B2B Goes Web-Centric

It’s easy for customers to find information even as the company and its offerings expand. “We’ve put in place a framework in which we can grow on,” says Dan Driscoll, Enventis’s director of marketing and product management.

HickoryTech’s approach—creating separate, streamlined sites for its three chief business units—points to an interactive strategy many B2Bs are using: creating specialized sitelets. Microsites, which promote a single product, product line, or service, can allow B2Bs to introduce new programs and products without cluttering up their main site.

Chanhassen-based data-storage firm Datalink has a corporate site that defines its capabilities and services. It’s so detailed that its fundamental digital architecture is very difficult to change. In the data storage marketplace, tighter budgets have meant that storage buyers are pushing for greater economies in their storage systems. Wishing to respond to this demand—and not wanting to rework its own site—Datalink asked Schermer Kuehl to create a microsite called Efficiency Central.

Efficiencycentral.com is as much marketing-driven as information-driven with its sharp images and catchy slogans (“Backup is the New Plan,” “Less is the New More”). Schermer calls it “a place where people can go for all sorts of content about how to become a more efficient data center. This is phase one. Phase two, we’re going to actually bring in much more aggregated content from different partners. Possibly we’re going to have a Twitter stream that’s incorporated into this, so that Datalink engineers and architects are constantly updating this new information about efficiency or new products.”

Data storage may be one of the most innovative spaces in B2B interactive. For Pranah, a Stillwater-based company that has developed a new data storage system, Minneapolis agency ASI Communications created a site that is more picturesque than the typical B2B site. (The agency also came up with the product and company name, as well as the logo.) The site is very simple—almost a microsite—and while it has product specs, this is primarily a marketing-driven Web presence, communicating through text and (especially) the home page image that Pranah’s is a distinctive, sustainable approach to data storage.