Google recently introduced a new set of educational materials in a program called Webmaster Academy. In keeping with the schooling theme, Webmaster Academy is design and organized into a curriculum-style format, wherein beginner webmasters can easily navigate their way through digestible chucks of structured content.

So what does this mean for you? You can now do a deep-dive into a topic you are interested in, and then you can drill-down and find more in-depth articles as you move through your “lessons.” What is even more encouraging is that a vast majority of the “lessons” have an accompanying video on the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. So no matter what your preferred learning style- they’ve got you covered.

In their words “Webmaster Academy provides practical and easy-to-understand lessons for beginner webmasters to help you improve your site with topics like getting your site in our index, providing search engines with helpful information about your video and image content, and understanding Webmaster Tools features.”

Exciting! I know… #nerdalert. Have you checked it out? What are your thoughts? Catch me here or @saminj58.

If your prospects can’t find you at the Google search box, then it is well worth your time to optimize your content, keywords and entire web presence for organic search. And you want to because more than 1 billion Google searches are performed every day; 85% of those searchers are most likely to click on the organic side (left-hand side) of the search results.

Getting to the top of Google’s search results requires ongoing commitment to optimizing your entire web presence.

Here are five SEO tips and tactics that will help you improve your search engine rankings, increase eyeballs to your online store and impact sales.

1. How do you rank now?

Before investing any time in SEO it’s best to understand how you currently rank for the keywords that you want to be found for. Accurate SEO rankings are challenging to obtain because Google personalizes search results for everyone.

If you go to the Google search box and search on your own product, it may appear as though you are #1 because you’ve likely searched on the keyword before and Google is personalizing the search for you. However, a prospect searching for your product for the first time might see your website or product page ranked #7.

SEO ranking results are also different by country. So if you’re located in France but trying to be found in Google.com, it is almost impossible to understand your actual SEO ranking.

Gaining insight into your true, unskewed, non-personalized SEO ranking for a particular keyword phrase requires access to an SEO ranking tool.

2. Closing the keyword gap.

The keyword gap is a concept I use to describe the fact that your prospects are most likely using a different keyword to find your products and services compared to the keyword you would use. For example, if you are selling “gizmos” your prospects may actually refer to them as “gadgets” in the Google search box.

Closing your keyword gap is about understanding how your prospects and customers are searching and adjusting your keyword strategy to match their intentions.

The only way to close your keyword gap is through keyword research. Studying your website analytics as well as talking to your customers are two great ways to get started. (Download: Getting Your Keywords Right Workbook)

3. Continuous content.

A strong SEO strategy starts with a continuous commitment to content. Content is at the heart of SEO. Without content, you’ll never be found in Google. Keep in mind that Google loves fresh, relevant content.

Start with evaluating your website and deciding if you think the content throughout your site could be improved. How do you take what you learned in #2 above and work those keywords into your content?

A regular blogging strategy will also boost and help maintain high SEO rankings when the content is optimized for the keyword phrases you are attempting to rank for. Brainstorm blog topics in advance. Think about stories about your products, the clients that love them, how they use them, etc. Post your blog content on your blog site and also Tweet it, Facebook it, YouTube It and Google+ it.

4. YouTube; YouBeFound.

YouTube is the second busiest search engine only after its parent, Google. Once you close your keyword gap and have great content, putting in the extra effort to publish video content on YouTube and optimizing it for search will really pay off.

Not only will you be found when a prospect searches directly from the YouTube search box, but YouTube results can also be embedded in the Google search results page. This increases the likelihood of you occupying multiple rank positions in Google for your product. Who doesn’t want that?

Ensure you have sufficient links back to your website from the video page and reference the keyword in your voice over. And remember, your videos don’t have to be fancy or expensive.

5. Socialize your online store.

According to both Google and Bing, social signals now account for 8% to 10% of their organic search algorithms. Your social media presence now matters to SEO! This means that Google is evaluating the volume of social signals that are being produced by your web presence.

A social signal can be a Twitter tweet or retweet, a Facebook Like or Share, or a Google +1. Here are a few tips to help increase your social signals:

• Ensure you have the social sharing icons on every page of your website. Not just the home page, but every shopping cart page. It is about providing your shoppers with endless opportunities to click the Like or Share or Tweet button.
• Incorporate Facebook into your site wherever possible. For example, add a Facebook Fan Box to your web pages as well as the Facebook Comments App to your blog.
• If possible, add your customers to your Google+ Circles and follow them on Twitter. They may reciprocate and retweet your product tweets or share your content in their circles.
• SEO Your Business Facebook Page. There are even more tips and tricks available in this SEO Your Business Facebook Page How-To Guide.

All this “SEO stuff” may sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Take it one step at a time, spend an hour per day figuring it out and it will pay off. SEO results do not happen overnight, but they do happen. It is a never-ending process but one worth investing in.

For those of you that track analytics or keyword reports, either on your own or through your agency, (not provided) should be old news. The not-so-recent search encryption update from Google has had a larger impact on analytics than expected, as (not provided) is polluting top keyword reports regardless of your industry. The update allows users that are logged into Google to encrypt their searches so that the keyword they used to find your site is not revealed in analytics and is instead (not provided). While this is a step forward for privacy – in theory (see below) – it has made the job of the Data Analysts and SEOs a bit harder. After all, if you don’t know which words your consumers are using to find your site, how can you properly target them online?

