No One Searches Online for My Products, Do They?

Do industrial and manufacturing companies use the Internet to source products and services?

This one should seem fairly obvious if you consider your own life and how you find information for just about anything from anywhere these days.  We can buy event tickets, find a ride, and buy any consumer good, as we know, but do engineers, plant managers, purchasing managers, and executives really go online when they want to buy a piece of equipment, source a material, purchase a component, or find a B2B service provider?  I often get comments from executives of industrial and manufacturing companies in some form or another relating to this topic, something like 'we are too niche/custom/special/technical and no one ever looks for our -insert your B2B widget here- online' or ' we never get leads from our website so no one must be searching'.

Earlier this week I posted an article titled 5 Key Stats & 5 Critical Steps To Hit Your Top Line Targets and in this case, statistics do not lie.

Stat#1 - 93% of B2B purchases start with an Internet search.¹

How can that be so high you may be asking?

Recently another consultant and I were engaged by a large capital equipment manufacturer to survey customers and prospects to uncover insights into how they purchased their particular piece of equipment.  The owner of this successful business, which by the way has a very large (approaching 50%) market share for this product, stated flat out that people he talks to are really using the Internet to buy this piece of equipment. As it turns out after over 40 interviews not only did every single first-time buyer use Internet searches and the resulting information to buy the equipment but every existing customer (some with over 20 pieces of this equipment) used the Internet in subsequent additional purchases of this equipment.

So not only were new buyers going online to look at options and research solutions but people that have already chosen a vendor and have many of these machines on their shop floor were doing online searches as a part of a repeat purchase.

Needless to say, our client was pretty surprised.

This makes sense - as we dug into the details of the interviews we learned that new buyers were looking for reputable sources and comparing features and prices as you would expect.  But what was interesting was that the buyers that had this equipment did the same thing.  They compared prices, looked for new features, and compared competitors.  In essence, they were re-justifying their choice of equipment supplier, keeping them honest with pricing, and making sure they had the latest technical features.

The implications for this company are pretty large.  If they ever hope to address the part of the market that they do not sell to now they need to have a strong Internet presence.  Smaller competitors are attacking our client online since the small guys can't compete with a large entrenched customer base and a big traditional marketing budget possessed by our client.  Our client also needs to update their engagement and communication with their large customer base to manage the messaging and educate them about technical features and not let the conversation be driven by searches that show the smaller competitors..  

So, if 93% of B2B purchases start or include an Internet search what do we need to do now to prepare for 2016?

My next article will tackle that question and more.

[1]  http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2010/10/26/how-to-use-social-media-to-generate-b2b-leads/