One such item is how organizations incorporate social elements into their e-mail marketing campaigns. This is relevant as organizations that leverage both e-mail marketing & social channels tend to receive better results for their campaigns according to a report from Vertical Response. This strong correlation can be further amplified by fine tuning the social enablement of the actual messaging.

If you review branded e-mail marketing campaigns you will see inconsistency in how social sharing is enabled. The goal should not be to drive awareness that the channel exists, but to create frictionless sharability of the content and in some cases to also provide relevantly targeted messaging based on the users social graph data.

There are multiple buckets that brands across multiple verticals fall into when representing social connectivity via e-mail.

1) The Social Chicklet - Many brands follow the rule of just adding a socially enabled chicklets to the top or bottom navigation of communication. While paying homage to the brands owned channels, the actual engagement on this style of placement is lower than other methods.

Playstation as well as a majority of brands that reference social channels in this manner go with the approach of simply providing visibility into the fact that their channels exist. There is however a missed opportunity to share the message itself or specific content segments that are worthy of sharing.

2) The Social Call Out - The second level of integration takes the social chicklet & applies a direct call to action that is specific to the desired channel. This at the very least calls out to the user that a certain action needs to be taken that may drive additional value to the user.

In the example below, Fandango provides specific calls to action on what they would like for the user to do with the referenced social channels. FOLLOW us on Twitter, LIKE us on Facebook

Here are other examples from Eddie Bauer which leverages the facebook share call to action, Macys & Red Envelope.

3) Socially Enabled Content - Xbox deploys a strategy that not only calls attention to their specific channels but also the ability to directly share the content of the e-mail, they also take special care to socially enable each individual content block for maximum sharability.

4) Socially Centric Communication - Some brands have invested efforts to provide communication that directly highlights their social channels and how users can benefit from engaging directly with their channels. The benefit to this approach is that individuals consume different types of information across different channels. By highlighting the benefits that their social channels provide, they are potentially driving the user to action to associate with the brands owned social channels. It is also possible to track the organic growth associated with the call to action to test the impact of the campaign as some brands e-mail databases triple their current fans/followers, etc...

Below is an example from CORT that highlights an individual receiving value and drives a targeted message about a potential value exchange from engaging via their social channel.

Pizza Hut dedicated an e-mail message touting the value of becoming a member by leveraging their current network size, teasing with potential exclusives.

5) Socially Relevant - One of the bigger opportunities for brands is associated with the adoption of social sign on & leveraging open graph data to drive highly targeted recommendations and communication. In my recent post I wrote about the benefits of social sign on and open graph.

From an e-mail standpoint, the ability to pull in relevant open graph elements to further drive socially enabled gifting, such as birthday reminders and socially optimized wish lists come to forefront. These principles can then be applied to driving socially relevant and targeted messaging to drive a user to take action on behalf of either themselves or their closest friends.

Example of how Old Navy could further socially enable a post purchase e-mail

By taking the time to consider how to truly socially optimize e-mail marketing, a brand can truly capitalize on the permissive nature of their users to share their content vs. vaguely eluding to the fact that the brand has social channels.

On a final note, socially enabled sharing when it comes to retail shopping experiences are key across the prime millennial & gen x targets when it comes to point #3 below.

Follow Tom Edwards @Blackfin360

Banishing Short-Term and Shiny: A Look at Vail Resorts

This is how everyone should be thinking about digital marketing.

Via @ClarkKokich

Your Company Has Social Media Nailed. Now What?

An excellent series of questions to ask after you’ve reach the first level.

Via @RichardLevick

Facebook to Brands: You’re Posting Stuff Wrong

The subjects brands post about is the key to engagement. That’s why text analysis is the key to knowing what works on Facebook.

Why CMO Tenure is so Short

This has long been a known problem for both clients and agencies, and it’s interesting reading what some of these industry leaders have to say about it.

Via @emarxe & @djgeoffe

Facebook Dominates Mobile Social Networking

Facebook’s big story to me has always been the amount of time and frequency with which people use the site. Now it looks like that same behavior is tracking over to mobile. And to think they bought Instagram to better succeed in mobile.

Via @JackMarshall

Ad Account Guy Gets Man Lessons

I like this because a lot of people want to publish content, but aren’t sure what to write about. This guy found a way to get over that hump.

I, like most of us, am subscribed to numerous newsletters for a wide variety of reasons. Some for aggregated news purposes, business tips, daily deals or retail companies that offer value. I think we all know our favorites by the excitement we get seeing the new email freshly unopened in our inbox. This for marketers is a dream come true; these loyal subscribers are the pulse of the messages they create and move the needle for what’s to come.

A company recently caught my attention and now goes into a short list of brands that I not only enjoy watching, but admire their email campaigns and overall integrated marketing.

One night, killing some time before dinner I walked around downtown San Diego and went into the Goorin Bros. hat shop. The store pulled us in and almost back in time as we tried on hats reminiscent of the 1960s, old derby days that radiated class. It was so fun spending time in the store that on my way out I wrote my name in a book to be added to their newsletter list.

A few days later I received my first email from the Goorin Bros. and I was able to open it on my phone without a hitch. I thought the email looked very clean, sharp and with closer notice to this and emails to come, I was continually impressed with the beautiful, thoughtful design, clear messaging and access to information.

Here are a few of many things that the Goorin Bros. have clearly mastered:

1. Short, accurate subject lines. They tell you what to expect and deliver.

2. An aesthetically pleasing design. All emails are consistently focused, highlighting one product. Rich in image but light in content makes this easy on the eye and on-the-go. Familiarity is also nice for consumers receiving hundreds of messages a day.

3. Access to information. Simple layout with light and light hearted copy gives you direction and not too much data at once. This allows men and women to know quickly where to click to see selected styles. They also offer quick links to the “Goorin Bros. Story,” Blog and Customer Service. These tabs allow subscribers to easily choose to learn or view more, and for the Goorin Bros. these links are trackable and offer consumer insights.

4. Transparency and accessibility. The Goorin Bros. provides a real email address. Not a “Do Not Reply” email, giving off the stigma that they do not want to hear from you.

5. No falloff when directed to the main site. When you do click to see more gorgeous hats, the main web site is compatible with a laptop or mobile device and stays as clean and simple as the original message. This almost ensures a lower bounce rate and keeps customers digging on their own and not overwhelmed with selections.

6. Social. In the email viewers are invited to an event with an RSVP on Facebook. While this did eliminate some subscribers as the event was in select cities, it added value letting everyone know they are present in the social world. Another way to stay engaged and connected with an audience, and turns out they are doing well in that arena too.

So a great email campaign should definitely strive to possess as many of the above characteristics as possible, but more importantly your communication needs to be consistent and cohesive among all platforms; representing more than a product or service. It was immediately clear to me that the Goorin Bros. is a company tuned into their identity who is doing a lot right in the realm of email and branding, marketing a nostalgic essence and modern appeal. Hats off to ‘em.

If you’re looking to partner with an agency who understands branding and email marketing, we may just be the right fit. Feel free to give me a call to chat. After all, a conversation will cost you nothing: 858-255-0027.

Amy

© All Rights Reserved I-5 Design and Manufacturer

This is part 4 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer-based modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

When it comes to the SMB segment and the multiple sub-markets, it is just a plain fact that you cannot be everywhere. We addressed the segmentation thought process crucial for buyer-based marketing to the SMB segment in the previous article, Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing, as a means to know where to have a presence. Therein lays the new buyer realities of today. Having a presence that creates a gravitational pull of SMB buyers towards your organization is the new realty of mastering the SMB challenge.

SMB marketing and sales began to become more than just an afterthought in the early ‘90’s through the early 2000's. Considerable investments were made in establishing inside sales organizations and in outbound marketing activities specifically to reach the SMB base of customers and prospective buyers. Newly created inside sales organizations endured the trials and tribulations of field sales entrenched infrastructure as well as the ownership battle of the mid-size customer gray area. Marketing discovered that outbound tools for inside sales and for marketing to the SMB segment varied greatly from that of a focus on large field accounts.

