One thing we can count on is by the time you have finished reading this buying behavior may have been altered one again. Changes in buyer behaviors continue unabated. This is making it difficult for marketing and sales leaders to plan the right mix of strategies and tactics resulting in a winning formula.
5 Buyer Behaviors B2B Marketing Must Keep An Eye On
New buying behaviors means B2B marketers have to become more responsive today. Creating nimble organizations and improving knowledge in buyer understanding. Here are ways buyer behavior will continue to reshape marketing:
Buyers Embrace Collaboration
Social and digital technologies has allowed for progress in the area of collaboration. Meaning the sphere of influence and interaction not only has widened but increased. Old ideas about roles on buying teams are being shattered as we speak. The era of collaborative buyer networks has arrived. We now have to consider internal as well as external members of collaborative networks impacting decision-making.
Buyers Want Co-Creation
Collaborative networks are fostering a new environment for co-creating products, services, and for solving problems. This new development will put pressure on B2B organizations to get in line with flexible products and services which allow buyers to play an active role in co-creating. Buyers... Read more
Home › iMedia Connection Blog › demand generation
Tagged 'demand generation' 
5 Buyer Behaviors Reshaping B2B Marketing
Tags: b2b marketing, B2B Sales, Business-to-business, buyer persona, buyer personas, content marketing, content strategy, demand generation, lead generation, marketing, social marketing, social media marketing, Tony Zambito
Posted in Creative Best Practices, Email, Emerging Platforms, Opinions, Social Media, Targeting, Websites, Word of Mouth | No Comments »
7 Big Questions for B2B Marketers in 2013
The more change occurring the more questions arise. This year is no exception. B2B Marketers are experiencing ongoing as well as new challenges as we start to hit stride in 2013. What are the big future questions for B2B Marketers? Let's look at a few:
How do we generate more leads and keep them?
Survey after survey indicate B2B marketers have this issue top of mind. Creating demand and filling up a pipeline is loaded with pressure packed environments. In my qualitative buyer research work, I see shifts in behavior on the part of buyers. There are unique sets of goals and behaviors emerging in the area of nurturing. Calling into question how leads should be defined and segmented. Lead research and unique lead persona development will emerge to help B2B marketers address this most important question.
How do we use marketing automation effectively?
Marketing automation has crawled out of infancy stage and is being more widely adopted. Many organizations have been in the "let's just get started" phase. Experiencing the pain of implementation. The next level question is how to make marketing automation more effective to get better results.
How do we operationalize content marketing?
Content marketing has certainly arisen as one of the core capabilities B2B marketing... Read more
Tags: buyer experience, buyer persona, buyer personas, content marketing, demand generation, Digital Marketing, lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing, marketing automation, social media marketing, Tony Zambito
Posted in Creative Best Practices, Emerging Platforms, Opinions | No Comments »
Is Your Lead Generation Off-Target?
Marketo wants to talk revenue cycle and lead nurturing #marketotour (Photo credit: servantofchaos)
A problem facing organizations today is generating more leads. Making this issue even more challenging is changes in buying behavior. Depending on which study to reference, buyers are performing different activities for up to 70% of their buying evaluation before sales intervention.
A recent report by the Aberdeen Group on sales performance shows there is a fair degree of dissatisfaction among sales leaders. 56% saying they were not seeing sufficient growth in top line revenue. Nearly 30% expressed dissatisfaction with lead conversion to sales. A recent CSO Insights report indicated that only 20% of organizations understood their buyer’s buying process. These two perspectives combined point to one of the key issues – targeting the wrong buyer.
Looking back on over 12 years of qualitative buyer research and buyer persona development work, I found in 6 out of every 10 organization– a different buyer was identified than the organization had been targeting! If you are off-target with the buyer – you will be off-target on your demand generation and lead generation.
Getting On Target
Marketing and sales leaders today are looking to increase their percentage of being on target when it comes to lead generation. There... Read more
Tags: buyer persona, buyer persona development, buyer personas, content marketing, demand generation, lead generation, lead nurturing, lead persona, marketing, Sales
Posted in Creative Best Practices, Email, Emerging Platforms, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions | No Comments »
5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ernest Hemmingway
The concept of buyer personas, as a means for understanding buyers, has been around now for over a decade. It is an understatement to say many things have changed in the world of buying and selling since their beginning.
We have witnessed the changing dynamics of the buyer-seller relationship. The dynamics I refer to are buying behaviors and buyer goals. On the other side of the coin, we see marketing and sales making attempts to adapt. The concepts of content marketing, lead nurturing, insight-based selling, customer experience, and brand management emphasized. These practices have been introduced as gateways to connecting with buyers in the new digital age.
Adapting to New Realities
Personas, at their core, were introduced as a tool to communicate the goals and behaviors of users and buyers. Specifically for informing strategies related to product design and marketing to buyers. For B2B Marketing and Sales, a clearer picture has begun to emerge around the goals and behaviors of buyers. Yet, there are many more miles to go. My endeavor and work with organizations over the past decade lead me to... Read more
Tags: brand, buyer behavior, buyer experience, buyer journey, buyer persona, buyer personas, content marketing, customer, demand generation, Digital Marketing, lead generation, marketing, Sales, tonyzambito.com
Posted in Creative Best Practices, Emerging Platforms, Opinions, Research, Social Media, Targeting, Web Analytics, Websites, Wireless, Word of Mouth | No Comments »
Your Top Priority Is Growing The SMB Revenue Base – Now What?
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... Read more
Tags: B2B email marketing, b2b marketing, B2B Sales, branding, buyer experience, buyer persona, buyer personas, buyer research, buyer strategy, buyergraphics, buyerology, content marketing, demand generation, marketing, Sales, selling, small business, small business marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Targeting
Posted in Creative Best Practices, Email, Emerging Platforms, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Search, Social Media, Targeting | No Comments »