Now Firefox is getting in on the search encryption fun, if something like search encryption can really be considered fun. Their most recent browser update defaults to a private search, regardless of the search engine you’re using. In other words, if you’ve recently updated Firefox and have not changed your default settings, your search keyword is (not set) for Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Search marketers are not seeing which keyword search led you to their site when they check their Google Analytics.

Alone, these two updates may not have amounted to much, but together they are hiding a fairly large portion of data, enough to force consideration of what analytics does for you and how you can replace the lost information. While some articles are providing specific examples of the damage (not provided) can do, even anecdotally it is clear that marketers needed to take notice of this update. However, having less than 10% of your data affected is not usually enough to cause real damage or a change in approach. But what if over 20%, or up to 40% of your data is hidden? With (not set) being triggered by Firefox in addition to Google’s (not provided), that is just what is happening to some site owners. Needless to say, if you have full data for 1,000 keyword searches you’re going to be more effective targeting users than if you have the data for just 600 such searches.

Why isn’t (not provided) Showing Up in AdWords Data?

I have no quarrel with Firefox offering an update that could appeal to users and help to differentiate itself from other browsers (read: Explorer), but here is where I pick a bone with the change. Those paying for ad placement within the Google search network can see which keywords led to a user clicking on their ad. So if you’re paying Google, they are providing you with the keyword search of their logged in users; it is just for organic search, the type for which marketers can’t pay for top placement, that the privacy implementation is coming into play.

It is worth repeating that if you click on an ad, and Google gets money for that ad, they will “unblock” your private search. That is because it has already been sold to marketers at an arranged cost – the cost of the ad placement. But if you click on a natural result, and Google gets no money, you can keep your privacy. So that begs the question: Why update privacy now? While I can’t get inside Google’s head (if I could, I’d be rich) and say for sure “why now,” I can say that marketers should be looking at other ways to collect data if they want the complete picture.

What this all means is that SEOs and other online search marketers for small business, the types that can’t afford an Omniture or a Webtrends analytics platform, must ponder a day when Google’s free analytics goes away or is diluted. While Google Analytics is currently the most cost-effective option for site performance measurement for most businesses, the day when Google makes you pay for the best, most actionable data seems a bit closer now than it had been a few months ago.

Given that, it might be time to consider your options for replacing the lost information, though there is no impetus act on those ideas immediately (or as long as GA remains free). While solutions will vary with site data needs, some options include more in up-front data collection such as User Experience studies, or perhaps generating an e-mail database and CRM campaign to collect user information. There are a lot of ways to collect data, and if Google has any additional plans to shift the access to data, you need to be ready with other solutions.

Leverage Your Newsletter for Blog Content

If you have a company newsletter, you have ready-made blog content. Take a few moments to review past newsletters. If you have access to analytics, pull content from your most popular articles and repurpose it. A skilled copywriter can create several blog entries from each article for a later publishing date. In the interest of efficiency, consider scheduling blogs to be published in advance.

More Blog Shortcuts for Content Updates

So you have the most engaging blog in the world and you want the masses to know it? That’s great. Blogging and social media are perfect together. By linking your blog to your Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, your social content will update automatically with every published post.

It’s All in the Application  

It is important to regularly update your social media profiles. Try simplifying your content strategy with applications. Are you constantly schlepping from tradeshow to conference? Then the Events application on Facebook or LinkedIn could be a win-win. Not only will you be updating your content, you’ll be keeping your contacts abreast of your whereabouts.

Applications can also make you seem more interesting on a personal level. The personal could impact the professional. For instance, the LinkedIn Reading List app allows you to recommend books to your connections. While it may be tempting to just list industry material, don’t be just another business wonk. Don’t be afraid to include The Hunger Games. Let connections know that you’re more than your job.

The creative, conversational, and relationship-building aspects of social media are what most of us consider to be the fun stuff. But in order for social users to see your creative, conversational, and relationship-building sides, they need to be reminded that you’re out there. That’s why updating and revising content, especially on your profile, is essential.

© 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)

Well, what if you were told that your company’s message could be put in front of people actively searching for your products or services, that you could pick and choose your audience by location, gender, and age, and that you could even control what time of day and device type they found you on? Would it sound too good to be true?

And yet there’s more. Imagine this advertising tool allowed you to simultaneously test multiple ad messaging, didn’t require costly and time-consuming ad production, and could take affect almost immediately. And, unlike traditional advertising, you could measure everything - conversion rates, conversion costs, ROI, and what keywords or ads result directly in a lead.

Before you think the catch is that this must be super expensive, consider that you can set a fixed advertising budget as low as $50 a month, and only get charged if a prospect actually visits your online page.

This marketer’s dream is called Paid Search, often referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It’s real; I’ve been using it to grow my business since this tactic’s beginnings, then offered via the “GoTo” platform. I’ve kept pace with this evolving advertising method and have leveraged it to help grow my clients’ businesses, too. Regardless of the size of the company and the budget, Paid Search is one of the most efficient and effective tactics for generating leads, driving traffic, and growing a business.

Our team believes in Paid Search so much so that we now offer an end-to-end solution for this affordable advertising. We call it Managed SEM Programs. In short, our expert SEM managers identify clients’ goals; conduct extensive keyword, competitor, and bid rate research; develop optimized landing pages; and leverage sophisticated software to run campaigns across multiple search engines, monitor and analyze performance daily, and provide detailed reporting.