In a span of 5-7 years we find ourselves in a drastically different world. The notion of reaching buyers is becoming a huge hurdle to climb for those wedded to predominantly outbound activities related to inside sales. As mentioned, establishing an inside sales function can be a sizable investment. The Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 today find themselves with inside sales units loaded with personnel, technology, software, and etc. that were installed and aimed at outbound efforts. What we now have is the challenge of turning on a dime to repurpose inside sales and marketing support to at least gain balance in inbound marketing while succeeding at a level of outbound demand generation as well.

This has more to do with transformation shifts in buyer behaviors with new technologies being the driving force behind these changes. What is profound is that this is more than the labels of the elusive, invisible, or buyer 2.0. No, they didn’t go anywhere and they are not hiding. Nor, should we be of the mind that buyers are now just empowered – as if sellers gave them the empowerment. Buyers today - with SMB buyers a significant part of this picture - are creating new ways of working and conducting business. Here’s the smell the coffee moment for sellers: SMB buyers, in addition to larger accounts, are creating a new world of buyer-driven economies whereby as sellers - if you do not fit or adapt – it is a world in which you will not be participating within.

While I may be seemingly digressing here, I do so to make a very salient point. SMB buyers are adapting new technologies in the entrepreneurial fashion they have started their business with in the first place. Unburdened by large scale infrastructures, they can see how to make new uses of technologies nimbly and drive new ways of conducting business as well as expand their own customer bases. SMB businesses, not so surprisingly, may be surpassing larger enterprises in their adoption of new technologies for interacting with buyers.

What Does This All Mean?

If you are part of a larger enterprise marketing to SMB buyers, what this all points to is a higher stakes challenge. Expectations on buyer experience are being renewed at a constant rate for the reasons mentioned above. Many of today’s new technologies, which for the most part had their original invention in non-business pursuits, have balanced the equation. While larger enterprises enjoyed an advantage in acquiring newer technologies over that of SMB businesses, this may no longer be true. In fact, the opposite in many cases may be true with SMB businesses able to leap frog into newer technologies as cost factors continue to be driven lower.

With this being the case, larger enterprises need to focus on creating seamless buyer-based experiences that allow SMB businesses to act quickly, make choices, and do so in the channels they prefer. This applies to both inbound and outbound efforts. A key focus for inbound efforts is that of enriching the buyer experience. Darren Pleasance, a Principal with McKinsey & Company, recently covered this topic in an excellent article entitled, Serious about SMB experience? Focus on your web site, on McKinsey's Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum site. Darren mentions the importance of the web site experience, providing the ability to buy seamlessly through multiple channels, and investing in post-purchase experiences as keys to success in the SMB segment. All of these contributing to enriched buyer experiences. The core of SMB buyer-based marketing and selling will not only be the web site as Darren articulates, but I believe the totality of the buyer experience now becoming the driving force behind how SMB buyers choose.

This brings us back to outbound. Does this mean inside sales and other outbound activities will simply go away? Far from it I believe. A fundamental shift however needs to take place in how organizations view and orient their outbound efforts such as inside sales. This shift relates to transforming from a tools-based approach to a buyer-based experience approach. Here’s the voice of one SMB business executive articulating this point:

“The thing that kills you is that you get what you need from the web site but contacting them directly is a whole different matter. It’s as if they are clueless that I may have visited their site and got information to review. On top of that, I get calls from their people saying they are my account manager. Really? Then how come they don’t know that I talked to someone in their company already?”

This exemplifies what happens when organizations fail to connect their inbound activities with outbound activities in SMB buyer-based marketing and selling. On the other hand, connecting the two tightly enriches the experience as this SMB business owner says:

“I was really impressed to be honest. I went on the site and found a few items I wanted to read so downloaded them. I got a call from the company; his name was Steve, first acknowledging that I had downloaded the papers and then asking if I had questions. We wound up having a discussion on some of things we’ve been working on. Wasn’t pushy or anything like that.”

To create impressive buyer experiences, this integration of inbound and outbound cannot be ignored. While the shiny object these days is inbound and the incessant promotion of content marketing, for some products and services, the ultimate deciding factor will continue to come down to the buyer conversation taking place. One thing we can count on is that more and more SMB buyers today come to table ready for a conversation – are you?

Next Up: Closing the deal in SMB with Buyer-Based Selling

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• Channeling Buyer-Based Experiences in SMB (buyerology.com)

Buyer Persona © All Rights Reserved Cristian Cardenas

The sheer size of the SMB makes for a daunting task for any organization intent on marketing to the SMB segment. When you consider some Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 organizations can have in the 10’s or 100’s of thousands of companies in their customer bases, the expression of zeroing in on your target buyer can sound near impossible. It is a dilemma however that cannot be ignored. The U.S. Small business Administration estimates that the SMB segment accounts for better than 98% of all businesses in the United States.

In the previous article in this series, How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer, I touched upon the means to get to know the SMB buyer. Marketing to the SMB segment and buyers should first start with visiting the segmentation issue a little deeper. There have been many means tried for SMB segmentation whether it is by size, type, vertical, products, solutions, and etc. To some degree, they have helped to manage the challenge of bringing a tighter focus to the SMB segment and its’ sub-market segments. Analytics of your SMB customer database is like fighting numbers with numbers – you can contain the data but without behavioral insight – you will not be able to get inside them. The call to action now is for organizations to bring more science and evolution to the challenge. Why? Because buyers in general have changed so rapidly in the last three years alone that gaining a competitive edge has become much more complex.

Getting Descriptive

Going beyond conventional methods of segmenting the SMB customer base means getting more descriptive about how SMB buyers behave and how goals drive their behaviors. This includes getting a good sense about their Buyergraphics – their attitudes, perceptions, values, information needs, and more. The attempt here is to answer some tough questions that help to bring more focus to an SMB strategy:

Who are our best customers in the SMB segments and why?

In what SMB sub-market segments are our best customers?

Who are our best prospects and in which SMB sub-market segment are they?

What are the best means of engaging our best SMB customers and best SMB prospects?

Descriptive buyer modeling helps you to get answers to these questions and gives you insight into the data as well. In the previous article I stressed the importance of buyer modeling to help get to know your SMB buyers. Modeling buyers and portraying them via buyer personas and scenarios helps you get to the first two questions mentioned. To help round out the SMB buyer picture, learning their attitudes towards your product, service, or technology and how these attitudes drive information needs help to get deeply descriptive. There are three specific buyer modeling efforts that can help shed light on the attitudes and goals driving SMB buyer behavior and help inform buyer-based marketing strategies:

Buyer Mental Models: collecting a picture of SMB buyer attitudes, perceptions, and goals that influence buying decisions can be a descriptive means for segmenting as well as buyer-based communicating. For example if your product technology is getting high marks for user-friendliness and there is strong attitudinal resistance to perceived complex technology in 3 out 5 identified sub-markets, then creating buyer-based marketing strategies around this mental model is one way of segmenting.

Buyer Content Models: identifying the information needs and goals of buyers today extends well beyond just the concept of content marketing. With the rise of SMB sub-market segments engaging not only in new technologies but forming new ecosystem, the information needs of SMB buyers are vastly different and changing rapidly. Carrying the above example further, the information needs of the 3 sub-markets may vary differently in context and how information is shared amongst both suppliers and partners. More and more, organizations will need to think context-based marketing and context-based selling as opposed to just content-based marketing. While this will apply to all types of businesses, I believe this will be especially true for the SMB markets.

Buyer Experience Models: how SMB buyers view, perceive, and expect experience is undergoing transformative gyrations. The way SMB buyers experience inbound marketing and other newer technology-based marketing and sales is certain to be different than larger enterprises. There are many more what I call Buyer Moment of Truth in SMB that are frankly invisible to marketers and sellers today. Not identifying where these moments of truth are can be a significant disadvantage in laying out both inbound and outbound marketing and sales strategies. Understanding experiences is important since they are instrumental in shaping attitudes, perceptions, and perceived values. For the examples mentioned, previous experiences with technology not yet cleared of bugs may have created entrenched resistance to both new and complex. Reshaping thinking around experience can then become an important strategy.

Modeling SMB buyers to a deeper level and around the three modeling efforts mentioned gets organizations closer to a true buyer-based marketing effort. In addition, it gives more robust ability to segment SMB by behavior and context. Buyer-based marketing can be most effective when it addresses how buyers behave and understanding the context of why they make purchase decisions.

