Your buyers complete 60%-70% of their research online before reaching out to you.

In a typical journey (per Gartner), B2B buyers spend just 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers, while any individual sales rep gets just 5% of a customer’s time.

That means your sellers have fewer opportunities to influence the sale.

Yet distributors continue to dedicate disproportionate resources to sales relative to their websites.

Your website needs to work with your sales reps and other customer-facing team members to help your customers make the right buying decisions. That means going far beyond just listing products and features.

Distributors must create a rich library of genuinely useful resources so prospects and customers can find what they need from you. When trying to find products or services to solve their problems, buyers are searching for answers to questions like:

• How have companies like mine solved this problem?
• What’s out there that could solve our problem?
• How do we determine the specs for the product that we need?
• How can this product be used in this application?
• What should I be aware of when selecting a product for this use?
• What’s the difference between Product A and Product B?
• What new technology is available or coming soon that could change how I solve this problem?

When you answer these questions on your website, you keep prospects from falling out of your sales funnel, and customers from venturing to competitor sites for answers. Individual sales reps can also use these in their prospecting and customer support efforts.

If you want to build a useful resource library on your site, you’ll need the following content types:

Educational articles: Educational articles tend to be top of funnel, meaning they are designed to educate your audience on more general challenges they may be facing. For example, the factors you should consider when selecting the right coupling for a specific application, how to prevent rust, tips for preventative tool maintenance or how to winterize a fleet of vehicles. This is also where you could talk about service-oriented content, such as how to increase efficiencies on your plant floor or how technology can help customers reduce stockouts. This is where your sales reps’ expertise and experience are translated online and where you can show off industry expertise and knowledge of your customers’ businesses.

Product comparisons: When customers are shopping for a solution, inevitably, they will want to compare a product with another similar solution. It’s a natural part of our shopping process today. If they don’t find that information on your website, they will definitely look somewhere else. You could compare products from one supplier (the differences between three different tools and what they’re best suited for) or from different suppliers. Review the pros and cons of other products for common applications.

Case studies: Case studies can highlight how your business helped another customer solve a problem (inefficiencies in the manufacturing process, continual stockouts of a specific product, the wrong tool for the job) and created real results measurable results. Or you could feature real use cases for the products you sell. For example, you may want to explain how an abrasive is used in a medical device manufacturing process if that is a core market for your business.

Supplier highlights: Helping your prospects and customers understand what different manufacturers bring to the table is useful even though it’s more promotional than the other types of content we’re suggesting. However, bringing your suppliers into your library has dual benefits: It showcases the brands you know well and gives your suppliers incentive to support your content development. Suppliers often have resources you can and should reuse, repurpose or adapt for your needs.

Downloadable resources and leave-behinds: Content does not have to be limited to living on your website. Certain resources lend themselves well to downloading and printing to share with peers or to use as reference. Tool maintenance best practices and safety tips are two examples. Sales reps may want one-page resources that they can print and leave behind at a customer location.

A digital resource library is no longer optional. And the benefits are clear: Gartner’s research found that customers who found supplier information helpful were 2.8 times more likely to feel like that purchase was easy, and they were 3 times less likely to regret that purchase.

In other words, there’s no downside to investing in building a great content library to support your overall sales efforts and help your customers find what they need faster.

Lindsay Young is the President of 3 Aspens Media, which helps companies in distribution and manufacturing markets develop relevant and helpful marketing content to support their customers’ journeys. Lindsay is a professional writer, editor and marketer with an MBA and more than 20 years of experience leading and producing online and print publications for publishers, distributors, manufacturers, consultants and software companies. She was previously the editor of Modern Distribution Management. Reach her at [email protected].

SHIFT | The Future of Distribution

Lindsay Young will be one of our speakers at the upcoming unified industry summit MDM is hosting Sept. 25-27 in Broomfield, Colorado. The SHIFT event will help distributors navigate business model transformation across sales structure, digital and data analytics. Learn more about SHIFT here.