The ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing is a complex and challenging place to navigate. We find more channels, buyers tougher to reach, increasing calls for accountability and sales team members more out of sync with marketing. So what is going on, and how should we respond?
The root cause of our modern demand generation challenges goes back to a seismic evolution over the past decade. The web 2.0 world has created a new information asymmetry and this has shifted power from seller to B2B buyer. The key to improving demand generation performance therefore lies in a better understanding of the evolving nature of the B2B buyer and creating demand generation strategies that are more buyer-centric.
The changing B2B buyer
The ‘big’ change is the power shift, but it carries with it nuances in how the B2B buyer now operates. More than ever, B2B buyers are increasingly:
• Turning to online sources on their own, earlier in their buying process, to research purchases before calling a ‘live’ sales rep. Canadian web firm Enquiro identified this pattern via data from its Buyersphere Project. B2B buyers tend to start with search and online resources, then move to engaging with other users and then don’t reach out to a vendor until much later in the process.
• Leveraging social media – such as Twitter, blogs, etc – for peer communication in the information collection phase of the buying process. Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) found in a recent global study, that “Buyers rely on their colleagues to point them to alternative solutions; nothing else comes close.” And the organisation found 80-90 per cent of enterprise technology buyers in the UK leverage social media in their decision-making process, tapping the so-called ‘groundswell’ as a medium for peer communication.
• Manifesting themselves as a complex, savvy ‘buying unit’ rather than simply as a single decision-maker. There is no single buyer anymore. Recent data from MarketingSherpa indicates that even for purchases in the £16.5K-£66K range, more than four decision-makers are engaged 64 per cent of the time. And for purchases in the £66K-£660K range, more than four decision-makers are engaged 92 per cent of the time.
• Pursuing their buying process more multi-channelled than ever before. However, channel weightings and their sequence vary by the phase of the buying process. B2B buyers turn to the web for nearly everything, but Enquiro found there is a ‘path’ to this process. B2B buyers tend to start with search, then move to industry news/information sites and then turn to vendor websites.
• Shifting attention away from interruptive demand generation channels. This is not a new story to many marketers, but it speaks to a critical evolution – the rise of content marketing. Spending on content marketing in 2009 rose to record levels, while interruptive ‘advertising’ channels saw significant declines.
Buyer-centric demand generation
So what matters is your buyer’s process. Demand generation is not merely about garnering attention (and securing a buyer’s email address). Rather, our efforts must be more sophisticated – designed to serve up the right information, at the right time, in the right format/domain and to move the buying process forward.
So what are the keys to creating a more buyer-centric demand generation programme in B2B marketing? There are three building blocks for improving middle-of-funnel dynamics and for enabling buyer education.
1. Lead management strategy
Holistic lead management defines the operational view of a lead from early entry into an organisation – through nurturing by marketers, to hand-off from marketing to sales, through additional sales nurturing and finally to close. Lead-stage definitions and lead management processes thus define roles and actions to be taken by the marketing and sales organisations in support of a buyer’s journey forward. It is therefore a critical lingua franca and extremely important to your demand generation design.
2. Marketing automation
Given a well-defined lead management strategy, marketing automation is the critical engine for moving it forward. A marketing automation platform takes cues from lead scores – driven both by buyer demographics and by behavioural cues (e.g. downloading a whitepaper) – as well as segmentation and routing logic, to make sure that leads are moved forward. And this is an intelligent, ‘semantic’ sorting that occurs quickly and continually – triggering actions based on what the system learns and enabling true mass one-to-one engagement with buyers.
3. Content marketing mindset
A content marketing mindset is the connective architecture behind the information exchanged with the buyer; it is the rationalisation of what content buyers need at various buying stages and what media and channels are going to convey this content. In the new era of the empowered buyer, content is critical information and a key point of engagement, it is also vital to ‘reading’ where a buyer is in his/her process.
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