Informed with behavioral buyergraphics that hone in on buyer behaviors and how they are influenced by mental models, information needs, and experience can be a powerful way to resonate with SMB buyers. Getting at the heart of their contextual environments, which will vary by sub-market segments, gives the insight needed to develop specific buyer-based marketing strategies that defies one-size fits all. When it comes to the dilemma of how to make sense of thousands of SMB customers and prospects, taking these steps eliminates wasteful guessing and pinpoints buyer-based marketing at the right buyer, the right sub-market, the right context, and the right time.

Next Up: Connect With SMB Buyer Through Buyer-Based Selling

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer (blogs.imediaconnection.com)
• Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing (buyerology.com)
• Use Buyer-Based Selling To Engage The New SMB Buyer (buyerology.com)
• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (blogs.imediaconnection.com)

©All rights Reserved Peter Schofield

This is part 2 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

In the first article of this series, we visited two new realities. One, that many Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 organizations are turning a focused eye towards growing their SMB customer and revenue base. With revenue growth potential shrinking in larger strategic accounts due to budget and pricing pressures, many are dedicating attention and resources with more determination than in the past. The second reality is that they are finding a very different buyer this time around than in the past. Simply put, SMB buyers are more social, more sophisticated, more connected, and are transforming their buying behaviors at an accelerated pace. New technologies opening their world to advantages only once afforded to large enterprises.

Waking up to these new realities has set up another challenge for executive leaders. That is of how to get to know the new SMB buyer. Here’s how one sales executive put this to me recently:

“One of the things we realized is that we have got to get to know our SMB customers. If you keep in mind that we haven’t really dedicated much resource to this area, then we are lacking in knowledge per se’. We’ve got to find out what is important to them versus just giving them some generic sales pitch.”

This is a very salient point for many organizations tend to view the SMB as a whole segment in of itself. The reality is that the SMB is highly fragmented and consists of many layers of sub-market segments. Getting to know what makes SMB buyers tick is, by no means, as easy as saying this is your SMB buyer. Layer on top of this the enormous changes in buyer behavior, the invisibility of SMB buyers in their sourcing for information, and new empowering technologies makes this endeavor a higher mountain to climb. It is no wonder many executives are walking out of their meetings where SMB growth is identified as a top priority saying – now what?

Getting To Know The New SMB Buyer

The first tough challenge is realizing that viewing the SMB as a single market and that rudimentary means of segmenting by employee size and revenue figures are not going to result in the understanding needed. While vertical segmentation is of significant help, what is paramount is knowledge of how these sub-markets and buyers within behave. What are steps that executives can take to understand the new SMB buyer?

Buyer Research: This has to be a clear mission. Getting to know the new SMB buyer is going to take some level of buyer research. It is going to take the integrated approach of committing to both quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand the full 360 degrees of the new SMB buyer.

Buyer Modeling: Depending on the degree of fragmentation in sub-markets, powerful buyer modeling can be an extensive exercise. However, one well-worth the upfront investment to get to know the new SMB buyer in ways that transforms efforts into an order of magnitude competitive advantage. There are several areas of modeling that by understanding them deeply, can make your organization relevant to buyers and core to their problem-solving:

Buyer Persona Modeling: What is important here is not to model the single archetypal buyer but to model the new levels of interactions buyers are having with newly formed ecosystems and networks. They may be SMB but they are growing exponentially and organically by creating new ecosystems. Buyer persona modeling represents composite archetypes based on behavioral research with a focus on identifying critical goals that drive buyer behaviors.

Buyer Scenario Modeling: To get a handle on the problems SMB buyers face and what confronts them, modeling buying scenarios can give your marketing and sales teams insight into how to be relevant. Additionally, this gives you the ability to address fragmentation and identify sub-market segments that have the best optimal scenarios to be part of the SMB buyer’s solution.

Buyer Decision Modeling: How SMB buyers are making purchase decisions today is changing so fast and by sub-markets that not monitoring this aspect of a SMB strategy can put an organization behind the curve. While looking at the buyer decision journey can be fruitful, in my qualitative research I’ve noted how the new SMB buyers are adept at more ad-hoc decision-making. Furthermore, with the rise of ecosystems and networks, collaborative efforts in making purchase decisions are not so neatly streamlined. Newer technologies are also making purchase decisions more decentralized than ever – making fragmentation on this issue even more complex.

Buyer Value Modeling: SMB buyers’ value varies widely by sub-market segments. Gaining insight and modeling how these values operate in their day-to-day world can help you to tailor offerings and communications to fit specific sub-market segments. Depending on the industry and markets, values in the SMB take on a deeper emotive texture and can be a deciding factor in purchase decisions.

Avoid Big Data Trap

With the rise of big data, there will be a tendency to try and “cut the numbers” every which way to make sense of the SMB market challenge. When dealing with 5,000 SMB accounts to 150,000 SMB accounts, the tasks of getting to know these SMB buyers at a deeper level can look downright daunting. Analytics will play an important role towards reaching understanding. I also contend and advocate that qualitative and predictive buyer modeling is essential to integrate into the mix of discovering the new SMB buyer of today. Buyer behavior within the SMB world is rapidly changing. A reasonable assumption can be made that in some SMB sub-market segments it is changing at a faster pace than that of larger organizations.

The combined use of analytics and predictive buyer modeling can yield an insightful picture into how these new behaviors translate into uncovering why buyers make purchase decisions. And, get closer to the holy grail of uncovering the reasons why they would change.

Next Up: The Importance of Buyer-Based Marketing in SMB

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base - Now What? (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
• 4 Ways the Power of Buyer Choice Will Transform Business Marketing (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)

Do Your Research Before You Pick Up The Phone © All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

This is part 1 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of target buyer modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.

As we continue to come out of the deep freeze over the last few years, we are beginning to see encouraging signs of an economic recovery. However, the purse strings are still drawn tight and new patterns of buying has created an atmosphere of even more exacting pricing pressures from enterprise-wide level buyers and accounts. This means less room for revenue growth to come directly from the fabled 20-30 percent of large customers who typically have made up 70-80 percent of total revenues. This is how a VP of Sales in the software industry put it to me recently in my research:

“Here is what it looks like…we are actually selling more of our product into our larger accounts than ever before….but…over the last three years we've faced stiffer competition that has driven our pricing down. So the net-net has been that we are just holding on as best we can to these larger accounts. Another words, we are not getting significant real revenue growth from them.”

It is highly likely that this refrain is being repeated across many Fortune 1000, Global 2000, and even Inc. 500 listed companies across the globe. With revenue growth opportunities shrinking among their large accounts, senior leaders in these organizations are turning a focused eye towards the highly sought after small and mid-size business segment. For instance, in the highly compettive world of IT Products and Services, both HP and IBM made substantial investments and strategic moves in 2011 to target the SMB segment. Challenging Dell and its' low cost entry strategy for small to mid-size businesses.

A New Challenge And A New Frontier

There is good reason for Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 companies to target revenue growth from the SMB segment. It is one of the fastest growing segments and traditionally has been coming out of a recession. It also has proven to be lucrative when you consider that actual contribution margin percentages are much richer per sale when compared to large accounts. It is little surprise that senior executives have shifted at least one eye towards expanding their SMB customer base and tapping into the revenue growth potential that can exists.

While targeting or at least accounting for the SMB segment is not a new idea to larger enterprises, this time around they are waking up to new buyer realities. Buyer behaviors continue to change rapidly and these new behaviors are associated with largely buyer-driven changes. What is confronting those wanting to achieve revenue growth from SMB buyers and companies is that they may know very little about these buyers and companies. How to market to SMB buyers and companies becoming one of the hot priority items showing up on the agenda of many large enterprise management meetings being held daily, weekly, or monthly. As one Senior VP of Sales and Markerting in IT pointed out to me recently:

“I am almost afraid to admit that we may have taken the SME (my notation: some executives refer to SMB as SME – small and mid-size enterprises) businesses for granted all these years. We never really moved beyond segmenting by employee size and revenue so we really don’t know a lot about SME’s as we should. It’s easy say you want to target them but planning how to target them is basically a whole new ball game for us.”