So if your company needs a boost of new customers, use the powerful and cost-effective channel of Paid Search. And if you prefer to let the professionals handle it, inquire about our Managed SEM Program to get even better results without having to shoulder all the efforts. Click here to request a free Search Engine Marketing analysis.

If you are a marketer you must be thinking, “How do I know if we are maximizing our SEO investment given all the changes Google has introduced?” If you are an SEO or marketing consultant you are probably asking yourself, “How do I sell my services and prove value to my clients?”

Although a lot has changed, two aspects of SEO remain certain:

1. SEO is not dead, nor will it die in the foreseeable future. Billions of marketing dollars are invested every year into “being found” organically in the search engines and this trend will continue. With more than a billion Google searches performed worldwide every day SEO is not going away.
2. The way we perform and measure organic search optimization has to change and is changing. Blatantly building out backlinks and optimizing on-site content is not enough. Measuring only rank and position is not enough either. Today organic search is about fresh, relevant, findable, optimized content that generates leads.

A New Theory: The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimization

The idea of building out a hierarchy of web presence optimization (WPO) comes from the belief that basic fundamentals are required before organic search success can be achieved. The purpose is to visualize how the execution of SEO and the services required to perform SEO have evolved due to Google’s algorithm enhancements, and to maximize your SEO efforts and investment.

There are five different tiers in The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimization:

1) Technical SEO Fundamentals & Foundation

If you are serious about being found in Google and optimizing your entire web presence, it is important to start with a strong baseline or foundation. We call this first tier Technical SEO Fundamentals & Foundation. A strong base layer will accelerate your efforts in the higher tiers by ensuring your web presence has a strong infrastructure, can be effectively indexed and is identifiable.

Technical SEO Fundamentals & Foundation accounts for approximately 10% of the SEO efforts often consisting of one-time tasks such as:

• Setting up Robots.txt, 301 redirects, sitemap, title tags, etc.
• Configuration and cross referencing of a blog presence and social accounts including: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+ and any other industry-specific social media or sharing sites.
• Implementation of social sharing icons throughout the main web and blog sites.
• Backlinking from respected industry and local directories.
• Setting up Google Places listings.
• Understanding web page load time and server details that may affect rankings.

This is not an exhaustive list and is bound to change as Google continues to tweak its algorithm to serve up the most relevant search results.

2) Keyword & Competitive Research

At the core of every organic search strategy are keywords. Coincidentally, at the core of Google’s organic search algorithm is relevance for keywords. There will be constant competition for every keyword you are trying to rank for – guaranteed.

The Keyword & Competitive Research tier is an on-going process that will expand and evolve as you venture deeper into your organic search optimization strategy. It is important to understand that the keyword phrases your prospects use will change as they progress through the buying cycle.

Approximately 25% of your organic search optimization efforts should be focused on continually understanding the keyword phrases that drive targeted traffic and conversions.

Before advancing any further up the WPO pyramid, become very focused on your keywords and your competition for those keywords. To get started, determine a shortlist of (two to four) unbranded keyword phrases your prospects are actually searching for to find the products and services you are selling. Only after you develop a keyword list should you scale your efforts into the next tier – The Optimized Content Marketing Plan.

3) The Optimized Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is experiencing a lot of buzz lately, and it should be! Content marketing is not new, but “optimized content marketing” is. Optimized content marketing is at the intersection of organic search optimization, social media, all the recent Google algorithm changes, and content marketing. Planning and creating your optimized content accounts for the majority of your SEO efforts - approximately 55%.

The Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs interviewed 1,092 B2B marketers in August 2011 and found that 60% plan to increase their content marketing budgets in 2012. Also, 40% are using SEO rankings as a measurement of the success of their content marketing campaigns.

So what would the impact be to your organic search rankings, impressions and clickthroughs if you optimized your next major piece of content for the keyword discovered in the previous tier?

An optimized content marketing plan addresses four major Google algorithm changes from the past year:

a) Freshness Updates – Google favors fresh, relevant content in the form of press releases, blogs, case studies, news and events.

b) Panda Updates – Optimized content distributed to valid, reliable sources will assist in building strong backlinks that are less likely to be penalized.

c) Google+ – Social networks and social media are about relationships and relationships prove relevance. Google’s social network, Google+, is indeed factored into its search algorithm. Build your Google+ presence and circles and start sharing your content today.

d) Search plus Your World – Most importantly, when you share your content publicly in Google+ it has a broader reach and a longer life than any other social network including Facebook and Twitter.

Additionally, an optimized content marketing plan will provide you with sustenance for other lead generation techniques such as paid search campaigns (i.e. Google AdWords and banner ads) and email marketing. And you need content to be successful at generating social signals, which is the fourth tier.

4) Publishing, Socializing & Sharing Content

Now that you have effective, optimized content that your prospects want, you need to tell them about it. Distributing your content effectively and frequently should occupy about 5% of your SEO effort. Here’s where to publish your content:

• Corporate website and blog site
• If a blog post, then to industry specific blog sites that your prospects will visit
• If a press release, then through a newswire such as PRWeb or Marketwire
• Social channels including: LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Facebook (with Twitter the content should be tweeted multiple times over a specified period of time)
• Subscribers and client base via email marketing

The distribution of your optimized content marketing is key because it accomplishes the following goals for your SEO campaign:

• Backlink building
• Indexing by Google so it can ultimately be found
• Social signals creation (Tweets, Retweets, Likes, Shares, Views)
• Beginnings of a sales conversation with prospects

5) Measurement & Improvement

In order to improve a content marketing campaign for further execution, not only must you master the previous tiers, but you must measure, benchmark, tweak and repeat. This is the final and ultimate tier - the remaining 5% of your SEO effort.

