B2B Content Marketing and Buyer Stage. How to Engage Website Visitors with Appropriate Content

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This Master's thesis explores whether there are content stimuli that are best suited to a specific stage of the customers' buying cycle. In other words, is there a connection between the engagement of website visitors and their current stage within the buying cycle? To study this relationship, an external webpage of IBM and its sub-pages are used to analyze webpage visitors' click and scroll behavior and to assess their interest in the presented content assets. The exploratory investigation was undertaken based on three online surveys with a total sample of 234 participants.

The age of classical advertising is over. The introduction of digital technology and the spread of the Internet have led to radical changes in the way companies meet the expectations and interests of their stakeholders. In digital communication, content marketing plays a major role in achieving business benefits. In fact, valuable B2B content marketing initiatives can drive website traffic, customer engagement, and inbound leads, which yield sales and retain customers. In the context of this digital environment, companies increasingly aim to provide relevant, engaging content assets to acquire new leads and create business benefits.

This raises the following question: What digital content assets encourage website visitor engagement and how does this relate to customer progress in the B2B buying cycle? According to the literature, content that is consistent, timely and contains exclusivity messages that matter to the target audience lead to engagement. However, engagement is obviously dependent on individual customer needs, motives, and goals. It should, therefore, be interesting for companies to know how to turn their website visits into engaged visits, but research on engagement combined with content marketing is scarce—especially in the B2B context.