If you think answering questions in online business Q&A sites like Business.com Answers isn’t worth your time, I’m going to try to change your mind. Opt out of online Q&A and you’re leaving money on the table, period.

First, consider these statistics from a recent report by search marketing agency Enquiro:

• 39 percent of people researching for a first-time B2B purchase say they will rely on word of mouth and the opinions of other business people
• More than half of business buyers talk to other people who use a product as either their first or second task in the purchase process

Bottom line: Word-of-mouth recommendations play a starring role in today’s business purchase process.

And how are people looking for this word-of-mouth input? In business-focused online Q&A sites. Consider this excerpt from a recent string from Business.com Answers, our B2B question-and-answer site:

Subject: Top email service providers for campaigns

Kelly (user): I am looking for the top ESPs (Email Service Providers) for sending tactical and operational emails. I am looking for an on-premise or hosted solution. Could you please let me know what you recommend?

Answer: I have used both Constant Contact and Streamsend to manage mass e-mail distribution. Both have worked very well. I preferred Streamsend due to their pricing structure (based on e-mails sent, not contacts in your database). – Jeff Arnold, Pocket-Promo.com

Answer: Infusionsoft also offers a great service. You can watch a demo on their site and they also offer a free trial service to see if they’re a fit for your business and your needs….I’ve just switched to them. – Anita Campbell, Small Biz Trends

Answer: Some email service providers are Constant Contact, Delivra, iContact and Yesmail. You may also want to look at Lyris, a powerful email marketing service. – Jim Alimena, BlumbergExcelsior

[ Read the full exchange about email service providers on Business.com Answers ]

See anything you like here? If you’re one of the companies mentioned, I bet you do. And once your company name is in the mix, it’s in your best interest to dive into the dialogue. This isn’t a hard sell opportunity, but rather a chance to thank the person who recommended you and jump into the conversation. With someone who clearly needs to buy a product or service that you sell.

You’d respond: Anita, thanks so much for throwing our name in the hat here – we really appreciate it! Kelly, we’ve been providing exactly the services you mentioned for more than a decade, and I’d be happy to talk with you about how other clients are using our services and whether we might be a good fit for you. Feel free to call me at 555-555-5555 or email me at myname@mycompany.com. Looking forward to talking with you!

Now imagine that you’re scanning incoming inquiries about your industry (you can do that automatically in just a few minutes a day on Business.com Answers using our Category Subscription feature) and a question like this comes in. The person who’s asking the question sounds like she’s pretty close to ready to buy, doesn’t she? That’s a live lead. You want to talk to her now, while she’s narrowing down her choices. And answering questions like this on Business.com Answers or other business Q&A sites is a direct way to open those lines of communication.

As a vendor, should you jump in and answer? Absolutely. But again, it’s about sharing information, not a hard sell. Try to help the person understand the issue in a way that makes you look smart and responsive, and you’ll be top of mind when it’s time for that person to evaluate purchase options.

You’d write: Kelly, as you’re putting together your list, I hope you’ll include us and give me a chance to show you our most recent offerings. I’m sure you’re thinking about how your email tool will integrate with your existing CRM solution, and we’ve worked with all the major players, so getting everything running smoothly and passing information back and forth should be straightforward. We know there are lots of great options to explore – if you need a hand making sense of all the possibilities and parameters, I’m happy to help, whether we end up working together or not. Here’s my contact information – don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The point is that people making B2B purchase decisions are looking for input in all kinds of places. In online Q&A forums like Business.com Answers, they’re asking very direct questions about very specific (and often imminent) product and service needs. Other users may recommend you, and that’s great: Peer recommendations carry a lot of weight. But there’s an effective way for you to be part of that conversation too.

At Business.com Answers, we get questions about everything related to starting and running a business. Everything. If you sell it – whether “it” is software, accounting services, replacement parts for tractors, restaurant equipment, SEO advice, office design consulting, or a thousand other products or services – someone out there is thinking about buying it and is asking about it online. And if someone’s asking, you should be answering.

Are you convinced yet?

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Have you ever been absolutely sure that your product or service was the best solution for a particular prospect, only to find out that they chose to go with another vendor? What about that great product comparison whitepaper you developed which generated an amazing number of sales leads but no sales? Or the by-the-book email nurture campaign that just doesn’t perform like it should?