But how do you measure the success of an SEO campaign? Compare the following SEO metrics to other marketing campaigns (i.e. Google AdWords, email marketing, banner ads):

• Impressions
• Clickthroughs
• Conversions
• Social signals
• Backlinks
• Keyword Rank

Conclusion

As organic search optimization and the services required to “get found” evolve, so too must our tools, techniques and tactics. The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimization can be used by marketers to guide their in-house SEO efforts, as well as by agencies in their sales conversations and implementation processes.

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)

Your SEO efforts are worth paying attention to on a regular basis because everyone looks at the organic side of search, and over 85% of searchers click on organic search results over paid results.

The following 10 SEO metrics are useful for tracking the progress of a web presence in organic search. Each metric provides signals as to what is working and what is not so your SEO efforts can be constantly tweaked and results improved.

1. SEO Rankings

Track your online organic search visibility for the keywords your organization wants to be found for in the search results. Following your SEO ranking metric every day, week or month will allow you to understand if your organization is expanding its web presence.

2. Unique Keywords (Discovery Index)

How many unique keywords are being used to find your organization on a monthly basis? If that number is trending upwards that means more and more unique keywords are being used in the search engines to discover your organization’s web presence. This is called the discovery index. Look at these terms and add a few to your content strategy each month to capture even more qualified traffic.

3. Backlinks

Are you growing the quantity and quality of the websites linking to your web presence over time? The number of backlinks should increase as you build out your optimized content strategy of blog posts, press releases and case studies. The associated anchor text as well as the domain authority of the websites linking to your content affect the quality of your backlinks.

4. Indexed Pages

Is the number of web pages from your web presence increasing or decreasing in the Google index? The more pages indexed in Google, the more opportunity you have to be found. For example, it would be difficult to rank for 100 keywords if you only have five web pages indexed in Google. As you build out your optimized content strategy adding new blog posts, web pages and press releases on a regular basis, your index count will grow.

5. Social Signals

Google and Bing factor social signals into their search algorithm to determine relevancy and rank. Social signals are metrics such as: Facebook comments, likes and shares, tweets and retweets, LinkedIn shares, and Google +1’s and shares – all of which include a backlink to a web page. gShift tracks the number of social signals during a specified time period to all your web content including web pages, blog posts, and press releases.

6. Website Traffic Breakdown

Tracking your topline website traffic on a regular basis is important. Are you growing your organic traffic? Or are you getting most of it from direct traffic? Is your referral traffic increasing? What traffic is converting better - organic, referral or social? Tracking these website traffic metrics can help you understand both your SEO and content marketing strategies.

7. Organic Conversions

It is also important to understand what percentage of your organic search traffic takes action on your website. Which keywords are driving the most conversions? Which keywords are leading to a high bounce rate (only visiting one web page)? Are your conversions increasing based on your optimized content marketing strategy?

8. Organic Market Share

Your organic market share is calculated based on the number of keyword phrases that your organization is following or wants to rank for organically. Calculate the volume of searches for those terms, how you rank, and then apply a “potential” click-through metric to determine the number of potential visitors you would get if you were ranking in the top three organic positions.

9. Organic Search Value

What is the dollar value of your organic search traffic as compared to what you would have paid for the same traffic via a paid marketing program such as Google AdWords? This metric can help set your budget for organic search and content marketing.

10. Branded versus Non-Branded Keywords

Out of the discovery index, how many keywords are branded? If 95% of your organic traffic comes from branded keywords, then your organization has an issue with your online visibility. A goal would be to increase your non-branded keyword phrases by building out your content marketing strategy.

SEO is one of the most difficult marketing tactics to measure and manage – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. And once you’ve mastered SEO for your organization the increase in leads and conversions will be worth the effort. Our recommendation is to pick a few SEO metrics to get started, measure them on a consistent basis and take action from the data.

©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)

One of the most interesting sessions I attended today was Search: The Search Ecosystem and Integrating Search Into Your Marketing Mix

The session positioned Search as center stage in marketing, not relegated to the basement of performance driven campaigns to drive sales. Search is no longer just "Search," it is an interconnected ecosystem that instead of only driving results or just supporting your "more important" campaigns, Search can, and probably should be influencing or even directing your brand campaigns. Huh? Heresy! Well, not according to our experts. So why should you be "listening" to what Search is telling you?

Kevin Ryan, CEO Motivity Marketing explains; Affliction is one of their clients. They noticed from the search data that people who were searching for "Affliction" were also searching for "Blasko," Ozzy Osbourne's bassist. So they integrated him into Afflictions overall campaign. This is Search influencing up instead of being influenced down. This is Search connecting with consumers by listening to them without them even realizing it. Listen to what is happening in search data. For instance, one of their clients Bugaboo which makes high-end strollers sells an attachment. It is not a "food storage device" or "drink storage" it is a "Cup Holder" or "Snack Tray." It does not matter what the attachment is called, you have to use search terms as to how people refer to it. "Brand Terms" deviate only when practical knowledge intervenes. He also educates us that even with a premium brand like Bugaboo price inclusion works very well and is a significant driver so do not forget to include it in your campaigns.

"Brand Terms" deviate only when practical knowledge intervenes.