Because little knowledge may exist about SMB businesses and buyers, there are perhaps more assumptions being made about SMB than for larger accounts. Generalized perceptions and preconceived notions run rampant in the halls and meeting rooms of larger enterprises attempting to figure out how to market to SMB segments. There is what I call a “definition churn” that can happen when knowledge is found wanting – new definitions, classifications, segmentations, and etc. begin to appear every 3, 6, 9, or 12 months. Moving around 1,000’s of accounts and prospects in virtual databases to new buckets created for employee size, revenue size, product targets, and verticals.

Unprecedented Transformation Occurring

In the past, working with these definitions may have been sufficient. Looking ahead into the future - and the near future at that – these definitions alone will no doubt prove to be limiting and even detrimental to growth. We are experiencing an unprecedented transformation in the world of business with new buyer-driven economies, ecosystems, networks, and communications emerging constantly – making understanding of SMB buyers and companies that may have been attained even as little 3 to 5 years ago nearly obsolete.

For many large enterprise organizations that show up on the famed Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 lists, growing the SMB customer base may be their number one, or at least in the top five, priority. It is also, as a result of new buyer realities that are emerging, their number one challenge. To tackle both angles of this two-sided coin, gaining deeper layers of understanding about SMB buyers and companies will need to get on these same priority lists.

Next Up: Understanding New Buyer Realities In SMB

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales (buyerology.com)
• 3 Ways To Connect With Today's B2B Buyers (customerthink.com)

Higher Grade Product Design Concept Models (Photo credit: Jordanhill School D&T Dept)

This is part 5 and final article of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

How buyers make choices today, in large part driven by empowering new technologies, will transform how B2B businesses will view buyers as well as redefine what is meant by business marketing. The rigid funnel will no longer serve as a workable means of communicating unique views of buyers and their buying behaviors. This not to say that buyer processes, stages, and steps are no longer relevant but to highlight that buyers today no longer make choices neatly in the paradigm of the funnel. A rigid funnel view, whether it is drawn up horizontal or vertical, cannot provide the orbital view of choices being made continuously.

There are four ways that new buyer choice dynamics will transform the practice of business marketing and alter the view of what practices are relevant:

Predictive Buyer Modeling And Intelligence

As we covered, many B2B businesses are wrestling with the unknown and the invisible. B2B buyers are remaining invisible in their behaviors associated with exploring as well as establishing new networks of participants in decision-making. There will be a rise in the use of buyer modeling techniques as well as integrating the use of buyer intelligence, predictive analytics, and the illuminating aspects of predictive buyer modeling. The changes underway in buyer behavior will cause B2B business marketing to extend well beyond conventional buyer profiling as well as simplistic buyer persona creating for demand generation.

Reorient From Business Marketing Teams to Buyer Driven Marketing Teams

Traditional business marketing has been historically put together teams that are seller driven and narrowly funnel focused. The single buyer model view narrowly shared across all channels. Leaders in B2B marketing and sales will soon have to migrate towards buyer segment teams that are focused on activities that are focused on the buyer’s entire brand and buyer experience. We are beginning to see leading organizations, such as GE, move towards aligning their organizations to industry buyer segment teams focused on deeper understanding and alignment with buyers.

Create Orbital Match With Buyers

B2B is becoming more complex with every passing month. When informed with deep buyer intelligence, business marketing can begin to align to the continuous orbital loop of what confronts buyers and how they make choices. The new role of business marketing is to pull buyers into an orbital loop that mirrors their own and enables choices that are buyer driven. The new business marketing strategy is to create the gravitational pull that buyers feel and are drawn to because it aligns with their own orbital loops. Conversely, how can your organization get close to the buyer’s own gravitational pull and be drawn into their orbital loop? This is a departure from the seller driven and narrow funnel view of push messaging. Another way of positioning this concept in simple terms is this: either your B2B business becomes part of the orbital loop or you can watch it from afar with a telescope – and be out of the loop.

Total Brand and Buyer Experience

Business marketing today can take a strong leadership role in organizations by transforming itself to an orientation around the buyer. Historically, in the seller driven and narrow funnel view world, business marketing has been positioned as the conveyers of getting information in front of buyers. Producing material that buyers could read, provide messaging to sales, and putting together promotional programs with the aim to get sellers to sell harder. My intuitive guess is that in the world of business marketing, this positioning still exists in a large majority of B2B organizations – perhaps trapped within the label of marketing communications. To influence corporate strategy and decision-making, business marketing must now become the conveyors of buyer intelligence and influencing organizations to orient around the buyer. Conveying that what counts is the total brand and buyer experience and that business marketing’s role is to help create these experiences for buyers.

Business marketing today, by making these four ways the cornerstone of transformation, can enhance their leadership role in organizations. Orienting businesses around the understanding of buyer choices being made in a new complex buyer driven world. This is no easy challenge yet one that business marketing must take up. It must demonstrate that it understands buyers deeply and that a designed focus on the total brand and buyer experience is the new business marketing strategy. It is time for business marketing to come out of the literature closet and lead.

(This 5 part series has been compiled into an eBook entitled, A Matter of Choice: How B2B Buyers Choose in Today’s Complex Markets, to make for easy reading and sharing. Click on the hyperlinked title to receive.)

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• 3 Ways To Connect With Today's B2B Buyers (buyerology.com)
• The Buyerology of the Buyer: How B2B Leaders Respond to the Psychology of Buyer Choice (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)

We’ve heard it a million times: communication is the key to successful relationships. This doesn’t make it any less true in the agency world. And through the years, Phenomblue has benefitted from a boom in communication tools. From the dominance of email, we’ve added video conferencing, Skype and Basecamp to our communication toolbox. This arsenal of tech-related tools allows our Production and Engagement groups to be as accessible and flexible when communicating with clients. And we’re not alone. Agencies and businesses of all types have evolved client communications. Basecamp alone touts more than 5 million users, 4 million projects and 46 million files. Yet at Phenomblue, we don’t hold quantity over quality, especially when it comes to client relationships.

Don’t get me wrong, we use Basecamp daily. Our Producers are in and out of Basecamp all day long, posting messages, checking off milestones, uploading files. But this is coupled with the practice of picking up the phone. You know, actually talking, real-time, voice-to-voice with clients and partners. It’s simply obeying one of the main tenets of advertising: match your medium to your message. And Basecamp (or other software or app based communication tools) aren’t always the right medium. Sometimes it makes the most sense to reach out one-to-one and have a conversation. And it takes people in a relationship to know when to post and when to call.

Relationships have a personal element to them, and for all their strengths, communication tools like Basecamp can’t replace the personal aspect. You wouldn’t date someone you only know through text messages, so why should a client settle for a Producer they only know from Basecamp posts or emails? We don’t think they should. Productive and collaborative communication is more than trading written messages. It’s listening. It’s asking questions. It’s affirming and challenging. And more often than not, conversation is the best way to do all of the above. It’s communicating with our clients because we care not just about what we have to say, but about what they have to contribute. As a whole, client services is a big conversation, and project communication shouldn’t be any different.

After all, there’s a lot to say about agencies that can’t be bothered to talk with their clients.

There are plenty of debates regarding the best tactical means to connect with B2B buyers. The effectiveness of these tactical means, as reported by once again the likes of IDC and etc., show that many B2B leaders believe these tactical efforts such as content marketing and marketing automation may only be effective about a quarter of the time. It does represent a big gap and it begs for a rephrasing of the challenge – this a big disconnect with B2B buyers. Enough to keep any sane B2B CEO and their senior management team scrambling for answers. Part 1 and part 2 of this series pointed out that conventional funnel thinking is woefully inadequate in today’s B2B buyer landscape and is limited in the ability to address new and evolving complexities.

Determining new strategies as well as tactics that can meet the challenge of connecting with today’s B2B buyers revolve around understanding new buyer psychology and dynamics that are in a state of continuous evolution. B2B businesses can do three things to help grasp the connection issue and make plans that close the gap:

Buyer Modeling To Understand Buyer Choices and Scenarios

Business executives today are using the concepts of buyer modeling to understand as well as visually illuminate buyer choice. Buyer modeling incorporates the elements of attitudes, beliefs, values, goals, perceptions, needs, and motivations. By modeling buyers, buying scenarios, buyer experience, and decision journeys, B2B executives can then map strategy as well as tactical marketing and sales activities that enable them to connect with B2B buyers on a relational level. Buyer modeling is based on qualitative research that addresses choices being made versus inadequate interviewing that is done in the context of the funnel.

