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Today’s B2B buyers rely on digital channels through every stage of their journeys — even long after in-person sales interactions with reps.

As a result, commercial organizations’ efforts to identify, nurture, and pursue opportunities “serially” — first through digital engagement via marketing, followed by a hand-off to sales for in-person interaction — is failing to support the way customers actually buy.

Instead, the best companies must evolve a “parallel” commercial engine, where digital and in-person strategies complement each other at every stage of the buyer’s multi-channel journey.

In other words: We have all worked hard to create for our organization a “seamless view of the customer.” Now, it’s time to build a seamless view of our organizations for customers.

To get there, most suppliers will have to re-think — and ultimately, re-design — their websites, as customers aren’t just buying digitally. They’re relying heavily on suppliers’ websites to do so.

In fact, we found suppliers’ websites to be the most frequently-consulted digital channel for customers at every stage of the purchase process.

And yet, the vast majority of B2B websites aren’t designed to support that kind of buying behavior. Instead, they’re primarily designed to “broadcast.”

Specifically, we’re all seeking to tell the world three things: (1) who we are, (2) what we do, and (3) how we help.

To help buyers buy, however, B2B websites will have to meet three critical — and very different — design principles moving forward.

1. Give customers an entry point on their terms.

After reviewing hundreds of B2B websites across every major industry, we found only a handful that purposefully invite customers into a conversation. To do that, suppliers need to stop talking so much about themselves.

Rather, they should provide customers with an opportunity to share something about who they are, and what they’re looking to do — on their terms.

Really, it’s no different than common courtesy at a cocktail party. No one wants to be stuck talking to the person droning on about who they are and what they do. Yet that’s precisely what the vast majority of B2B websites do.

Not only is that kind of self-centered approach disengaging, but it also leaves the buyer wondering, “Do they even know who I am? Or what I actually do?” Or worse, “Do they even care?” It’s impersonal at best, and off-putting at worst — fostering questions rather than connections, and distance rather than assistance.

That said, we found a handful of websites that do, in fact, actively invite customers to engage on their terms. Square, for example, asks customers to identify their business sizes and types as a first step to entering the site. It’s the first — and nearly only — thing a visitor encounters upon landing on the home page. That information allows Square to offer customers what feels like a much more customized web experience.

Another example is vAuto.com. A division of Cox Automotive, vAuto sells enterprise software to auto dealers around world. Among those dealers are both used and new car sellers, along with wholesalers — some franchise-based, and some independent.

Those distinctions matter — not only for finding the appropriate vAuto solution, but they help to identify how that customer thinks about themselves.

vAuto has designed the front page of its website to allow buyers to self-identify along the dimensions most important to them, prior to going any deeper. The customer’s first choice upon landing at vauto.com is declaring, “I’m New Car,” “I’m Used Car,” or “I’m Wholesale.”

Notice that even the pronouns are specifically chosen to position the website as a learning and buying tool for customers, rather than a broadcasting tool for the supplier.

Questions to ask yourself:

1. How do our customers define themselves?
2. In their minds, which aspects of their identity most affect the way they look at suppliers like us?

2. Signal your solutions in customers’ language.

Just as the best websites invite customers into a conversation, they also guide buyers to supplier solutions using the language of customer outcomes — rather than supplier capabilities.

The best companies take the time to understand the specific business objectives customers are seeking to achieve, then organize their sites using language immediately recognizable to customers along those particular outcomes. That way, customers don’t have to translate.

Here’s another place where vAuto excels. The company employs actual customer-articulated business problems as the organizing framework for diving deeper into their broad solution set. It organizaes this information around headings like, “No one’s buying my inventory,” and, “The internet is killing my profits.”

At every step, the goal is to make online learning and buying as easy and as resonant as possible — all through an easy-to-follow path of breadcrumbs leading directly to vAuto’s unique solutions.

Questions to ask yourself:

1. What help are customers seeking from a supplier in your category?
2. What specific language would best resonate with your customers to describe that help?

3. Help customers do what they are on your site to do.

Finally, the best websites identify and then facilitate the specific tasks that customers come to your website to complete.