For Rhonda Hanson, Director of Search Marketing, Getty Images, she only jokingly admits that "Google does not have a good idea of how to index imagery at all." And she also admits that it is not really their fault; it is a struggle for companies in the photo space as imagery comes with much less meta data that search engines can crawl. And Search is such vital importance to these types of services.

What she did is launch a contest called the Mishmash Video/Music/Images Remix Competition where people could use Getty Images to make mashup videos. The campaign seeds Getty throughout not only the Search ecosystem, but the entire Social Media ecosystem as well. She used Google site links on her brand terms to get extra promotion for the campaign, and demonstrated through the use of promoted Tweets which only cost $300, through the Google Display Network for another $5,000 and through traditional Press Releases how they could increase Getty's Search footprint. And the lesson is simple. Since there are many companies where Search is the number one way people find and interact, Search, and campaigns that help Search should be a primary strategy... AND it does not have to cost you an arm and a leg.

Mitra Naeimi, Director of SEO and Social Media, Shutterfly also understand that. She knows how important search engine optimization is to one of her brands Tiny Prints. Tiny Prints started using Pinterest in Q4 of last year, but the majority of their traffic is to through organic search. They noticed that they were missing a big opportunity to capture the long-tail traffic. They were doing well with the "head" search terms like "Photo Printing" etc... but were no where to be found with long-tail terms like "Twinkle Little Star birth announcements." She implemented a three step process after doing a site audit.

1. She added a "Related Searches" modules on their category pages. What this enables is it creates the dynamic link graph across the site. This helps crawlability, extends content, make content richer, creates a better user experience, and makes a difference in ranking.
2. She added "Related Products" to each of her product pages for the same reasons and that it helps provide content richness which improves the user experience.
3. She structurally implemented "Rich Filters" (the ability to sort by "rounded corners" "heavy stock" "color" etc...) so that all different types of pages were created that were "search type specific." This takes advantage of the way that people search and find information online, so these filters restructure their pages and act as links, efficiently linking into their product pages. This cross-linking dramatically increases search relevancy in

If you are a product company, you need to restructure your site for Search, and Mitra outlines a three step process that works. Search elevates up to influence design, structure and site functionality. It actually should be the first place to start.

Matt Lawson, Vice President of Marketing & Partnerships, Marin Software rounded out our panel of experts, and his four step process educated us on on how to integrate mobile device platforms in search

1. Separate your mobile campaigns. i.e. "Call us now to reserve a table" instead of a brand ad works in mobile. Recognize how consumers interact with their devices. i.e. With GAP a desktop campaign promotes a sale, whereas a mobile device promotes the store location.
2. Target users with specific device copy. Banana Republic has created a specific "http://...../iphone" URL that is displayed. This can increase click-through 9%-15%. No one wants to click on something on a mobile device and end up on a non-mobile site.
3. Prioritize Ad Position. Even though the cost per click in mobile is lower, you need to bid higher due to there being less positions. On a desktop being on the first page of ads is fine. In mobile if you are not position one or position two do not bother. Especially bid on your brand terms to protect your brand in mobile.
4. Optimize for the User Experience. You do not have to create the worlds best app, or the best mobile site, but you have to check your landing pages to make sure they look good on iPhone and Android and have some sort of mobile friendly landing page. In addition, the notion of conversion may be different for mobile devices. Is it a Call? a Reservation? a Map lookup? Put a dollar amount against it and measure it.

And I will add to that the advice "Measure what is Valuable, Don't Value what is Measurable."

This four panel of experts and all of this advice was from just one session at AdTech. I started by saying I could write a book on all the session I attended. In fact I could write a book, and a good one, on just the lessons in this one session.

AdTech is what you make of it; ask questions, take notes, email panelists and presenters, they are all willing to help almost anyone and answer any questions within reason... but before you can do any of that you have to attend all of this value.

"…start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area…"

With the implication that a site's use of keywords and links will be inspected, many site owners have become concerned that they might get caught by the coming over-optimization penalty.   In today's short post, I'd like to highlight the SEO practices that are likely to be penalized by the new algo, present items that should be inspected and finally offer a few tips for remediation.

Likely To Be Penalized:

• Link exchange networks
• Paid links
• Forum/blogspam
• Pages with ultra-high target keyword density & little semantic context

Inspect the Following:

• "soft" duplicate content/canonicalization
• sitewide incoming links
• footer links (incoming and outgoing)
• heavy advertising above the fold
• blending of JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, images, forms with content
• connecting content to the real world with authorship, outgoing links & schema markup

Remediation Steps:

• Link inspection/modification requests
• URL review & canonicalization
• Content review, removal & edits

This isn't the place where I'll go into what each of these items means and why it is important but, overall, it's important to note that only the worst of the worst are likely to be penalized by the coming SEO over-optimization penalty. This is a perfect wake up call, though, that webmasters should re-inspect their site for suspicious or over-zealous SEO practices.

The truth is we could spend all day working on traffic acquisition strategies, spend thousands (even millions) of dollars on PPC, SEO and ad targeting, and launch the most advanced email marketing system fully integrated with our POS systems to drive people back to our website. Heck, some of us are still throwing a lot of budget and resources into direct mail and couponing. But, while all of these strategies may work, the puck does not stop there. Your marketing dollars must reach far beyond “more eyes on your website” and ensure conversion rates that turn those browsers into buyers, and turn your marketing dollars into revenue. And it starts with CXO.