Focus On The Total Brand and Buyer Experience

B2B businesses are learning how to think outside the context of the funnel and how to encompass the total view of the brand and buyer experience. The invisibility of buyers who are in explore and network mode of the buyer choice model makes it an imperative for B2B businesses to better understand how different buyers interact with different channels that create impressionable brand and buyer experience. The emphasis here is on identifying critical Buyer Moment of Truth™ impression points that contribute to the overall brand and buyer experience. For example, does the web channel brand and buyer experience stay true to form when buyers interact with either the social media, sales, resellers, partner, or service channels? HP, for instance, has a strong ecosystem of reseller and partner channels where the brand and buyer experience has many potential pitfalls and has several challenging Buyer Moment of Truth handoff points that can make or break their involvement. B2B leaders today can conduct buyer experience mapping that identifies critical Buyer Moment of Truth and ensure that the brand and buyer experience stays true to form throughout.

Descriptive Buyer Segmentation Based on Buying Behavior and Opportunity

By integrating the benefits of predictive analytics with that of predictive buyer modeling, B2B leaders are gaining smarts on taking segmentation to a new level. With the use of visually illuminating B2B Buyergraphics, buyers can be segmented descriptively by explore and buying behavior and also by modeling buying scenarios that identify where the organization can reach a “best fit” level with buyers. This can be especially useful in industries where there is a strong company or account focus as well as complex buying scenarios that involve lengthy buying cycles. Descriptive means of segmentation helps to illuminate the many elements related to choice, needs, goals, attitudes, behaviors, values, and experience. This approach enables both marketing and sales to focus on resonating with buyer segments that have similar goals and buying behaviors where knowledge in doing so is dynamic and enriched with each company or account interaction. In essence, allowing B2B businesses to build strong connections with B2B buyers in buyer segments that have higher winning percentages.

When B2B leaders can do these three things, they can be better informed on how to guide the overall trajectory of their organization. Their focus is on identifying the buyers and buyer segments that they can best establish a connection within the context of understanding choices being made. More importantly, they can learn how to connect with B2B buyers today in ways that resonates and invites participation into the buyer driven world of goals, challenges, issues, uncertainties, and growth objectives that orbit them continuously.

Next up: Transforming B2B Business

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• The Buyerology of the Buyer: How B2B Leaders Respond to the Psychology of Buyer Choice (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)

© All Rights Reserved Kenny Madden

This is part 3 of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

When it comes to understanding the psychology of the buyer, much has been done in the world of B2C to get inside the mind of consumers to understand buying choices and preferences. For B2B, it has been harder to translate B2C research dynamics into ways that would make the psychology of B2B buyers more readily understood. However, what we do know is that there is an increasing consumerization effect happening in B2B buying whereby B2B buyers have the same desires for more experiential purchasing as opposed to a heavy emphasis on sterile transactions.

In part 2 of this series, I discussed the Buyer Orbit and the elements of the Buyer Choice Model. Each of these now filled with more psychological aspects related to why B2B buyers buy. This comes with many implications for B2B leaders to not only understand new buyer psychology but to also shift business models, operations, strategies, and interactions that transforms the way they connect with B2B buyers. In part 3, let us look at how B2B leaders are responding to new buyer psychology in relations to the elements of the buyer choice model.

Psychology of Buyer Choice

Understanding buyer choice has many implications for B2B strategies and tactics – whether they are focused on demand generation, content marketing, or selling approaches. Addressing new buyer psychology and buyer choice paradigms, within elements of buyer choice modeling, can be transformational:

Explore

With more and more buyers mapping out exploration due to the proliferation of content and information channels, a side effect of B2B businesses scrambling to be noticed in the 50% to 70% window of buyers remaining anonymous, B2B businesses are considering the implications of buyers taking deliberate action to map out their exploration.

What this means: predicting and modeling how buyers map and begin their exploring as well as what forms of navigation they usually take specific to their industry.

How to respond: devote more resources to qualitative investigative means, such as contextual interviewing and ethnographic research, to uncover how buyers begin their efforts to explore and how they are dealing with content proliferation.

Network

As elaborated upon recently, the single buyer model is no longer sufficient and more and more B2B buyers operate from the new buying model of working within ecosystems and relying on network participation. Codependency is here to stay and B2B businesses must adapt.

What this means: reexamine how buyers are viewed internally and what forms of outmoded approaches may be resulting in missed opportunities.

How to respond: use various forms of B2B buyer research and begin working with buyers to understand important ecosystem and network drivers for their business and industries. Incorporate important ecosystem views into strategy and organizational infrastructure.

Decide

The art and science of decision-making is becoming more complex each year. An increasing number of variables are being introduced into decision-making such as globalization, uncertainty, ecosystem considerations, and more – shifting how buying is taking place.

What this means: how buyers are buying today is shifting dramatically and B2B businesses need to understand the new rules of decision-making, in addition to the buyer decision journey, that are being implemented for purchase decisions.

How to respond: shift internal focus to understanding new rules affecting decision-making, acquired through the mix of analytics and qualitative insight, and support how buyers are making purchase decisions.

Buy

Buying today, as mentioned in part 2, is a higher stakes game for many businesses today. The margin for costly mistakes is the slimmest in decades. The extent of poor choices can have disastrous effect on many aspects of a business. Understanding high stakes motivations enables a focus on why B2B buyers buy.

What this means: B2B leaders must not confuse how buyers buy with why buyers buy. The focus here is on understanding the new buyer psychology in terms of their collective attitudes, goals, beliefs, perceptions, and drivers. This new collection of mental models are changing each time new variables, such as new technologies, are introduced.

How to respond: getting an understanding of buyer mental models through qualitative research efforts will become more crucial each year as buyer psychology continues to shift.

Relate

With higher stakes involved in decision-making and purchases today, B2B buyers seek more assurances post-purchase than ever before. Unlike the emphasis on engagement in B2C post-purchase, the need for deeper ties relationally is affecting long-term loyalty.

What this means: shifting out of funnel thinking and viewing the entire buyer experience cycle is a new rule of B2B thinking today.

How to respond: post-purchase support and talent can no longer be an after-thought of organizational planning but be seen as the gateway to being included in newly formed ecosystems and networks by buyers.

What we are witnessing today is a marked shift from funnel-thinking to that of focusing on the total buyer experience that does not fit neatly into stages or step approach thinking. The new buyer psychology compels B2B businesses today to make the buyer the centerpiece of strategy and respond to the continuous loops of what confronts them (the buyer orbit) and the choices (buyer choice model) they must make.

Next up: Impact on Marketing and Sales

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Revenue Growth by Choice and The Buyer Orbit (buyerology.com)
• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)

As the price of oil rises, it’s become economical to invest in new technologies thatrecover previously expensive sources of natural gas and oil. Two techniques - natural gas 'fracking' and shale oil extraction –have emerged as viable alternatives that.Both approaches require new technology, place a premium on available inventory and are disruptive to existing producers. These are not methods you use when oil is cheap and plentiful.

Oil isn’t cheap and plentiful like it used to be. 30 years ago China and India weren’t growing at 10% a year and the internet was nothing more than an academic and military communications tool.

The parallels between the energyeconomy to the current ad technology ecosystem are not obvious at first. But when you take a look at the ad ecosystem - and Terry Kawaja’sLumascape - the parallels are stunning. As demand for more has risen over the last two decades, more companies and more technologies have arrived to fill the gaps and create new sources of inventory to satisfy new demand.

When oil was first 'discovered', in western Pennsylvania in the middle of the 19th century, it was very close to the surface. This madeextraction simple, but messy and inefficient. John D Rockefeller's consolidation of the early oil industry into Standard Oil introduced efficiency. As worldwide exchange for trading oil and its derivatives developed, the US dollar was standardized as the Reserve Currency to stabilize the market. Since thattime all oil, even internationally, is bought and sold only in US dollars.

The development of this complex system for extracting, trading, transporting and refining oil took  nearly a century to develop. By comparison, the same process took the online ad industry less than 15 years.

Within the ad tech ecosystem, Doubleclick was Standard Oil. Overture would have been British Petroleum, but they ceded this mantle to Google.  24/7 Real Media became Dutch Shell. Various other ad networks became versions of Philips, Citgo, Getty, Chesapeake Energy and Lukoil.

