B2B eCommerce Strategy for Growth — Chapter 3 | xTuple | Inventory Management Solutions for Growing Manufacturers

Marketing or ERP Content —

Managing customer conversions, sales campaigns and product details

If you’ve ever worked on developing or implementing an eCommerce project — or any website for that matter — you know how important content is for increasing conversions. The art of fine-tuning marketing content, campaigns, keywords and product descriptions is essential for ensuring customers find your products, get engaged and make purchases. Ensuring that content management is fluid, easy and non-technical was incredibly important when selecting a B2B eCommerce platform for sales and customer service.

Unfortunately, most eCommerce systems are built to handle products and shopping carts well, but they are not good at creating marketing campaigns and various other content types like testimonials, blogs, reviews and company news. We recommend a platform built on the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). The Drupal system handles both eCommerce and content marketing very well. With Drupal, content types make it incredibly easy for customers to manage large amounts of content on their website (blogs, news, marketing pages, landing pages, etc.) as well as managing internal ads, promos, homepage carousels, and the like.

Consider Your Content Needs

Many aspects of content that need to be considered. Let’s talk about each.

Marketing Content vs. ERP Content

If you were to look at a Manufacturer’s ERP and review the Product information, you’d quickly see that it is not optimized for customer browsing. Product descriptions, for example, are written for sharing technical information and very specific product details. This is great when you are working to help a customer on the phone find what they are looking for, or if your employees need to quickly review information about a product that is on the shelves, but it’s not efficient content for the typical Web user.

In the example shown here of the xTupleCommerce system, we have separated the product details into ERP information and Marketing information. In the ERP, additional fields were added that are specific to the eCommerce site. This allows you to write marketing descriptions for your customers and keep the detailed information for your employees in the ERP.

Now, imagine having about ten thousand products in your database. That is a daunting task: to manually re-write ten thousand product descriptions. To solve this, we have written scripts that duplicate the Product detail content into the marketing fields. This does a lot of work for you. Then your team will simply clean up the marketing data over time.

Search Engine Optimization

As previously mentioned, the industrial marketplace is seeing some of its biggest impact with their eCommerce channels thanks to search engine optimization. For the first time, SEO-boosted organic search is surpassing print, such as catalogs, in overall effectiveness with successful engagement of industrial customers.

Engagement is most active with websites providing technical information about products and product selection, comparisons and/or configurator guides. In addition to product descriptions, fields for saving metadata, page titles, and keywords associated with the product are essential for discovery and identification purposes. These fields are what search engines such as Google use to index your products. Again, this is all managed in the ERP and reflected in real-time on the B2B eCommerce website.

“Product data is essential content to drive engagement as well as provide a solid foundation for SEO.”

Marketing Campaign Content

Building an eCommerce site and allowing users to make purchases online is only the beginning of a successful eCommerce website. To continue growing your audience, improving your search engine results, and marketing your catalog of products, you must put effort into expanding your marketing campaigns.

The Drupal Content Management System (CMS) is an open source leader in the Web industry. It’s the platform that leading organizations such as B&H Photography, Weather.com, and even Whitehouse.gov use. Not only is it extremely robust and secure, it’s built to make content management intuitive and fluid.

Managing internal advertisements, user accounts, content updates, blogs, homepage carousels, promotions, and many other types of content is very easy with Drupal. You do not need to know any Web-based markup or styling languages such as HTML or CSS to work with Drupal. This empowers your marketing team to plan and execute marketing initiatives without the need of an IT team or coders.

Keep this powerful ease of use in mind when building an eCommerce site for a B2B or a B2C audience. In order to drive traffic to your site — and to earn and support conversions — you are going to need to provide high quality content. Lots of it. In order to achieve this, be conscious of the platform you choose and make sure that it will provide the tools required to manage this aspect of your business, effortlessly.

“The least amount of effort and time expended on managing your eCommerce system and related marketing efforts is valuable for yourself — and your customers.”

Executive Summary
Introduction —

Three Ways B2B eCommerce Benefits a Manufacturer
How Can You Meet Customer Demands for B2B eCommerce?
Chapter 1 — Sales Growth
Chapter 2 — Pricing Schedules
Chapter 3 — Marketing or ERP Content
Chapter 4 — Customer Engagement
Chapter 5 — Multiple Locations
Chapter 6 — Omnichannel Customer Experience
Chapter 7 — Sales Reps and Vendors
Chapter 8 — Customer Complexity
Chapter 9 — Customer Service
Glossary of eCommerce Terms
Conclusion

B2B eCommerce Strategy for Growth — Chapter 3