How Do B2B Buyers Search For Suppliers?

How to search for buyers? Many enterprises have asked this question. There is another way to think about this question: If we make the buyers find the suppliers easily, this problem will become easy to settle.

According to the latest research, The major means of network marketing is search engine and its own website, which is much more important than other category of B2B website platform. For business to business (B2B) buyers, search engines are the primary research source, and one of the top influences on purchasing decisions.

Among the buyers who search for suppliers, technology buyers accounted for 31.8%, and they are sent to ensure that the purchase of a product complies with the technical needs of the company. During the process of looking for suppliers, they mainly rely on four major channels: the mainstream search engine, seller site, B2B search engine and enterprise information site.

In the Business to Business Survey 2007, we found that general search engines topped the list of research sources throughout the purchase cycle, from awareness, through research, negotiation and purchase phases. However, many buyers move toward vertical search engines as they get closer to making a buying decision. The importance of cultivating a strong presence in relevant search results becomes even clearer to B2B vendors. Additionally, the more precise the key word is, the higher probability will the buyers inquiry. On the contrary, the broader of key word cause lower quality of inquiry.

When buyers in the study were talking about using a general search engine, they usually meant Google. A whopping 77 percent of respondents prefer Google, compared to 14 percent who chose Yahoo, 7 percent who chose Microsoft, and 2 percent who chose another engine. This reinforces for B2B marketers the importance of having a presence on general search engines, especially a presence on Google.

For B2B buyers, simpler is better. They want vendors to provide clear information, that's easy to get to and can be easily transferred within the buying organization. The person doing the searching is not usually the only person involved in making the final decision. The researcher may be tasked with finding the relevant pricing information, technical specs, customer service and support data, which they in turn will need to present to the decision makers. A vendor should use that knowledge to provide researchers with the opportunity to dig down into the details of their products, and make it easy for them to find what they need to move on to the next phase of the buying cycle, with the vendor still in their consideration set.

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