A barrel of Oil? In today’s ad world, the standard measure is CPM.

Over time, vertical control of oil field operations left the control of the 'oil' companies and became separate businesses. The rise of the SSPs echo this development, as companies like AdMeld, The Rubicon Project and Pubmatic became the Halliburtons of the ad world and helped manage yield. Their plumbing provided the raw material for Google AdX and other exchanges to monetize. Media companies like Yahoo, seeing the value of their own fields, sought to buy technologies like Right Media to better monetize their own inventory and then applied this technology to other companies’ fields. DSPs like Turnand Invite developed ways for buyers to target the fields that best met their needs.

Still, during all this time, these companies were recovering most of the easy stuff: web display ads on the best publishers' pages. Using a standard set of recovery tools - iFrames, JavaScript, and Flash - these OPEC-like players competed for the ad inventoryby bidding for the highest quality impressions, or the best crude oil, that they could find. Like wildcatters of the old days, Publishers realized that more home page inventory meant more revenue and created new editorial products to be sold. As long as the users visited and occasionally engaged, all was good. Publishers even started to monetize impossibly tiny audiences on impossibly small screens via mobile apps and companies like AdMobwere created overnight to pursue and exploit this market.

However, throughout this flowering of ad technology innovation, one humongous source of potential inventory has stubbornly avoided profitable exploitation:  the real estate residing within email newsletters, alerts and notifications. Breaking news. Friend and game requests. Transactional messaging. Status Updates and reminders.

Email, the universal tool of communication - the number one way for publishers to remind you to visit their site, for social media services to notify you of a post, and for etailers to send you your confirm – has until recently relatively untouched by the ad tech revolution. Unmonetized except by retail email marketers. While retailers have long appreciated email as an effective marketing tool, the issue is that, in the hands of a publisher, email has long been underutilized and has remained a loss leader. Big time.

Why is that?

Cost. The hassle factor of buying and selling email inventory. It’s been too hard to sell, and too hard to buy. Everyone else has been selling impressions and clicks while email has been selling sends. And selling them asynchronously. The time has come for a change.

The amount of premium display inventory available in email dwarfs that of display. There are approximately three billion email addresses in existence today, four times the number of Facebook users. Much of that email volume, estimated at 170 million messages a minute, is being read using HTML readers, which, similar to display, are capable of serving images. As more users move to smartphones, the number of HTML5-enabled readers grows by the minute. All of this is for a solution to recover the valuable latent ad inventory locked within it.

The reason email inventory hasn’t been exploited is very simple: without flash, javascript and iFrames – the drilling tools of the ad tech ecosystem –advertisers and agencies couldn’t buy it the way they can buy display. And publishers couldn’t sell it like they could sell display.  So it just sat there. Until now.

LiveIntent has ‘fracked’ the latent inventory lying dormant within email newsletters, alerts and notifications and has made it available for buyers and sellers just like every other form of interactive inventory that’s been created.

With this revolutionary extraction method – no flash or javascript required - email advertising finally has developed the real-time technology to unlock the high-attention, opted-in ad inventory of the newsletter, which allows it to be bought and sold as efficiently as display. Publishers can now fully monetize inventory, something that had been nearly impossible and cost-prohibitive prior to this innovation. Advertisers can now target, bid and buy impressions within emails where users are routinely spending 20 or more seconds - impression quality that approaches billboards or television.

This is a really big deal. With the growth of the smartphone, people are spending increasing amounts of time reading email. Where before it was a desk-bound activity, now people – for good or bad – can read email anywhere they want, and on devices that render in HTML5, often a better platform than what they have on their desktop computer.

Advertisers can now buy email ad inventory that can truly be called local and mobile. Publishers can now make money sending email like their counterparts within the retail sector.

What’s most exciting? People click ads in email at a rate 10x in traditional display. People spend almost 30 seconds in an email when they open it.  Why? Because unlike in display, with it’s high bounce rate and short time on page, readers of opt-in newsletters have asked to receive the content, and there is high trust factor when requested content is paired with an ad.

So if you were deciding whether you were going to create another subsection on your website, another page four clicks down, think twice. There is another property that you own, another property that you can sell, and you push it to your best customers – it’s your email newsletters, alerts and notifications. Use this inventory and you’ve ‘fracked’ your way to some new revenue that technological innovation has created for you.

IT Buying Process © All rights reserved by Kenny Madden

This is part 1 of a limited series on why buyer choice modeling is the new view B2B Business must adopt to improve revenue performance and develop long lasting relationships with buyers.

Finding the keys that unlock improving revenue performance and achieving growth is becoming harder and harder as we go from a single buyer model to that of more interdependency among ecosystems and networks by B2B buyers. B2B marketing and sales is still predominantly tethered to traditional ideas, approaches, and systems that are being dragged into the modern era. While we have seen modifications, the idea of the traditional funnel is still at the core of many B2B organizations today. It matters little whether you keep it vertical or flip it sideways and make it horizontal – it is still suggesting a funnel that winnows down opportunities down to a “buy” decision.

As the modern era rages on with increasing speed where the Internet and Social Technologies are converging into new forms, the oversimplification of the funnel becomes more and more apparent. Simply put, buyers just don’t act or behave in that way anymore. Evidence suggesting that buyers are behaving well out of the norm of our conventional views of the funnel as well as the buying process is abundant from surveys. These behaviors cannot be represented in the view of a funnel. DemandGen, for example, reported that B2B buyers don’t talk to a sales rep until they’ve conducted independent research 77% of the time. There are plenty of surveys around showing buyers acting and behaving differently – yet – the willingness to snap the tether cord of the funnel doesn't appear readily apparent. It does beg the question of: what is going on?

I believe that is still an open question without an answer. We are about to see an uptick in Big Data being touted as the next Big Thing. Why? To figure out what’s going on. My thinking is that if this Big Data explosion is designed to tell us what’s going on within the confines of the funnel - then B2B organizations can find themselves in the untenable position of explaining why Big Data is not telling them anything. Here’s why: we will learn a lot about what buyers purchase and we will learn a lot about how they are purchasing - perhaps. What is missing is the most important question of all – why. And there are two very important components to the why question:

First, why are they buying and second, why are they making the choices they make.

Traditional marketing and sales, oriented towards the funnel, don’t answer these why questions very well. To get close, it may take years of piling on data after data to get a clue. This is a very expensive proposition for companies to take on today.

Despite the many super hyped concepts coming to the forefront attempting to address the 77% who are not getting a sales rep involved until much later, the funnel – whether vertical or horizontal or even cyclical – seems to be glossed over like a sacred cow. The language of these many new concepts is spoken through the prism of the funnel – still. For example, if we take an often used expression of the first part of a funnel – awareness – many of the new concepts are really talking about how to make awareness happen differently in the new social buyer era. But is that what’s really going on? I don’t believe so.

Before moving on to what I believe, let’s review limitations of funnel thinking against the new realities of today:

Buyers Explore vs. Become Aware. B2B buyers are less likely to become aware of solutions and more likely to explore and find them. And they are making significant choices during their exploring based on what they find. Unlike consumer purchases where there is an object of purchase desired – for example a HDTV – B2B buyers are making choices on which path they will invest more time hiking and exploring.

Buyers Are Part of Ecosystems and Networks. The age of the single buyer has come to a close in complex B2B environments. While there may be a target buyer per se’, they are increasingly dependent upon various ecosystem participants who are directly impacted by purchase decisions and have a voice in these decisions. The funnel is very limited outside the scope of the single buyer.

Buyers Just Don’t Make New Buys. In the complex realities of today, buyers are not repeating the new buy orientation of the funnel. There are many choices being made around how to modify different alternatives. In the age of just-in-time – and now in the age of real-time, buyers look ahead into the longevity of repurchase – or continuous supply that feeds the ecosystem with little disruption.

Buyer Views Extend Beyond Purchase. The funnel is based on the short-term view of making the sale and it is measured in quantities. In today’s environment, the funnel cannot accommodate the long term views buyers have on the overall buying experience and doesn’t account for many factors that happen well after the sale.

