If you sell either a product or service to other businesses (B2B), then you can be pretty sure that the vast majority your web visitors can be put into three buckets:

1. The visitor is there by mistake because they misunderstood the link they clicked on to get to your website.
2. The visitor is looking for information in your industry, but isn’t interested in buying anything from you at this time.
3. The visitor is in some phase of considering a purchase of your of product or service down the road and is evaluating what you have to offer.

This can easily be broken down further, but this gives us the three primary segments of what I’m wanting to focus on. For your business, you want to focus on that second and third segment, which if you are doing a good job of marketing, then this is going to be the majority of your web audience.  Believe it or not, most companies do not think this way.  Companies, even large ones, rarely think about segmenting their visitors but merely dump everyone into the same content. This is a mistake.

Once you understand that different visitors to your website are at different stages in their purchase and have different needs (even if you only sell one thing), then you can begin creating content that helps get these visitors to your goal faster.

Lets say you sell software for managing the content on your website (CMS) that people can either download or use as a service.  A visitor may so early in the sales process that they dont even know what a CMS is or the best practices.  Another may already have a CMS in place but do not like what they have and want to change.  Both of these visitors are potential customers, but are at very different levels of understanding.  If you try and meet the needs of just one, you’ll miss the other.  If you write too general content to meet both needs at the same time, you’ll lose both.  But if you can create content specific to each visitor, you’ll move them much further along the sales cycle and have a better chance of winning that customer.