One major reason for these, according to a fascinating new study from Enquiro Research, is that the standard model of business buying as a thorough, rational, step-by-step process just isn’t accurate. Instead, this study of over 3,000 business buyers suggests  that B2B buying is driven largely by attempts to control personal and organizational risks. In other words, according to the authors, “99% of B2B buying is about covering your butt.”

These insights put a  new spin on the drive to improve B2B conversion rates – if business buying is driven more by risk mitigation than rational optimization, what does this mean for landing page content and offers? How can B2B online marketers create the lowest-risk environment for prospects to increase registrations, quote requests or purchases?

In a world where risk protection dominates rational evaluation in the business buying process, the following are important for improving B2B online marketing conversion rates:**

Understand Business Buyer Risk

To reduce business buyer risk and improve conversion rates, its essential to understand the extent to which your company, products/services or offers may be perceived as risky by your target buyers.

Purchase consideration clearly matters – there’s less risk in asking someone to provide their email address for an e-newsletter subscription than there is in a $100,000 purchase. Market position also matters, but its not just your company’s standing in the Fortune 500 or Inc. 5000 that makes a difference. Is your company the dominant player, or just entering the market, in the specific product or service for which you want to improve conversion rates? For example, few would doubt that Google’s “conversion rate” for signing-up new pay-per-click advertisers, where they’re the clear market leader among general search engines, is much higher than their conversion rate for radio advertising in their recently discontinued Audio Ads program.

For those of you marketing low price/low consideration products or services from a dominant, market-leading position, good news! There isn’t likely to be all that much you can do to improve conversion rates by reducing business buyer risk since risk is so low already.

On the other hand, B2B marketers working to establish their offerings in new markets and/or selling higher-consideration purchases may have considerable opportunity to improve conversion rates by addressing business buyer risk factors.

Become an “Approved Vendor” Through Teaser Offers

B2B online marketers struggling to drive conversions of a high consideration product for a relatively new business that hasn’t established a dominant market position are in a very difficult position. Even with a brilliantly conceived and executed marketing program focused on an accurate, rational view of your products’ superiority, quality conversions that lead to sales are still likely to be relatively rare. More often than not, prospects will fall through because they “got a great deal from an existing vendor” or “went with a vendor that’s already approved.”  None of the standard advice about improving conversion rates through better landing page design will put a dent in this issue because its not about making it easy for your prospects to see what they should do and act. Instead, the problem is not being on the approved vendor list in the first place.

So what do you do? Become a champion for a teaser offer (e.g., simplified product, free 30- to 60-day trial, etc.) that lowers the perceived risk of getting started for your target audience. To be an “approved vendor”, whether formally through the AP department or simply through the trust built up via multiple, positive interactions around the teaser offer, gives you a considerable leg up on future business. Its not as simple as landing page design but, if better landing page design was all you needed, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Use Search Marketing to Drive Word-of-Mouth

The Enquiro research suggests that word-of-mouth can be hugely influential during the business buying process, particularly for “blank slate” purchases where the buyer/company has no prior experience with purchasing that type of product or service. While search marketing is an extremely powerful tool for getting your message in front of business people searching for solutions, B2B search marketing tends to focus much more on driving prospects to whitepaper or webinar registration pages, or to ecommerce sites, than driving people to view and participate in conversations about a company’s products or services (for an exception, see Office Depot’s success incorporating customer reviews into paid search campaigns).

If your target buyers see your solution as moderately to highly risky, there’s reason to believe that alllocating  a portion of the search marketing budget toward driving more online and offline word-of-mouth activity will positively impact conversion rates. While it may not happen overnight, fueling the conversation can reduce the perceived risk of conversion.

Address Buyer Risk in Your B2B Demand Gen Program

One of the major challenges in driving online conversions or creating a more effective B2B demand gen programs is personalization – making each landing page, e-newsletter or offer as relevant as possible to the target prospect – and addressing business buyer risk gives us another opportunity to make demand gen practices more personally relevant. To improve conversions by reducing business buyer risk, you might consider the following changes to your demand generation program:

• Match prospects with happy customers that came from similar “risk” profiles – rather than matching a “blank slate” prospect with a reference customer that’s been with you for 20 years, have them talk with customer that made their “blank slate” purchase with you within the last couple years. Also, consider getting references from multiple people involved with the decision to purchase your product or service, and matching prospects with references at their same job level and role in the purchasing process.
• Consider linking to customer reviews or forum conversations from your conversion pages – giving prospects more than one option sounds like landing page heresy, but this may not be the case for higher consideration purchases and less established brands. If visitors to your landing page have any doubts at all about converting, at least take them to content that reduce the perceived riskiness of converting.
• If you sell primarily to large companies, get creative with landing page technology-  consider doing a reverse IP lookup on visitors to your landing pages, identifying the company and serving a dynamic content block on the page indicating that your company is already an approved vendor for the visitor’s company (if you are). Sounds creepy? Possibly for very early stage offers, but less so when a prospect visits for detailed spec sheets or to request a quote. NOTE: this won’t work well for small companies.