Given these limitations, I believe that companies today must attempt to understand buyer choices and adopt a different model. A Buyer Choice Model that begins to reflect buyer behavior and provides the language and terminology needed to understand why buyers choose as they do. It puts the buyer at the center of B2B marketing, sales, and service and reflects, more accurately, that buyers are making multiple choices throughout their actions as well as behaviors that ultimately lead to a purchase decision. But – it doesn’t stop there at the purchase decision. There is a continuous loop that extends beyond the purchase decision. The idea of buyer choice modeling is to understand choices that are being made in this continuous loop – so as not to be left out of the loop.

Next up: The elements of the Buyer Choice Model

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales (buyerology.com)
• Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B (buyerology.com)
• Boost Demand Generation Using Target Ready Buyer Models (buyerology.com)
• One Thing That Can Get You From Here to There in 2012 and Beyond (buyerology.com)
• The Single Buyer Model: A Dangerous Road Towards Competitive B2B Marketing (blogs.imediaconnection.com)
• 5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Will Affect B2B Marketers in 2012 (blogs.imediaconnection.com)

To avoid embarrassing mistakes that can earn you unsubscribes by the dozen, here are 18 solid tips to help you build and send mobile emails that get attention - and keep it:

1. Employ Multipart MIMEodramas – Mobile devices display your email in a mind-boggling variety of ways so ensure that every message is sent out in a manner which ensures that it is properly shown in HTML or plain text.

2. Tag Carol Alt with an Alt Tag – Many mobile devices have images off by default so your supermodel hero shot is going to be lost unless you clearly specify in the Alt Tag what the image is all about.

3. People don’t have pointy fingers – A good optical mouse can click on a single pixel, but fingers are far more sausage-like thus require an absolute minimum of 44x44 pixels to activate any button or link.

4. Microcontent rules the universe – From lines, subject lines, and preheaders are the only bits of information your reader has to determine whether or not to open the email. Make those three items spectacularly alluring!

5. Call To Action not Apathy – It’s easy to lose your Call To Action on the smaller smartphone screens, so positioning it prominently and above the fold will ensure that your conversion rate soars.

6. Get your emulate straight – “It looks great on my iPhone, so send it!” Wrong! Varying devices will display your email differently, so run every email through simulators and emulators to confirm that it’s just as readable on a Droid or BlackBerry.

7. #1 with a bullet – People are drawn to bullet lists like moths to a lighthouse, so condense the salient points of your pitch, and position your bullet points so that they form a visual break that will grab the attention of your reader.

8. Be a bold Italian – Mobile users are the ultimate attention deficit disorder subjects, so bolding or italicizing your most important phrases will allow the reader to pull out the gist of the text at a glance.

9. Parashortandsweetgraphs – English Literature is based on the long, descriptive paragraph, but Mobile Literature rewards paragraphs that are brief, snappy and to the point, with lots of white space between them.

10. Sorry, southpaws – Much to the chagrin of the left-handed population, the vast majority of people are right-handed, so your email message should have links and buttons positioned for the right hand to access them easily.

11. Coming in for a mobile landing – Don’t direct the conversion link to a page that won’t display properly on small screens. Have a properly designed mobile-friendly landing page or lose the sale!

12. Forget fancy fonts – Sure, that ITCHieronymusGutenbergianUltraBoldExtraCondensed has the most adorable fillip on the lower-case f but it will reproduce like a blob on a small screen. Stick to the simple, basic fonts that scale well!

13. Scrub your code clean – Creating an email on a WYSIWYG HTML editor is as smart as diving into the piranha pool. Those editors usually generate clumsy code rife with mobile-verboten elements. Use your email provider’s proven templates instead!

14. Everyone is wrong: smaller is better – …at least when it comes to image and file sizes. Relatively few mobile users access superfast networks so ensure that your overall kB size is as small as possible and images are optimized to their minimal acceptable resolution and color depth.

15. The best time to send is now – There are very few times in the day that are any better for sending emails to gain a conversion, so as long as you shun middle-of-the-night sends you should be fine.

16. QR score more – There is no limit to where you can place QR codes to drive mobile users to your email subscription forms!

17. Location, location, location – Embrace Foursquare and similar services to target your email customers by wherever they happen to be at the time!

18. When you’re done testing, test some more – There is no substitute for intensive, continued, and sustained testing of every imaginable element. Become best friends with your statistician and get intimate with your multivariates.

Apply all 18 of these mobile email tips and you may move up from a small business to an extremely successful mid-size one. The key is to test, test, test and always strive to improve your campaigns.

Curt Keller is COO of Benchmark Email, a company that offers a free, award-winning email marketing app for sending out newsletters.

"Valentine’s Day is here yet again and the shops seem to be bursting at the seams with roses, chocolates and cards. Although this once-a-year event is a chance for us to show our nearest and dearest we care – for a business loving your customers should be a daily occurrence.

However, do your customers love you? One way of making your customers your not so secret admirers is through effective email marketing. Get this right and your email marketing can help build and nurture a beautiful and long-lasting relationship – get it wrong and your customers will look elsewhere.

• Ask them out

You wouldn’t go up to any Tom, Dick or Harry in the street and ask them out unannounced, so why do so many businesses think this approach works with their email marketing? All successful relationships are two-way affairs, so ensure your email marketing is permission-based.

• Build up a rapport

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of light-hearted flirting with your new subscribers in the early days. You don’t want to bombard them with too many offers or mailings too soon as you might scare them away. Take some time to nurture your new subscribers with helpful information they can use – they will start to recognise your name in their inbox and be more likely to open their mail to see what you’ve got to say.

• Wine and dine them

When we go on a date we turn up dressed to impress – and the same should be true with your offers. Present your best offers in a presentable, eye-catching and engaging manner. Make sure your email matches the brand guidelines of your organisation with a tailored template. Also impress them with your knowledge, your range of wares and what you can offer them that no other business can. If they think you’re the bees’ knees you’re one step closer to stealing their heart.

• Declare your love in public…

When we fall in love we want to shout it from the rooftops – but the same should be true of your emails. Rather than keep your love hidden, publish your email newsletters for the world to see. Sharing them on social media websites will not only encourage other people to sign up it can do wonders for your SEO too.

• But don’t be clingy!

Being too clingy in the early days of your relationship will inevitably lead to being kicked to the kerb. You can reduce the chance of being dumped by sending personalised offers, letting your subscribers choose when they want to hear from you. Being reliable yet respectful of their privacy and personal space will keep you away from their delete button.

• Be spontaneous

When all’s said and done your customers know that you're in business to make money, but if you give something to them for free, they will take notice. Think about what special offers you can give to email subscribers only – it will tempt others to sign up too. The best-performing email campaigns are ones that speak directly to your customers’ individual needs and are incentive-based.

• Remember your anniversary

It goes without saying that you need to remember your anniversary. Sending a simple thank-you to your customers on the one-year or six-month anniversary of their first purchase lets them know they’re treasured. You could even offer them something tailored to their past purchase which would really make them feel special.

• Always listen

Successful relationships only work if you listen. You could create short, simple surveys and ask your customers what they think of your relationship. Is it working out or does it need a makeover? Do they want more space?  Are there things you used to do that they miss? Now is the time to find out the honest truth and work it out.

• So long…but can we still be friends?

It’s always sad when a relationship comes to an end. If your customer wants to break up and say goodbye, you need to accept it, thank them for the special time you shared together move on. Don’t try and hide the unsubscribe option – be clear and open. On the opt-out page why not give them the opportunity to be your friend on Facebook or follow you on Twitter? If you end the relationship with dignity there may be a second chance down the road."

As our company has grown over these past years we’ve had to install another level of business process to keep projects on schedule and things from falling through the tracks. 37signals has met and surpassed our expectations as a customer management solution. That’s the honest truth. This is not a paid endorsement, remember? We use all four components in 37signals’ suite: Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire.
All the packages have 30-day free trials, are easy to learn and can be ramped up over time. These options suited us well because we’re a small business and our time and resources are precious. Here’s how we use each of these packages, not necessarily how you might apply them in your business:

Basecamp – is a simple project management solution. We track all the project team members, their things to do, messages between each other, pertinent documents, schedules and files. A great fit for a small, busy company.
Highrise – this is where we keep all of our client information. We email through this app which gives us the ability to track our client conversations. We can also group certain client-types together and export their contact information into MailChimp, our email campaign service which we use to educate and nurture our clients and prospects.

