Engagement with your B2B buyers improves when you offer them an excellent site search experience. Predictive search anticipates their needs, delivering modified search options to help them find the right products or services more quickly.
Your buyers can search for product titles, stock keeping units (SKUs), descriptions, or article numbers. To help them you can review search results and terms in an easy-to-use content management system (CMS) and link common search terms to products.
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Why predictive search is important
Your buyers are on a tight timescale, but they also want to build relationships and collaborate. Anything you can do to make their purchasing journey easier, faster and more rewarding helps build customer loyalty.
Their personal online shopping experiences have conditioned your buyers to expect searches to deliver exactly what they want straightaway. Even for complex B2B searches they will still go somewhere else if they can’t quickly find what they want.
The buyer’s B2B ecommerce journey
Your search engine optimization strategy will help online discovery of your site. When visitors arrive, the quality of your site search is possibly the most important aspect of your B2B buyer’s experience. With large product catalogs buyers won’t want to use a detailed process of elimination to find what they need.
Indexing your product descriptions for the best possible search returns is a top priority for fast and relevant searches. However, you can give yourself a competitive advantage by adding predictive search functionality.
As soon as your buyer starts to type in their search the predictive search function will offer possible results. These can include categories, brands, and recommendations for other related products.
How predictive search works
Predictive results help your buyers find the products they want much more quickly. They can use search terms relating to a specific product, a category, an internal code or an industry-specific part number.
Predictive search will suggest products and categories in real time, based on the key words they search for. Auto-complete can offer relevant phrases to reduce the amount of time needed to key-in search terms.
Product-specific previews
Your buyer’s experience improves even further with automatic product previews. You can also include short descriptions, pricing and go-to-checkout options along with your predictive results.
To discover how Cloudfy’s predictive search function can improve your buyer’s experience, talk to one of our experts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Predictive search anticipates search phrases based on user behavior, previous searches and location, for example. It might also include trending searches from other site visitors. All these options help buyers find what they’re looking for.
When your site visitor starts to enter a search term you can offer options to complete it, reducing their keystrokes. It helps them explore options they might not know about until they see your suggestions.
Predictive search cuts down the amount of information a buyer must enter to find the right product. This saves time but also helps refine their search query so they are less likely to give up and go somewhere else.
Improved on-site experiences keep customers engaged so they will stay for longer. You can help them discover new products so they’ll learn more about your business while they’re there. By helping them find the most relevant terms you increase the likelihood their visit will convert into a sale.
