My mentor, John Sonnhalter posted these three points on B2B search on his blog Tradesmen Insights.

These were gleaned from  just released research from Google:

  • Search – Still big and this should be no surprise. Internet usage among the B-to-B sector jumped from 71% to 88% over the last year.  Even more enlightening is when asked about how they used search to research business purposes; there was a 23% increase over last year from 67% to 90%.
  • Videos – More companies in the B-to-B space are creating videos. They range from how-to videos to thought leadership topics. Here’s an interesting stat – the C suite indexes very high on using videos to find info.
  • Digital marketing to reinforce the sales force By the time a B-to-B purchaser actually engages with a company or sales rep, they’re 57% of the way through the decision process.

The trend continues to grow for companies to find other companies- suppliers and customers- online. And that almost always means via search- where “almost always”  is 88% according to the first bullet above.

We  here at Speaking of Precision have lost count of how many topics we have that are page one on Google.

Page One Number One Google- Photo Too!
Page One Number One Google- Photo Too!

Here are 5 tips from my experience to help you be findable: 

  • Post regularly– it increases you visibility and Your “trust factor;”
  • Provide compelling facts and information- not just promotional text. SHARE REAL VALUE;
  • Always include a photo– often the photo gets to page one on Google images  even when the text doesn’t;
  • Tag. Tags should be relevant and include combinations of terms, not just single words. Think, “search phrases.”
  • Share on LinkedIn Groups

I can tell you that folks aren’t calling in from seeing advertisements in the phone book these days. And they aren’t seeing salesmen or returning your voice mails.

They do connect when they find what you have posted online.

Be findable!

How about you? Do you have any tips to share to increase your “findability?”

I can give you 271,574 reasons why you probably ought to make it a priority.

Sorry for the moire pattern, but how about those views?

That is the number of views to posts this blog all time since we went live in the summer of 2010.

You are missing hundreds of thousands of opportunities to connect with people who are looking for what you can provide if you don’t blog about how you can help them.

Need more reasons?

Over 240,000 potential viewers get to see our blog name and title 3 times a week on the various linked groups to which I and my colleague belong. We post our blog to our linked in groups each day if it is appropriate to that group.

Even if the group members don’t click through, just seeing the title of the post and our blog name raises our visibilty and gets our idea (the title!) out.

You could be doing this too.

Yes it’s a commitment. Anything worth doing requires a commitment. But the numbers show that we have had a lot of interest in what we have chosen to post.

271,754 interests to be precise.

You could generate similar interest, I’m sure.

So here’s a gentle post from my mentor and friend, John Sonnhalter,  to help you see that this “Blog Thing” is doable-  and worthwhile.

Afraid of starting your blog?

John’s blog Tradesmens Insights  covers the business to business and business to tradesman market sectors.

At PMPASpeakingofprecision.com we try to publish three posts a week. We don’t seem to have a problem finding original content to write about- if you count publishing standard industry information or lessons we’ve learned along the way as ‘original content.’

But the proof is in the pudding, as my grandmother used to say, and 271, 574 servings say our pudding is worth the time.

Proof is in the pudding!

I’ll bet yours is too.

PS, If 271,574 views isn’t good enough, how about having over 100 items show up on Google page 1?

Want to talk about this further? Leave a comment and we’ll connect.

Pudding courtesy of Stephanie Meyer at Fresh Tart Blog. thanks Stephanie!