Backpack – we use this for internal things like calendars, SOPs, travel details, speaking opportunities, proposals and other ancillary files. Everyone on the team can see and edit the information.

Campfire – we use this voice over the web option for our many overseas conference calls. Business is no longer done across town. We have clients in over 30 countries.
37signals has much more to offer; but remember this is not a software commercial. Find out more by visiting their site.

If you have found a different customer management solution why not share why you love your option.

According to a new whitepaper by Mintigo, this is a question of scalability.  Search and Display Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most common methods for generating new leads.  However, PPC works great at the beginning, reaping all of these low hanging fruit at relatively low cost per lead.  However, once all of these easy targets are exhausted, advertisers who want to scale their campaign need to buy more keywords or buy less relevant media, causing the cost per lead to spiral.

This problem is exacerbated for B2B marketers who need to target a very specific audience that's relevant for their product or service.  These marketers may find themselves wasting precious dollars on sifting through irrelevant and disengaged audience trying to get to a few relevant targets.

But there is a solution.  Once cost per leads start to increase quickly in inbound Search and Display campaigns, advertisers need to start thinking about complementing it with outbound marketing.  Outbound marketing such as email campaigns can be very targeted, reaching only those relevant potential clients.  The key challenge there is to get a high quality and a relevant email list.

How do you make sure that you have a relevant list?  Today, targeting the right people has become more of a science than an art.  New technologies can sift through huge quantities of data on the social web and find just those who are relevant for a product or service with high likelihood to convert.

Technology is making outbound marketing much more efficient and scalable than ever before.  So if your PPC advertising doesn't scale well, don't just throw more money at the problem—instead, make a smarter investment in outbound marketing.

Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi discussed the economic outlook for the next couple of years in opening comments.

While he says full recovery is a few years away, he is optimistic and predicts that 2012 will be better than 2011, and 2013 will see additional improvement.

Mark indicated that the next big opportunity for US companies is in China, but that products and services must be re-imagined in order to succeed in that very unique and different culture. This holds true for content as well.

Our next speaker Peter Francese, Demographic Trends Analyst for the MetLife Mature Market Institute, noted that the state of the union for publishers is strong, considering how limitless the demand for content has become.

He broke down the various demographics that will be consuming the most content. He focused on both the young–noting that children are starting to access content online at around 5 and 6 years old–and grandparents, of which there are 65 million in the US alone.

For the latter, he said that when users encounter a new life stage, e.g. becoming grandparents or seniors, the need for content that explains the new worldview increases.

Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Director of Interactions and Experience Research, Intel Labs, INTEL, spoke next about how Intel uses anthropology to better understand how its products fit into this changing landscape.

She highlighted the fact that the world is not just more connected, but that the US is no longer the center of the web-driven world.

“17% of the world’s Internet users were based in the US in 2010 vs. 65% 10 years ago,” she said.

“You need to be clear about who you are targeting, not just creating a fantasy of who your user is,” Bell said. “It is essential that technology providers and content providers make things that cut through the clutter.”

She highlighted a number of trends that impact the publishing space. For example: the proliferation of devices. While consumers are struggling with what devices are relevant to their lives, they have decided that no one device will do it all.

But not everything is changing; Bell is quick to point out that Americans still watch five times more TV in a month than spend hours on the Internet.

Plenty more to come tomorrow and don’t forget to tune in at 9:15 am ET and 9:50 am ET for the next two live streamed sessions from the summit.

This post originally ran on the OPA Blog.

If not, then you’ll just be among the many small business owners and managers who take a half-hearted plunge into online marketing and then dejectedly shrug their heads when they don’t really derive anything of solid value from the project.

Identify & segment who is interested in you

It’s not sufficient to be able to secure email subscribers for your newsletter list, you have to find out as much about them as possible. Polling and surveying through your missives, as well as providing valuable and alluring incentives to drive the followers to your email newsletter campaign’s Preference Center, can provide critical demographic and geographic data.

Leverage the data to craft custom tailored content

Every single byte of data you can obtain about your email subscribers can provide significant insights which can help you categorize and segment each customer and potential customer in such a manner that you can deliver specifically tailored content to them.

If, for example, you’re operating a sports goods business you can apply this “online intelligence” to drill down through the data and come up with a remarkably complete “portrait” of the consumer which will allow you to provide them with the precisely accurate content they will respond to.

Customer sample: The non-athletic sports fan

The demographic information tells you that this person is 54 years old and lives in Minnesota. Their behavior shows that they spend an inordinate amount of time in your football section and primarily click on and/or order NFL Vikings jerseys in a 3XL size, team beer mugs, and a purple tailgate BBQ emblazoned with the helmet’s famous horns.

To make a shallow determination that this person is suitable for your football segment is not sufficient. According to the data obtained, is this customer going to be interested in a $250 Men's Air Zoom Alpha Talon TD Football Cleats shoe? Not likely, as their segmentation should show them as a non-active, obese football fan primarily interested in watching games, drinking beer, and enjoying tailgate parties at Mall of America Field.

NCAA Conference merchandise to a Canadiens fan?

Just as it would be a strategic error to provide that couch potato customer with content better suited to the early 20s athletic participant in local flag football games, it would also be irrelevant to promote to the athlete a sale on your 3XL jerseys and jackets.

The rule of thumb in both social media and email marketing content provision is to offer only the specific category of goods and services to your customers that resonate with their preferences and requirements.

Therefore just as the Montreal Canadiens hockey fan in Lac St-Jean, Quebec is going to fundamentally disconnect with merchandise emblazoned with NCAA Southland Conference team logos, the non-athlete is going to react differently to gear specifically intended for athletes, and so on.

These sports examples can be readily applied to any small business sector from computer equipment to auto accessories ad infinitum. If there is a level of segmentation which is too fine, it is certain that no online marketer has ever reached it.

In a perfect world, small businesses would have the time, energy, manpower, and resources to craft individually targeted content specifically for an individual by hand. That is unfortunately not possible for all but the tiniest companies, but there are ways to use sophisticated mail merge technologies which can derive data from your customer records and come up with acceptable substitutes for hand-written missives.

Small business owners and managers should scrutinize these options as soon as possible and implement a software-personalized segmentation strategy which will see them speaking directly to their customers about the products and services that they really want, not just what you’re trying to move off the shelves!

Curt Keller  is CEO and Founder of Benchmark Email, one of the world's top email marketing services for small business.

High-level customization of email marketing campaigns usually requires collecting various types of data on your customers, segmenting your lists and using (and paying for) complex enterprise-level tools. But for many of us – especially the small agency or small business marketer – we need to start our email marketing efforts pronto without spending a whole ton of money.

Thankfully, there are ways to make it seem like your campaigns are customized even if all you have are the basics. How? Take your content cue from seasonal shifts, news headlines and even weather fluctuations.

Here are a few examples from big brands where this type of approach works well:

Baskin Robbins: To combat an inevitable dip in ice cream sales during the chillier months, they served up a double scoop of savings with a BOGO coupon (Buy One Get One Free) for their aptly-named Bobsled Brownie cones. Subject line: "Slide into Winter with December's Flavor of the Month."

Cole Haan: Their post-Black Friday campaign offered exhausted holiday shoppers a chance to both pamper themselves and score a year's worth of freebies. (In exchange for an email address, of course!) Subject line: "TREAT yourself: Enjoy 25% off AND enter to win 12 months of shoes."

Kaiser Permanente: The healthcare provider's December e-newsletter got a timely (and flavorful) boost by including a heart-smart winter soup recipe. Subject line: "Warm up your holidays with our lentil soup."

Recyclebank: They gently nudged members to earn extra points redeemable for free stuff by either pledging to reduce energy consumption and consumer waste, or by playing the latest, seasonally-themed game called “Green Your Seasons.” Subject line: "Last Days! 'Green Your Seasons Winter' is open, did you get your 90 points yet?"

Of course, you can kick it up another notch by automatically including the subscriber’s first name in the subject line, if you collect that information; most email service providers offer this feature.

Have you spotted any examples of “customized” marketing based on timely happenings or seasonal trends? Let us know!

Janine Popick is the CEO and founder of VerticalResponse, a provider of email marketing, social media, online survey, event marketing and direct mail marketing solutions.