Business to Business Moves Online

It isn’t news to you that the nature of your relationships with your clients and prospects has changed. Existing relationships are more difficult to maintain as the people you used to deal with leave their posts, and their replacements (if there are any) are much less inclined to engage with IT providers. Cultivating new relationships is more difficult because prospects don’t feel the need to interact with IT providers until they’re ready to buy. They do their research online. If they contact you, the conversation will be about price.

What may be news is that there’s a more cost effective way to build, nurture and maintain relationships with clients and prospects. You don’t have to be in the same room (or the same country). You can build the trust online that forms the foundation of every sale. With one caveat – the relationships you build must be authentic. Everybody has a well-honed BS detector today. If you aren’t in it for the long haul, if you’re just trying to make your quarterly numbers, resign yourself to competing on price.

Return On Influence

There’s networking and relationship-building for business, and there’s ‘sales disguised as networking’. Don’t confuse the two because your prospects won’t. The first one is truly helpful because he wants to make and keep relationships. The second one is interacting only to fill an immediate need.

By being helpful over time, even when there’s no imminent payoff on the horizon, you become a trusted advisor. And you’re able to accomplish this fairly easily, because it’s a one to many relationship. By communicating relevant and useful information through your blog (and commenting on other appropriate blogs), and/or a newsletter, white papers, videos, your website etc., you build a reputation. As long as the content you develop is high quality, people with an interest will find it and disseminate it to others.

Starved for Time, Not Information

It seems counter intuitive. Why develop more content when people don’t have time to consume the information that’s already available to them? If you develop content that resonates, or informs in a way that’s valuable, or entertains (or preferably, all three), people rightly perceive it as a time saver. They didn’t have to hunt down these tidbits, assimilate them and think them through – you did it for them.

Content Strategy

Of course, you can’t deliver useful, relevant, compelling information off the cuff. You must determine what your positioning is. What subject matter do you want to be the trusted advisor for? And who are your target prospects? Once that’s done, you can develop a content strategy that outlines the research you’ll do and the topics you’ll cover. An added bonus is that, as search becomes more contextual (see Bing, Kosmix and Duck Duck Go), your relevant content becomes your search engine optimization (SEO). No need to trick the search engines into driving traffic. The same valuable information that keeps people interested, will also draw the interest of the search engines.

Tags: content strategy, digital relationships, return on influence