We’ve all heard it before, “Content is King.” And by this point we’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who still believes a beautiful website is valuable absent quality content.

That said, we’re still left wondering …

What Content Should Be On My Website?

Let’s begin with the sobering facts from Accenture:

• B2B buyers do their research online — in staggering numbers. 94%.
• Of those buyers, a paltry 16% want a sales person involved in their research process.
• The study that generated these statistics is already three years old and was the beginning of a trend.

With that in mind, if B2B buyers want to research online, and they emphatically don’t want sales people involved in their process, then the answer to our central question is another question:

What Content Do B2B Buyers Want?

In a word, everything. The successful B2B site must cater to multiple successive audiences each with differing interests and priorities.

Workers/Users are often interested in details about features, functionality, and support. Omit these at your peril: the guys at the bottom of the ladder are the ones conducting research and making recommendations to the folks on the top.

IT People need all that nitty gritty technical information to ensure that your software or service isn’t going to break their infrastructure or weaken security. Making their lives hard is a sure fire way to put the kibosh on any deal.

Accountants and Lawyers will want to know all about pricing, licensing, and terms of service before signing off on any major purchases.

Managers and Executives will want to know about a company, its people, and its reputation — and they’ll want high level summaries of any offering that helps them understand what they need to decide, without drowning them in what they don’t.

And one additional note:

Although 16% of buyers at any level don’t want a sales person involved, 71% want them to be available to answer questions.

Final Thoughts

“What content should be on my website,” is such a common question because so many competing interests war with each other. And among the biggest is sales’ desire to withold information in order to compel contact. But that’s MAD.

If a B2B site isn’t providing the information visitors require, they’re not going to call the sales team looking for it. Instead, they’ll close the website and move on. Nobody wins then.