CXO Defined
Customer Experience Optimization (CXO) is about making every experience with your brand matter. (Yes, I definitely want to do that!) CXO is dynamic, adaptive and specific to each customer’s interaction with your brand, while optimizing for your business goals. (Right, sounds good to me). CXO is about using multivariate testing, personalization and multichannel marketing to gain real time feedback from customers on which content works, and which doesn’t to increase conversion rates; it's about allowing marketers to tailor website experiences on a personalized level to improve average order values and repeat buyers; and it's about filtering these insights into all marketing channels for maximum ROI and brand consistency. (OK, how do I get started?)

Online Testing + Internal Culture Shift
A/B and Multivariate have indeed become more mainstream, so it’s safe to assume that most companies have attempted some form of testing. But launching a test a month, or employing a testing program with a solution provider doesn’t mean you are nailing CXO 100%. The notion of internal cultural shift that centers around CXO is must. In other words, brands who have a testing program in place need to swear by it: testing any and all changes that happen on the site first, before making any permanent changes.  By letting live visitors and customers tell marketers what they like through their clicks, conversions and purchases, the evolution of providing exception online customer experience can fully begin. 100% optimized, 100% of the time.

Level Up: Personalization
Thanks to mobile apps, site aggregators and even Google, all consumers can easily comparison shop and search. You may have even found yourself throwing more money to stay in the mix at search, PPC and affiliate marketing. But those strategies, while they may help in the short-term, they aren’t going to change the fact that consumers are more fickle than ever and cultivating loyalty is a real challenge. Fortunately, the personalization component of CXO means marketers can meet this challenge head-on.

Segmentation and product recommendations are great ways to get started with personalization, though technically there is no order to which you can start providing better customer experiences. With segmentation, you can create user profiles that allow you to segment visitors into basic groups, which will dictate visitors’ experience the moment they land on your site. Even the simplest categorizations allow for better customer engagement with content and offers that are more relevant.

Or you can apply meaningful product recommendations that help you sell, cross-sell and up-sell: “viewers who bought that, also bought this”, for example. You can even segment and apply multivariate testing directly to those recommendations. Or you can get even more sophisticated, with automated behavioral targeting, by modeling what is the next best content to show an individual in real time. (Wait, tell me more!)

The Holy Grail: Automated Behavioral Targeting
Real-time personalized marketing is now a reality. And if you want to achieve the CXO trinity, it’s a must-do. But, you will need the help of technology here, since it would take way more than the likes of Rain Man to come up with a set of rules that could effectively, and precisely, target your visitors with the right content.

Using sophisticated mathematical modeling, automated behavioral targeting empowers you to present highly personalized offers, products and experiences to each individual website visitor. This type of behavioral targeting takes into account everything you know about your customer, including existing customer data, such as current products owned or a propensity score, it uses all this complex data to identify the best offer for each customer, and then adjusts over time to dynamically optimize visitor experiences with content that yields the highest conversion rate.

In other words, you are spending your marketing dollars to get people to the site, and personalize it, then letting the technology take over to learn, adjust, segment, promote and improve the site experience over time. All this equals more conversions, more loyalty, more revenue, and more marketing ROI.

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)

Talking with people before and after my presentation -- “DotAnything 101: Demystifying New Domain Extensions” -- it also became clear to me that most companies know just enough about new top-level domains (TLDs) to be intrigued, but not enough to strategically leverage them. For example, very few people were aware of the important upcoming deadlines for those applying for new TLDs and for brand owners that could be affected by new TLDs.

Like a lot of things in life, just when you start to understand what’s happening around you, the window to act may close before you know it. For many companies looking into new TLDs, this can mean losing the chance to make the most of this opportunity. Even if all the excitement doesn’t apply to your company, as an online marketer you can arm yourself with the knowledge to ensure that your brand is protected from what might be just around the corner.

First things first: there are important deadlines to consider.

If you’re an organization considering applying to manage your own TLD, time is running out. The deadline to register with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is March 29, 2012. Once the current application window closes, there are no guarantees as to whether ICANN will announce another opportunity to request your own domain extension.

A new TLD is probably not for us anyhow. Is there anything we still need to worry about?

Let’s be honest. How many organizations are willing to spend $185,000 on a partially refundable evaluation fee just to prove to ICANN they have the technical ability and credibility to launch, manage and administer a new TLD? Consider the expense of managing the TLD moving forward, and it’s not a proposition for the faint of heart.

For most brand managers and online marketers, the real question becomes how to adapt their domain portfolio strategy, given the addition of potentially hundreds of new extensions by the end of the year. Part of the answer includes a proactive approach to understanding the new TLD rollout process, as well as your remaining opportunities to voice concern against any potential new extension. Processing fees mean your chance to complain will not come cheap, but the public is given a chance to voice concerns before ICANN comes to any final decisions.

How can I object to an application?

Approximately 2 weeks after the close of the application window (so, sometime in mid-April), ICANN will post the public portions of all applications that have been received on its website (http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-results). The formal objection period will then begin and will last for approximately 7 months. Formal objections may be filed on any of the following grounds so long as they follow pre-established dispute resolution procedures:

• Legal rights -- such as trademark interests
• Community -- for TLDs that would seem to represent a particular group
• Limited public interest – for TLDs that would seem to touch on obscene or anti-social themes
• String confusion – intended to avoid public confusion between TLDs

Who will hear my complaints and what will it cost?

