B2B Digital Content and Veal Parmesan

It’s time to think differently.
Things have changed.

Your task at hand is to plan dinner. In this case, veal parmesan. You have confidence in your general cooking skills. But, for this specific veal dish, you need to know the ingredients and how long to bake it.. 
 
So, you turn to a web browser for help in completing your task. You query “veal parmesan recipe” and tap on one of many search results. It’s just that easy, right? 
 
That would be no.

Instead of seeing the recipe, which the search result promised, you are immediately presented a litany of content including the history of veal parmesan, how it likely originated in Italy, became a staple on U.S. tables in the 70s and 80s, and blah, blah, blah. You immediately start scrolling. Volumes of superfluous content follows, mixed with promotional content for cooking utensils – and you are still scrolling. All along the way are needlessly large pictures of expertly plated veal parmesan meals which set a visual expectation you know you will not achieve.

You still do not have the recipe.

How could it be more frustrating? When scrolling ends, there’s a button to tap that makes another promise to deliver the actual recipe. Or, you go back to another search result and it starts again. 

If you are speedy at scrolling, patient and lucky, at some point, the ingredients and instructions finally appear.

We all recognize this experience. It’s clickbait. When you need to accomplish a task quickly, it can be frustrating to borderline infuriating. 

How Does This Relate to B2B Content?

The majority of B2B buyers have a list of tasks to accomplish each day. In many cases a search engine is the first step towards accomplishing a task, followed by browsing a corresponding landing page that hopefully, quickly makes good on its promise. 

B2B Information Architecture (IA) becomes critical at this point. For the majority of B2B products and related services, buyers want to see the minimum information necessary to confirm legitimacy of the product or service and supplier—no preaching, no teaching, no boasting.

The B2B buyer just wants to accomplish the task at hand. Nothing more. Nothing less.

In combination with an efficient User Interface (UI), effective IA requires surprisingly little top content. Ensuring top content is adjacent to actionable functionality, like “buy it”, delivers what’s promised and becomes a force multiplier for conversions.

In B2B digital business, this point cannot be over emphasized. 

Conversely, search engines devour content. Often it seems the more the better. Additionally, extended search optimization content is often required to attain desired rankings. Again, IA is critical. While carefully avoiding distraction, which negatively affects conversions, this content can be distanced below actionable top content. (Archaically referred to as “below the fold.”) Properly tagged, it can have the same impact on SEO.

Things Have Changed

Success at B2B digital business is all about ensuring speed and providing a path-of-least resistance for buyers to accomplish their tasks. Accordingly, often less is more. Information Architecture is a science in itself. It goes hand-in-hand with understanding the buyer. 

Unlike clickbait, the optimum amount of content, and how it is organized, respects the buyer, becoming an important tactic in generating leads and revenue.

Now, let's cook.