Business.com’s CEO shares our journey as we continue to build our brand and engage with our audience.
Every month, we generate millions of high quality brand engagements and demand generation for our advertisers. We’ve organized our suite of advertising products to solve the brand engagement and demand generation challenges that many marketers have. Whether you’re looking for advanced display, pay-per-click, email marketing, content marketing or sales ready leads, we have a solution to meet your digital marketing needs.
Business.com is not a new URL. But, as one of the leading destinations for executives in growing companies to acquire knowledge, products and services they need, it’s only nine months old. And for these past nine months, we’ve completely transformed the business.
Now, it’s time for us to step back and start putting our brand first. We do an amazing job at promoting our advertisers and aligning their products and solutions with the right audience, at the right time. It wasn’t until a few months ago, we sat down and said, it’s now time for our next step. It’s now time to brand the new Business.com.
Related: Finally, Content Targeted to You
All of this wasn’t a missed requirement. Before nine months ago, we weren’t ready. We now are. Instead of hyping up our updated solution center to showcase all our products for our advertisers, we thought we’d walk you through the decisions we made and why we made them as we are on a road to our own brand identity.
This is just one of the many things we are doing here at Business.com to reinvent and evolve our brand, showcase our abilities and stay myopically focused on our customers.
Here are some of the feature changes:
1. We’ve organized and named our advertising products based on how our customers view them. We believe there is way too much jargon and marketing double-speak in our industry. We want to present our products and solutions based on digital marketers needs and make it easy for them to find and understand our solutions.
Related: 2014 in Review: A Year of Change and Innovation at Business.com
2. We eliminated (and by that I mean killed) the lead form on each section. The old days of making your site all about direct marketing and buttons flashing do not help customers understand what it means for them and how to view your offering in context of their needs. In a multi-device world where accessibility is important wherever you are, we care less about layers of navigation and more about simplicity. If users want to learn more about your products, they will find it. Make it simple. Don’t load up mobile views with forms, demanding information for you, that has limited if any value for your prospects and customers.
3. We changed up the imagery. Just like you, we’re online all day and just like you, we are sick of uninspired experiences. So, in the spirit of authenticity and ambition we have gone with full browser photography. This simple alteration makes a huge difference by immersing you in the color, texture and vibe of modern business.
We believe that business today is more than just work. It is a means of self expression and self discovery. We want our imagery to reflect the passion that our audience and our advertising customers have for their businesses. We also believe that the web is shifting to a far more visual and experiential medium and we want to be on the leading edge of this trend.
4. You might have noticed a cool overlapping of elements happening when you scroll. Don’t be alarmed, the interweb isn’t broken. This is just one of a million rad tricks we will be slipping in to our UI now that we have lost all fear of newness… you are welcome.
As I mentioned before, this is just one of many things we are doing to engage with our audiences and our advertisers. There are many more things in the works for making the Business.com experience an interactive, mobile playground were design elements and features are forgotten because our users are just having fun.
We hope you will join us with this journey by following our blog and insights of leading digital marketing practioners on our B2B Online Marketing blog. We also just hired a new V.P. of sales to better serve the growing needs of our advertisers. See the full release.
Please take a tour of our new Solution Center and don’t hesitate to reach out to us for help with your digital marketing challenges.
Tony Uphoff
Tony Uphoff, is CEO of Business.com. A uniquely accomplished operating executive with an unparalleled track record of building, growing and transforming media and marketing businesses, Uphoff has been a leader in business innovation and transformation for the last 20 years.
Prior to Business.com, Uphoff served as CEO of UBM TechWeb where he led the transformation of a declining print-centric business into a fast-growing digital media, live event and marketing services powerhouse. He was President of VNU Media’s Entertainment Group and Publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, building out and expanding the brands via digital media and live events. Uphoff served as Publisher of InformationWeek in the mid-90’s, growing the brand into the largest in the history of B2B media. Uphoff also served in several key management positions at Ziff-Davis during the company’s rapid growth in the early 1990’s.
Uphoff has been named “Folio Forty C-Level Visionary” by Folio Magazine, “Top Media Innovator” by Mins B2B and is regularly named in the Top 100 business media execs by B2B Magazine. Uphoff is acknowledged as an industry expert on media, marketing and technology and is a regular speaker at industry conferences and leading business schools. Uphoff serves on the boards of NTN Buzztime, the HIMSS Media Group and as a Trustee of Linfield College. He also serves as a Business Mentor at Mucker Labs Accelerator and on the advisory boards of the data company Connotate and the programmatic radio ad platform company Jelli. In addition to serving as a Market Expert on Business.com, Uphoff also writes about Media, Marketing and Technology trends on his blog Uphoff On Media.