ICANN has hired the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as the exclusive dispute resolution provider for trademark-based ‘pre-delegation’ legal rights objections for new TLDs. In other words, they will hear the complaints from organizations that would like to oppose a new TLD based on one or more of the complaint criteria above. At a significant cost of $10,000 to the complainant (with a partial refund if successful), a company must be confident in its chances of winning.

What’s been done to help existing brand owners?

The new gTLD handbook from ICANN has introduced new mechanisms to protect brand owners from a domain infringing their rights, such as a uniform rapid Suspension system and a trademark clearinghouse, but the exact rules and procedures of both are still being discussed. Of course, the standard sunrise windows for brand owners will still apply for any new domains being made available to the public, allowing them an early chance to register their own names.

According to VeriSign -- the registry for everyone’s favorite TLD, .COM -- there are more than 225 million registered gTLDs. And that doesn’t even count the 90 million ccTLD domains registered under extensions like .US, .UK, .DE, etc. New gTLD applications have been estimated in the hundreds, so it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to predict how the domain landscape is about to transform forever.

Be sure your organization is prepared by understanding the important deadlines to review proposed new extensions, your chances to submit complaints against their acceptance, and the sunrise windows for trademark owners to secure their brand names for each relevant new TLD.

I’ll keep you posted as more information becomes available!

© 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)

I’m sure my hypothalamus is hardwired for chocolate – that old adage, “out of sight, out of mind” may work for some folks – not me. If there’s chocolate in the upper reaches of the pantry or it’s buried two-feet deep behind various foodstuffs in the fridge, my brain immediately sends out tracking signals – a cranial GPS (Godiva Positioning System), I reckon.

So not surprisingly, as a self-confessed ‘chocoholic’, I was thrilled a few years ago when I started reading reports about how dark chocolate – eaten in moderation (inhaled is more accurate for me) – may be good for the heart.

Some dark chocolate confections even contain various vitamins, nutrients and probiotics; research has also shown that flavonoids – antioxidants found in cocoa beans – may help lower blood pressure and LDL (think ‘Lousy’ – it’s the bad acronym) cholesterol, and also improve blood vessel function.

In fact, noted Joy Dubost, a nutritionist and spokesperson for the Washington, DC-based Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, “the higher the percentage of cocoa, the higher the flavanol content, the higher the antioxidant content and thus we believe the greater positive health benefit.”

All of the aforementioned now fully justifies my quarterly trips to Ghirardelli’s in San Francisco – I now order guilt-free the hot fudge sundaes with dark chocolate sauce.

This then got me wondering about innovative marketing campaigns various companies have rolled out to drum up sales for their dark chocolate products, and in some cases if interesting enough, plain old milk chocolate.

Cadbury

One campaign that Cadbury would probably like to recall/reboot was to promote Bliss, a chocolate product.

The august British company (established 1824 and now owned by Kraft Foods) ran an ad for the product with the heading, “Move over Naomi, there’s a new diva in town.”

Supermodel Naomi Campbell wasn’t thrilled about being compared to a chocolate bar and even her mum, Valerie Morris, chimed in, saying “I’m deeply upset by this racist advert. Do these people think they can insult black people and we just take it? This is the 21st century, not the 1950s. Shame on Cadbury.”

Cadbury, it should be noted, did do the right thing – the company pulled the ads and issued an apology to Campbell.

On the flip side, another campaign rolled out by Cadbury India fared much better. The objective was to publicize its premium dark chocolate brand, Bournville and further promote the catchphrase, “You don’t just buy a Bournville, you earn it.”

Cadbury launched a blog called The Dark Truth and introduced a virtual character – Old Hound. In one story, another virtual character, Mark, a friend of Old Hound, disappeared. While trying to find Mark, Old Hound got a clue that if he collected 100 stories about people receiving something after they have earned it, he would discover the whereabouts of his friend. The posts generated more than 2,000 daily readers.

Haagen-Dazs

A few years ago Haagen-Dazs rolled out its Dark Chocolate Orange flavor at 14 outlets in Singapore and Malaysia. A campaign slugged ‘Slow Melting in Progress’ was aimed at female professionals in their 20s and 30s who are “engrossed with their profession and family and tend to forget themselves in the process, neglecting to pamper themselves.”

That verbiage seems a bit askew but the radio/print/web campaign apparently worked as Dark Chocolate Orange became a popular flavor in that corner of Southeast Asia.

Cocoa Metro

Cocoa Metro, located in Auburndale, MA, markets various dark chocolate drinks. Their catchphrase on their home page immediately grabs your attention: 'Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.'

The sweet maker recently rolled a multimedia ad campaign. One image depicts how Cocoa Metro’s decadent chocolate can be consumed – via juice boxes, pop cans and flasks, for example. Another series of ads relies more on clever verbiage and fonts to capture your attention (having a refrigerated backyard bunker full of chocolate seems like a very sound idea).

Rom

While not a dark chocolate, this campaign merits a brief mention. Rom is a hugely popular Romanian chocolate bar, first introduced in 1964. It features the Romanian flag on the wrapper and probably everyone from Bucharest to Brasov to Baia Mare has gobbled one down.

To fuel international sales and branding, the company rolled out a week-long hoax – the American flag was used on the packaging and various YouTube videos explained that due to a poor economy and a frustrated youth culture, Rom was ditching its Romanian heritage. Literally tens of thousands of angry Romanians vented their outrage on Facebook, YouTube and countless blogs.