What do you think?  What would you do to improve conversion rates by reducing buyer risk?

For more background, you can download the first whitepaper from Enquiro’s new business buying study, “Mapping the BuyerSphere“, from the Enquiro web site.

**These recommendations, and many more, are part of  Business.com’s presentation ”Improving Search Marketing ROI During a Recession: Top 10 Insider Tips,” during the Online Marketing Summit 14-city Regional Whistle Stop Tour from May 5th through July 2nd, 2009. For a 20% discount on OMS registration from Business.com, use discount code business.com20.

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If you had $1,000 today to spend on B2B marketing to either generate new leads or nurture existing prospects, how would you spend it?

Unlike this group of marketing executives at large European companies, I’d spend it on generating new leads – do you really know enough about the financial stability of your existing customers and prospects to place a bet that improved nurturing will unlock budgets and drive sales?

What are your thoughts? How does the unique challenges your business faces drive B2B marketing focus on generating new leads versus prospect nurturing?

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This week Business.com participated in our first ever virtual trade show, MarketingProf’s Digital Marketing World Spring 2009. Unlike last week’s Search Engine Strategies NY, this event didn’t require any packing, security check points or jet lag. Our team didn’t even have to leave their desks to man our virtual booth, attend sessions or network with over 13,000 registered attendees. Instead, they simply logged on, chose avatars and let their fingers do the talking.

As with any new event we sponsor, the Business.com marketing team looked closely at the audience composition, brand impact and ROI of DMW Spring 2009. However, we ultimately viewed this show as a bit of an experiment. After all, we’ve been monitoring the increasing interest in virtual events.

Last December, BtoB Magazine reported on a best-practices research study among 545 professional IT buyers.  The study found that they are attending one virtual event per quarter on average. Eighty-two percent consider virtual events to be a valuable source for learning about new technologies, and 62% agreed with the statement, “They are an efficient use of my time, enabling me to see a variety of technologies in one place.”

Attendees of this week’s MarketingProf’s event seemed to agree. The event rocketed to Twitter’s #2 spot on trending topics the day of the event. For those of you still new to tweeting, this means the conference was the second biggest topic being discussed on Twitter on April 1st! According to event organizers, that equates to about 8 tweets a minute during the height of the conference. It probably helped that the keynote speaker was Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign Manager.

From an exhibitor standpoint, we were pleasantly surprised with the volume of traffic to our virtual booth. Here are some of our tips for B2B companies considering exhibiting at a virtual trade show:

Don’t Over-Staff Your Virtual Trade Show Booth

Though many attendees will wander the virtual trade show floor and stop by your booth, most are looking to gather information and click on your offers/links. Don’t take it personally if attendees aren’t inclined to chat one-on-one. We found many people enjoy the anonymity of not having to get pitched at every booth. Keep in mind that many may not even know exactly how to engage in individual chats.

Do Provide Virtual Trade Show Booth Visitors with Links to More Information

We found click-though rates were strong on these five links: Special Offers, About Business.com, B2B Marketing Research, B2B SEM Newsletter, Read our Blog. Make sure to also include collateral (whitepapers, media kit, audience profile, etc.) in the event’s Resource Library. Downloads of Business.com content numbered in the thousands!

Don’t Miss Out on Networking in the Virtual Trade Show Lounge 

We found it’s a hotbed of activity. Not surprisingly, ROI on virtual events, the economy and social media were hot topics. Via a group chat feature, our staff answered b2b questions, shared resources and when appropriate, let folks know about all the benefits of advertising with Business.com. What would a trade show be without shameless self promotion?

The jury is still out on the quality of leads from this event but initial analysis looks good. In fact, we’ve signed up for MarketingProf’s Fall 2009 virtual event. What’s your take on virtual events – future of the industry or flash-in-the-pan fad?

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