What do visitors want to read?

You’ve probably put a variety of information on your site over the years for business customers. Would you like to know what types of information appeal to your B2B visitors the most? Do you think you’d be surprised at the answers? I was.

Marketing Sherpa and KnowledgeStorm surveyed marketers and readers of B2B content in February 2007 to find out what each group thought was the most important.

Marketers and content readers agreed that case studies, research on your industry, how-to guides, and top ten lists were all useful types of publication for sites. But as you can see in the charts below, marketers placed a much greater importance on case studies, whereas content readers found all four types of material of similar value.

(Each group was asked “What type of content interests you the most?”)

This table shows what marketers gave the highest priority.

Here is how the content readers responded.

I guess it’s not too surprising that marketers would rank case studies at the top. Sales teams want case studies because they are a type of customer reference. They are hard to produce because customers usually don’t want to tell competitors about their success. So if Sales wants it and it’s hard to do, it must be important. Right?

Well, visitors agree case studies are important, but they think lots of other things are important too.

These charts probably also point out that B2B visitors arrive to your site at different stages of the buying cycle. Early in the cycle visitors may not even be looking at products yet; they may just be trying to come up to speed on your industry. Or perhaps they are already a customer and are looking for information on how to get more value from their purchase. It’s important to provide material to satisfy visitors at these different stages. Especially in the early stages when business buyers are doing research you have an opportunity to not only provide information, you can also frame the discussion.

The survey goes on to look at how marketers decide to update their content (hint: they need to think like publishers, not like marketers) and how well marketers target different stages of the buying cycle. It’s free until March 15 and well worth a look.