The campaign was a stunning success – it reached almost 70 percent of all Romanians. Rom’s Facebook page fan total increased by over 300 percent and it’s estimated the company generated about $500,000 worth of free media. McCann Erickson’s Bucharest office also garnered two Grand Prix Cannes Lions awards in the ‘Promo/Activation’ category (for advertising programs that bring on immediate responses/engagements), and the ‘Direct’ category for direct marketing.

There are scores of other examples but quite frankly, I’ve written enough – time for some chocolate.

Image via Wikipedia

This is part 2 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.

Growth is getting harder and harder to come by. With this comes the realization that some of the embedded thinking about how to reach and market to buyers are not working well. In part 1 of this series we looked at how the funnel is facing a slow death and the limitations of so called funnel thinking. We are entering a new era of the buyer. Buyer behaviors are shifting yet we know only a fraction about this shift. One emerging insight is that of buyer choice. Simply stated, buyers are making multiple choices prior to as well as well after buying decisions.

Buyers Have Many Options. The floodgates have opened on channels, social media, old media, the Internet, and countless other ways to interact, explore, retrieve, and digest information in this new era of the buyer. With countless options available, buyers are making choices on where to start their exploring.

The Buyer At The Center Of Strategy, Marketing, And Sales. Conventional funnel thinking has a hard time doing this. A better way of stating this is that conventional strategy, marketing, and sales decisions are funneled through an old paradigm of the buyer where marketing and sales held the information cards – cards used to target, sell, and persuade buyers. Today, buyers make the choice on which information cards they decide to deal. B2B leaders today must find ways to focus strategy on the buyer, the choices they make, and the experiences they have with their organizations.

Experience Determines Choice. A while back, I made a choice to attend a Broadway musical – of which I am a big fan. The pre-show experience and excitement was plenty of fun with a great dinner in New York. The musical started and about 20 minutes into the musical the dread began to overcome me. I knew this musical production was going to be – dreadful. We made the choice to leave at intermission and the choice didn’t ruin the entire experience of the evening but it sure changed it. We chose to find a jazz club and had a great time which meant cancelling out the plans we had after the show. Buyers today are taking experience cues well before the buyer decision journey and well after. The buyer experience cues they take-in alter their thinking about the choices they make. And they could be choices about whether to continue having an experience with your organizations – or – find another.

© All rights Reserved Buyerology

Buyer choice anchors five choice elements that can be thought of as continuously orbiting buyers today. A fundamental shift is happening here. In the conventional DNA of funnel thinking, we are accustomed to thinking that involves phases or steps. One phase ends and another phase begin. What I propose is something we can call the Buyer Orbit. This is meant to shift the thinking towards recognizing that buyers are continuously addressing goals, challenges, issues, uncertainty, and growth that are in a continuous orbital loop. This applies to buyer choice:

© All Rights Reserved Buyerology

Explore. As mentioned in part 1, funnel thinking usually started with attempts to make buyers aware of a product or solution. It is still rooted in the thinking of flashing attention-getting means before buyer’s eyes as well as push messaging outwards in the hopes of making buyers aware. Today, buyers are mapping out deliberate exploration prompted by the orbital loop of the goals and etc. that orbit them. Confronted with many choices, buyers are taking time to map out where to explore, how to explore, and etc.

Network. As buyers make progression towards less of a single buyer model to that of a world that includes ecosystems and open networks, buyers are making choices to interact with networks and different ecosystem players to collaborate on addressing the issues orbiting them.

Decide. The way buyers decide today is becoming increasingly complex. Choices are being made on such things as the rules for deciding, who is included, checking dependencies, and assessing impact. Buyers today no longer make decisions in a vacuum.

Buy. The actual buy choice has become a higher stakes game in the B2B world. Not only are the rules for deciding more complex, but there are more dependencies related to buying and potential impact as well. The experience element here is now more critical than ever because of the high stakes. Making the wrong choice, for example, on a software platform designed to measure quality of manufactured parts could have drastic affects downstream with OEMs and distribution.

Relate. The word – relate - has more applicability in a B2B context than say engage for example. The higher stakes involved means buyers needs an organization that can relate to the high stakes and a relational bond is being formed. In the example mentioned above, there may be many discussions before and after the buy choice to ensure that the software platform meets an intended goal. The ability for B2B companies to provide relational choices and experiences becomes an important factor. Does the company provide relational choices whether they are face-to-face, telephone, or complex networking technology that involves exchanging design ideas and specifications?

The new era of the buyer is resulting in a paradigm shift on what is required thinking about the buyer today. Letting go of funnel thinking is no easy task – especially when you strip away the hyperbole and promotion that can surround strategy, it is still very much about the funnel. Buyers today have many elements related to growth, goals, and uncertainty orbiting their world. Making choices as this orbital loop continuously impacts their world is changing the very nature of buyer behavior today. These changes are rocket propelled by a new world of hyper-connectivity and hyper-competition.

Next up: The Buyerology of the Buyer

Follow @TonyZambito

Related articles

• Slow Death of the Funnel: Why Buyer Choice Matters to Revenue (buyerology.com)
• How B2B Leaders Are Understanding Buyers Better With Behavioral Buyergraphics (buyerology.com)
• Boost Demand Generation Using Target Ready Buyer Models (buyerology.com)
• Buyerology: The New Science of Understanding Buyer Behavior (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)