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 and their collaborative networks will demand it.  For B2B marketers, this means a broader view on how you deliver messaging.

Buyers Want Less Content

I am sure some will do a double take on the above sub-header.  The fact is buyers are overwhelmed with content.  Here is how one buyer put it to me: “Look, I think twice now about putting my name in a form - not because I am not willing - but I know this just means I am going to get a flood of emails to download more information.” Buyers want less content – yet desire smart content.

Buyers Want 1-to-1

A funny thing happened on the way to marketing automation.  Marketing may be inadvertently dripping back into the mode of 1-to-many as opposed to the coveted 1-to-1.  I came upon this thought after conducting two reviews of lead generation and nurturing campaigns.  Buyers can see right through this screen.  They can smell automation.  A buyer’s voice on an email she received: “What is this?  I really don’t know because it doesn't say anything to me.”

Buyers Want More Than Insight

There is the old adage “too much of a good thing.”  I think we may have such a situation happening.  We have embraced the idea of the Challenger Sale and you see organizations racing to offer insight.  An issue here is too many items are being classified as insight.  This can actually counter-balance the act of contributing insight.   What this means for B2B marketing and sales is they will have to be more judicious in what they label insight.  Why dilute a good thing?

Adaptive and Agile Marketing

With rapidly changing buying behaviors, B2B marketing will need to be more adaptive and agile.  I foresee buyer behaviors shifting in waves.  This means marketing must be able to see these waves and make adaptive shifts in how they connect with buyers.  This will certainly not be easy to do.

Predictability will become even more important as we look ahead.  While Big Data holds promise, it will equally take developing the qualitative ability to anticipate where the new buyers of today are heading.

(Become part of the dialogue.  Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus as well as subscribe to the Buyer Persona Blog on the tonyzambito.com website.)

Related articles

• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• The Art of Buying
• 7 Big Questions for B2B Marketers in 2013

Questions? (Photo credit: Valerie Everett)

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 must possess.  It is causing radical shifts in thinking about the role of marketing and how to build internally.   To operationalize content marketing begs further questions related to structure, roles, and skills.  Presenting CMO's with the daunting task of figuring out how to build internal strength in content marketing.

What do customers and buyers want?

Usually, when this question is asked, there is a tendency to give a product-centric answer.  If you find yourself doing this - then you might want to catch yourself.  Admittedly, this is one of the hardest questions to figure out.  Since no one is guaranteed to be a mind-reader, this will take qualitative intelligence.  To understand how your customers and buyers think as well as what is motivating this thinking, it takes skilled customer research and buyer research.

How do we create seamless multi-channel experiences?

Existing customers and prospect buyers, simply stated, do not want to have to alter how they interact based on the channel.  My theory on this is based on hearing how buyers complain about how one channel works for them but another does not.  The wider the gap, the more disruptive.  Disrupting your customers and buyers - well - is not a good thing.   Here is an example:

"Okay here's what I mean, I go to the website.  It is impressive and I find some good information.  I am thinking this could be a smart organization to potentially get to know.  Of course, I download the white paper and I get the call.  Let me just say they had no idea what they were talking about." (Director, IT Integration and Service)

How do we stop reacting and plan for the future?

There is palpable tension in the air for B2B Marketers this year.  The need to know and the need to get results creates mounting pressure.  When first quarter results may not have been as expected, it is bound to cause some to push the panic button.  It can become a fire drill.  All hands on deck to create the next campaign.  What I believe is happening is buyers are out in front and B2B marketers are trying to catch up.   I advocate having a solid foundation of buyer intelligence to work with.  This means a collective body of research-based reference knowledge like audience personas, buyer personas, mapping tools related to content and buying journeys, and much more.  These give you the perspective you need to know why something may not have worked and to plan intelligently.  Another words - stop hitting the panic button.

How do we build more buyer predictability into B2B Marketing?

Predictive analytics continues to grow.  With limitations.  It holds promise to scale down Big Data and give the ability to predict buying behaviors.  While this may help us to predict how buyers may behave online for example, it may yield little on predicting why.  A capability I am advocating is developing customer and buyer foresight planning.  This type of planning calls for  emerging buyer scenario modeling and mapping capabilities.  Knowing where your buyers may be headed can give you the foresight needed to anticipate future motivations.  In addition, share your foresight and help them envision a future which includes you.

There are many more questions.  It is the nature of business and marketing.  It is the one constant we can count on.  Things will change enough which will beg more questions.  B2B Marketing leadership and success wil be predicated on the ability to answer the big questions.

(Become part of the dialogue.  Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus as well as subscribe to the Buyer Persona Blog on the tonyzambito.com website.)