Take something like a cost calculator embedded directly into a website. A tool like that enables customers to independently calculate the costs of (in)action, rather than relying on sales reps to make the case for change. It’s a simple, practical idea, but it’s deployed with single-minded purpose: to allow the buyer to easily progress along the journey, while remaining in her preferred channel of choice.

Questions to ask yourself:

1. What specific buying tasks are your customers coming to your website to complete?
2. How easy is it to find support for those tasks on your site right now?

There’s a great deal to be learned from the handful of world-class websites we found as part of our work. For a more detailed discussion, check out this video, where you’ll also find examples and a practical worksheet to plan next steps. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an evolving science. While some of the core principles may stick around forever, the more nuanced parts of it are subject to continuous change. As a result, many of the “proven” tactics people have used in the past — keyword stuffing, link schemes, and so on — are now the stuff of legend.

In our new guide, 20 SEO Myths to Leave Behind in 2018, we revisit some of the SEO trends that should continue to guide your strategy through 2018, while also highlighting how the practice has changed over the course of 2017.

Here are two myths to give you an idea of what to expect in the world of organic growth this year:

Myth: ‘Keyword optimization is THE key to SEO.’

Not anymore. Today, a new artificial intelligence (AI) system called RankBrain is helping Google understand the relationships between topics and search terms. What does this mean to you? It’s time to dial back the exact keyword matches — your content may be hitting the wrong audience.

Myth: ‘Local SEO doesn’t matter anymore.’

I’ll just leave this here:

“If you are a local business, having a website isn’t enough to rank well in Google’s local search listings,” says Kristopher Jones of the SEO agency LSEO.com. “If you want to rank well you need to unlock, verify, and optimize a Google+ Businsess Page.”

He’s right. Local SEO couldn’t be more important today, and growing companies are consistently crushing it under local search queries. In fact, national or global companies are advised to stay away from local search terms because they don’t stand a chance against local Google+ business pages.

Unless your organization benefits from a dedicated SEO marketing specialist who can work on this stuff day-in and day-out, keeping up with the latest changes in the world of SEO can be a struggle. But in the end, adjusting your strategy based on search ranking algorithm updates or changes in the way search results are displayed visually can be incredibly impactful on business results.

Check out the SEO Myths PDF to learn more about what changes you’ll need to make with your SEO strategy moving forward.

There’s really nothing like a truly spectacular lunar event. 

I remember the first time I saw a lunar eclipse, for example — I was in the third grade and, for the first time, didn’t immediately tune out my Dad’s seemingly endless enthusiasm for science and history.

I also remember the first time I first witnessed a lunar new year celebration during a childhood trip to San Francisco. It, too, was enchanting and captivating.

And a supermoon — who can miss that? In fact, earlier this week, people in certain parts of the world were treated to the phenomenon of a “super blue blood moon,” in which a lunar eclipse, blood moon, and super moon are all combined.

Naturally, there was a great deal of chatter about in social media, with brands and other Pages jumping on board to celebrate this lunar event — including a little-known Page for EBUZZ, which racked up 16 million views for its “coverage.” 

But here’s the thing: The EBUZZ “live feed” of the supermoon — casting over the Temple of Poseidon in southern Greece — was actually just a continual broadcast of a still image with certain nature sound effects playing over it. 

In other words, while Facebook has made several major announcements in 2018 about its efforts to curb inauthentic Page content, this largely inactive Page was earning views in the millions for what was essentially fake content.

Source: CNN

What’s worse, the content wasn’t original or recent. The photo being used for the live stream actually belongs to photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos. 

The stream remained active for roughly four hours before Facebook removed it, though the EBUZZ Page — which hadn’t previously posted anything since September 2017 — does appear to still be intact.

For context, Facebook tallies views according to the number of users who watch a video for at least three seconds, either directly on the Page or what it appears in their News Feeds.

That 16 million users engaged with the content long enough for the video to reach that metric raises questions about the strength and veracity of recent efforts announced by Facebook. In January alone, for example, the social channel committed to curbing the amount of Page content in users’ News Feeds — instead placing greater emphasis on content from personal networks — surfacing more local news in certain regions of the U.S., and completely banning all ad content related to cryptocurrency.

And on January 19, Mark Zuckerberg also announced Facebook’s efforts to ensure that news items appearing on Facebook would only be from “trusted sources.”

Facebook has not officially commented on this incident.