B2B Buyers Are Still Skeptical About Vendor Content

A recent research report by TrustRadius paints a rather sobering picture of the effectiveness of B2B content marketing. The B2B Buying Disconnect is based on the results of two surveys. One was a survey of 418 individuals who played a key role in a significant software purchase during the previous two years, and the second was a survey of 190 individuals who worked for software vendors in a marketing or sales leadership capacity.

Although the TrustRadius study focused exclusively on technology buyers and sellers, the results would almost certainly be similar in other cases involving complex B2B products or services.

In the buyer survey, TrustRadius asked participants to select which sources of information they used during their purchasing process from a list of 12 options. Then survey participants rated each information source in terms of helpfulness and trustworthiness. The table below depicts where each source of information ranked across these three dimensions.

There are three primary takeaways from these rankings.

Buyers prefer resources that provide direct experience with the product or service - Survey respondents ranked product demos and free trials as very helpful and very trustworthy.

Buyers value information from third parties - Respondents described referrals from friends, colleagues, or peers as very helpful and very trustworthy. Buyers also ranked user reviews and customer references as very helpful, and they rated conversations with analysts and recommendations by solution consultants as highly trustworthy.

Except for product demos, buyers place little value on most types of vendor-provided information - Survey respondents rated vendor sales reps and sales presentations fairly high in terms of helpfulness, but low in terms of trustworthiness. Respondents ranked vendor or product websites and vendor collateral (e.g. ebooks, case studies, webinars) as the least helpful and least trustworthy sources of information.

These research findings should be a wake-up call for B2B marketers. In the 2017 edition of the B2B content marketing survey by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, only 34% of B2B marketers rated their content marketing strategy as extremely or very effective. The comparable percentage was 30% in 2016 and 38% in 2015. The buyer attitudes captured in the TrustRadius study explain (at least in part) why only a minority of companies are achieving a high level of success with content marketing.

As marketers, we need to expect and accept that many potential buyers will view our content with a skeptical eye. To overcome this skepticism, we need to "go the extra mile" to create content that is objective and non-promotional, and most importantly, content that delivers real value to our potential buyers.

Top image courtesy of Terry Johnston via Flickr CC.