Do you remember how booking a hotel or flight used to be? You’d check the prices and other offerings on each individual operator’s website (like United Airlines, Marriott, or Best Western) before making a final decision. Then, aggregators came along and changed the game.
Aggregators like Travelocity compare rates and accommodations from operators around the globe to make finding the right options easier. An aggregator culls data and deals from operators’ websites and shares it with the user in an easy-to-understand interface.
Eventually, however, there were so many of these solutions that there was a need for an aggregator of aggregators — a site that searches all of the aggregators and looks for the best prices. Tools like Kayak, Trivago, and even Google now offer a “search-one-and-you’re-done” type of solution that simplifies travel planning. Hotels and flight options from all around the world are searchable by date, location, and offerings to ensure users aren’t missing out on the most affordable options available.
At this point, you’re probably wondering why we’re talking about a travel-planning solution that’s been on the market for almost a decade. Well, it’s because this same kind of ease of understanding is sorely needed in today’s B2B buying space.
Finding content solutions today
You could argue it’s even more challenging to find the right B2B solution, as there are so many different offerings (equipment, software, services, and materials categories, along with all the products within these families). Then, you have so many different industries and challenges to solve.
How do you find the best solution to your challenges? Today’s customers are most likely either looking to individual vendors, industry websites or simply scouring the first few pages of Google, hoping the right case study or white paper just falls into their lap.
Unfortunately, none of these approaches are truly efficient.
While vendor websites can be a great source of knowledge, using them limits your ability to find the best possible solution. There are hundreds of B2B vendor sites out there, producing varying levels of content quality. While you may already know and respect the content of your favorite vendors, going exclusively to a few places limits your ability to find the absolute best solution. Your favorite vendor probably won’t have a timely case study for every problem you’re having — and going to the same sources over and over limits your ability to learn and find the best solutions for your company.
Industry websites, meanwhile, offer a broader scope but won’t necessarily deliver the knowledge you actually need. These sites tend to feature far more than just B2B content, including job postings and industry news. In addition, industry-specific siloing just doesn’t make sense in many cases. Problems are complex and solutions may not fit neatly under one industry umbrella. Let’s say you’re looking for a case study about improving pipeline cybersecurity (an important topic these days). Your ideal content may be on a vendor website in either the energy or cybersecurity sectors. Ultimately, the case study you seek simply may not be on the industry website you’re looking at.
A straightforward Google search of, let’s say, “energy efficiency case studies” may also not yield the results you’re hoping for. A Google search will require you to do a lot of the hard work yourself — parsing through results that seem promising but aren’t relevant or timely. Most B2B leaders simply don’t have time for this. More often than not, a Google search will lead you back to the same industry-specific pages you already know, and leave you wondering if there’s a solution out there you’re missing.
There’s a much better way
Savvy B2B solution seekers know that the current model doesn’t work. A content aggregator is the difference-maker they’ve been searching for. Much like a Kayak or Tripadvisor, a B2B content aggregator searches the web for the newest case studies, white papers, e-books and webinars, and houses them all under one roof. From there, content is carefully curated by industry and topic, then made searchable for the user.
Content aggregators such as Contentree.com are a huge win for content searchers and providers alike. Searchers save time and can feel confident that they’re viewing all of the potential content solutions, rather than just the few case studies on the vendor website you happen to be familiar with. B2B sellers, meanwhile, open their content up to a higher level of potential viewership and have an improved avenue for connecting with quality prospects looking for the kinds of solutions they offer.
Rather than the “backcountry roads” of a Google search, vendor website, or an industry platform, a content aggregator is more like the Autobahn, getting you to your final destination in record time. Contentree is the very first website dedicated to being a B2B-specific content aggregator across all industries — think of us as the “aggregator of aggregators” for B2B. Best of all, it’s free to search and free for vendors to showcase their content.
One website and all of the information you need. It’s time to take the guesswork out of content syndication and make finding solutions as easy as booking your next vacation.