B2B Audiences

Original Post  - Oct 11, 2007

We’ve been talking about customer-centric websites, but what are your customers doing at home? Obviously these results apply to the consumer market instead of B2B, but B2B is usually not far behind:

Silicon Alley Insider: Almost All Consumers Now Use Web for Buying Decisions -

• 53% share bookmarks
• 56% use RSS feeds
• 35% use tag clouds
• 70% read blogs regularly
• 67% regularly watch videos on YouTube, etc.
• 92%+ use the web when making product buying decisions (research, reviews, retailer location, price comparison, etc.)
• 54% start their product research at a search engine
• 55% rely on user reviews most when choosing products
• 21% rely on expert reviews most
• After product selected, most important criteria when choosing where to buy are price (38%) and site reputation (38%)
• 36% use mobile phone to check headlines

There is a pretty huge jump in the acceptance of many of these technologies, including RSS, tag clouds and videos. All three should be considered in the design of your b2b web site. If you were in doubt about the importance of your website: 92%+ use the web when making product buying decisions and as we’ve shown in the ABM-Harris 2006 Interactive B2B survey, this applies to B2B research as well. And community is important, as is the thoughts of peers in the reviews of products and services.