book Digital Body Language, was one of the speakers at the Online Marketing Summit which was here in Cleveland on Monday. We learned quite a few interesting things at the event and thought we might share a little bit of that insight.

Steve’s area of expertise is B2B marketing, and in his presentation he talked a bit about today’s B2B buyer. We thought that the tips he gave might be helpful for someone who is marketing a B2B product or service online. For example, he gave the following (paraphrased) list of attributes about today’s buyer:

• Wants information on his or her own timeframe.
• Does not want to be sold to (but wants access to sales people when ready).
• Wants interaction, not marketing. Data is critical.
• Will likely interact with your brand/website multiple times before making a purchase decision.

Based on those points, here are some questions to consider about your site: What do you offer in the way of immediately available information? Is your info all locked up in white papers that require lots of personal information (and which will clearly result in a sales call when completed)? Does the customer have to schedule a demo in order to get anything more than a cursory amount of information about the product?

When you are thinking about these questions and how you might tailor your site and your materials to meet your prospect’s needs, remember that they are going through a process. As Steve described it, the process is as follows (with our interpretation in parenthesis):

• Recognition (this is where your PPC campaign helps prospects realize that you exist)
• Evaluate (key time to provide easy access to information about the product/service)
• Sample (now the prospect is ready for a demo, or to trade their info for more detailed specs, etc.)
• Integrate (now the sales team is involved and from here it’s about follow-through)
• Test (the soon-to-be customer is trying things out)
• Deploy (you have a customer)

The goal of your website should be to help prospects make their way through this process. Prospects are unlikely to give information that will lead to sales calls at the outset. They need to know more about your offering to see if it is worth that kind of commitment. As they learn more about the product they will become more likely to trade their contact info for more detailed information such as a demo.

This is the kind of information that is good to keep in mind as you are designing landing pages for your marketing campaigns. It will also help you evaluate  the success of the campaigns. From a PPC perspective, you might expect broad keywords to bring visitors who are more interested in the materials meant for early stage prospects. That is where they should be directed. More specific, niche keywords might correspond to more advanced prospects who might be willing to sign up for a demo or white paper. Again, the landing page should reflect that.

As your campaign progresses, your analytics should guide your decisions. After all, that is where you will find the clues to your prospect’s digital body language.