Is Your B2B Website Content Too Simple (or Too Technical) for Buyers?

By Tom Embleton, Content Manager at Move

Most marketers in complex sectors know their content has to work for the audience – that is pretty obvious. But what I tend to see – especially in complex businesses that cater for different audiences and industries – information can sometimes be provided as a catch-all. I’m talking about product and/or service pages written to please anyone who might read them. This approach is of course too generic to properly land with anyone. When it comes to website content – and more specifically what is said across webpages – the key question that should be asked is: how much do you show, to whom, and when?

The Reader is Never One Person

Getting that balance right matters because the website now carries the argument. Today, the majority of the buying journey for complex industrial products happens before anyone speaks to sales, so by the time a prospect makes contact, they’ve read your pages, compared you against rivals and formed a view. In complex industries like industrial, science, and technology, that view gets formed by more than one person. A long buying cycle pulls in engineers, specifiers, procurement professionals and senior decision-makers. The cycle will also pull in people like finance directors (and various other profiles) – who are obviously reassured by very different things, and the questions differ again from one sector to the next.

Audience maturity shapes this too. For example, some readers work in a market that knows the category inside out and want you to reach the substance fast. Others are earlier in their understanding and need the groundwork before any specification means much to them. What’s more, the same reader can change over time.

An engineer who wanted a simple explanation of the problem in month one might want technical performance data half a year later.

The job a page does depends as much on when someone reads it as on who they are. And none of this is solved by one page trying to do everything. Technical people, for instance (think engineers and specifiers), can sometimes be the people who decide whether you make the shortlist, and trust me, they can spot vague marketing language and jargon from a mile off. Give them a page that confuses the detail or avoids it, and you’ll lose their confidence. And frankly, rightly so.

The opposite mistake does its own damage. Imagine a non-technical person visiting a product page and being buried in datasheets; it just wouldn’t work. And then take the commercial reader – that person just wants to understand what you do – and they’ll give up if they don’t find anything useful.

So once you know the personas reading your site, you can give each a clear route to the content made for them. A specifier heads to the technical detail, a procurement professional to comparison and proof, a senior buyer to the commercial case. That means building the site in sections, each shaped for the person most likely to need it, so no one wades through material written for someone else.

The Right Depth at the Right Moment

Early on, most visitors are still working out the problem. They might not know what they need, let alone which supplier provides it. Content at this point earns attention by educating rather than selling. Education will typically come in the form of clear explanations of a challenge and the available approaches to help the reader frame their own thinking. These types of pages go easy on specification and focus on plain explanation, written so someone new to the category can follow them.

Sometimes the reader is comparing you against named alternatives, and the question becomes whether you can do the job. Technical depth earns its keep here. Specifications, performance data, compliance information and sometimes case studies all do their job, because the evaluator is checking your claims against their own requirements. Holding this material back to keep a site tidy is a mistake. Picture a specifier weighing up two suppliers of the same component. A site that lays out the performance figures, the standards it meets and a case study from a comparable plant gives that specifier something concrete to take into an internal review. Warm copy and a contact form, on their own, leave them with nothing to put forward when the decision gets debated. A relevant case study answers the question every technical buyer reaches in the end: has this supplier solved my kind of problem before? You can see a range of those across our work.

If a reader is closer to a decision, it’s because the person has narrowed the field and wants reassurance more than education. Pages here support the final steps. They give the reader clear commercial framing, the business case, and the practical details a decision-maker needs to defend the choice internally. The technical material stays available for anyone who wants it, presented so the commercial reader gets to the point quickly and the specifier can still dig in.

The Work Sits in the Content

Sectioning a site by persona only takes you so far. It’s a content problem underneath, and a continuous one. Knowing what to write, how deep to go and where content belongs takes a proper grasp of how your buyers reach a decision. A clean menu helps people find things, but it won’t rescue a page that says too little to the reader who matters most, or one that drowns a commercial visitor in detail they never asked for. Structure works when the content underneath it is built around how people buy.

The work doesn’t stop at launch, either. What a buyer searches for can change, new questions can surface, and the pages that earn leads are often kept under review and refined as the market moves.

That’s also why technical substance and clarity can sit on the same page. A page can carry serious depth and still read well, as long as the writing respects the reader’s time and the information is ordered the way they think. The skill is in the calibration. Carry enough rigour for the specialist, keep enough clarity for the commercial reader, and order the page so each one finds their level without wading through the other’s.

Thin Content Disappears

Buyers are often getting their first answers from AI-driven search, where the engine returns a direct response rather than a list of links (more on that in our blog on answer engine optimisation here). A site that explains its products clearly and credibly, at the right depth, gives those tools something solid to draw on. A thin one gives them nothing, and you stay invisible at the moment a buyer is forming a view. The websites that hold up will be the ones with real substance behind the polish.

Getting this balance right is most of what we do when we build a website for complex businesses. We start by understanding who’s reading and what each of them needs to move forward, then we shape the content and the structure around that. The result performs under technical scrutiny and stays clear for the commercial reader.

If your site is doing one of those jobs at the expense of the other, our approach to B2B websites is a good place to start.