Does Your Content Travel Well?

The key to increased sales and better lead generation over the Internet is a mixture of good content, relevant content and discoverable content. Successful B2B businesses employ several tactics to ensure that their content travels well and generates the kind of leads that form their business's backbone. Below are some of the most successful tactics and why they work well to generate better quality leads.

Be Smart About Space
On average, websites are now 1/4 heavier than they were back in 2010. So what does this mean? Websites are slower than ever. The most aggravating thing a site visitor can experience is a slow-loading page. A page with too many useless kilobytes or too many functions will load much slower than a page with just the right amount of content. Does your page load slowly? If so, take a look at the items on your page and determine whether they are necessary. Buttons, excessive content, social media buttons and unnecessary graphics can all make a page load slower.

Open Your Site Access to Mobile Users
Trends show that smartphone owners mainly use their phones to access the Net, and a healthy percentage actually shops on the mobile Web. This means that your website has to conform to the size of the mobile phones, not just desktops. Responsive design is proving to be one of the best solutions for businesses, with sites that have more functionality and content that is easier to navigate on mobile phones because the site fits within the screen size.

Make Use of Social Media
According to the latest statistics, 70 percent of the worldwide Internet population will be using social media. This means that social media is a good outlet for businesses to get discovered and grow. You can increase the discoverability of your website by linking your URL on popular social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. Surprisingly, most of the traffic to these social media sites comes from smartphone users, so you're not just reaching the person at home, but also the person on the go.

Make sure, however, that when visitors click the link:

• It takes them to a website URL that is responsive to the size of their screens
• The website is responsive to the browser
• A user without a browser clicking within a social media app is not greeted with a video or heavy content that could make the app crash

Check Your Analytics
Some people still have cell phones that are not smartphones, so make sure your content is accessible on any device. Also make sure your that your website is accessible using touchscreens as well as phones with trackballs or keyboards.

Don't Use Unnecessary Content
Stuffing your page with unnecessary content will cause the user to grow tired of scanning and to simply navigate away from your website. Each word on your page must have value and be relevant to the products on the page.

Remember that the smartphone market is divided into categories, each with a different audience:

• The high-end market includes Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry users who surf the Web more than anything else.
• Businesses mainly use BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Windows 7 to access databases and emails.
• 45 percent of the market consists of midrange Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile users who listen to music, use the camera and send texts.

Keeping these statistics in mind may help you create better content for your Web users. Lastly, remember to test your website from different mobile platforms and using different browsers to see how your content travels and how your site responds. Just remember that not all browsers will display everything on your site, but this is a good thing. Testing these devices will let you know which items to remove from your website so it is responsive to a specific browser.