Related articles

• The Art of Buying
• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• One Way to Know the Ideal Buying Scenarios for Lead Nurturing

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 are four steps you can take to resolve targeting issues:

Do Lead Research:  It all starts here.  You can no longer assume the buyers you've been targeting are the correct ones.  A level of lead research is needed to outfit your lead generation and nurturing team with knowledge about ideal prospects.  For example - it may not always be the CIO but the IT Director.

Develop Lead Personas:  Lead and buyer personas are useful in understanding consideration and purchasing behaviors.  Organizations, through personas, can determine how a prospect behaves when moving from a lead persona to a buyer persona.   One of the main benefits of this approach is the ability to tailor lead and buyer personas to fit the needs of dedicated lead nurturing teams as well as sales team.

Buyer-Centered Design: Designing your lead generation strategies, systems, and processes should revolve around buyers.  The key is in modeling their behaviors when in lead nurturing and when they enter the buying cycle.  Better results will happen when you meet buyer expectations and goals – which can be distinctly different when in lead nurturing versus buying cycle.  Conversion rates at the point of when a lead persona converts to a buyer persona (becomes a sales-ready lead) will rise.

Conversation Enablement Training:  What is needed is making conversation enablement a staple of training for lead generation and nurturing teams.  The long ramp-up time it takes for lead generation teams to understand prospects is out of synch with the pace of change in buying behavior.  As the CSO Insights report pointed out, barely 20% of organizations understand their buyer’s behaviors and buying processes!  In my qualitative research, I often hear of the frustration prospective buyers have in the lack of productive conversations.

Targeting the right prospect is becoming the lifeblood of organizations today.  For many companies, tackling this issue means discovering who represents their ideal target buyer.  In addition, gaining greater clarity on how buyers differ in behavior when they are being nurtured versus actively engaged in a buying cycle.  Combining these can be a winning ticket and get your lead generation results on target.

(Become part of the dialogue.  Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus as well as subscribe to theBuyer Persona Blog on the tonyzambito.com website.)

Related articles

• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle

• One Way to Know the Ideal Buying Scenarios for Lead Nurturing (tonyzambito.com)

“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 this conclusion:

Personas, specifically in B2B, need to be adaptive to new goals and behaviors of buyers throughout their buyer’s journey.  In addition, personas need to be designed for the new practices, which are developing in marketing and sales.

The term buyer persona has been used universally to an extreme level. The term worked well when buyers relied on sales for their buying cycle for upwards to eighty percent.  We are seeing the inverse today.  Here is where I believe buyer trends as well as qualitative evidence is telling us to go:

B2B personas need to be researched, understood, and designed to meet robust goals and behaviors of buyers throughout the end-to-end buying cycle and brand experience.  In addition, personas need to be designed to enable as well as make more effective new practices, functions, and roles.

Persona Buying Cycle™

As new operational models for marketing and sales develop, there are 5 buying behavior phases of the buying cycle personas must now address:

1. Audience Behavior: the concept of content marketing reaching audiences is more prevalent.  Audience goals and behaviors are distinctly different when not in the market for products or services.  Yet, awareness, insight, and intelligence are an important component of connecting with existing customers and future buyers today.  Content marketing effectiveness is enabled when it can reach many different types of audiences.  Audience personas must now include the likes of industry influences and more.
2. Lead Behavior: one of the fastest growing areas, in terms of emerging practices, is the rise in lead nurturing and lead development.  Buyers have distinct goals and behaviors when they convert from being a part of a wider audience to an interested party.   New forms of lead research and lead personas can create more effective conversions from an interested party to an active buyer.
3. Buyer Behavior: the core persona when buyers have become actually engaged in the process of buying.  Buying behaviors, and buying goals, operate on a different level when buyers are actively engaged in the buying process.  Buyer personas, true their original intent, are designed to enable the buying process between buyer and seller.
4. Customer Behavior: when a buyer becomes a customer, there is a trial period underway.  This trial period consists of a different set of goals and behaviors meaningful to confirmation and customer experience.  Specific customer personas can enable understanding and capabilities to meet customer goals post-sale.  Implementation and customer support teams can benefit immensely from personas designed specifically for their roles.
5. Brand Behavior: brand management is emerging out of the shadows, as a competency B2B companies have to get right today.  Fulfilling the brand promise consistently is one of the hardest jobs of marketing and an organization as a whole.  Customers and buyers have different goals, behaviors, and beliefs, which surround brands.  The goal here is to convert customer personas into brand persona advocates.

A recommendation for forward-thinking marketing and sales leaders is to begin thinking in terms of the Persona Buying Cycle™ versus a singular focus on a buyer persona.  One certainty is the buyer’s journey not only begins before buyers think of themselves as a buyer, but also extends beyond the purchase.  Having a common visual and story of how buyer’s goals and behaviors change throughout the buying cycle is compelling.   We are also seeing activities, functions, and roles widen in marketing and sales in response to changing buying behaviors.  The Persona Buying Cycle™ is a natural extension to address both of these developments.

Positive Outcomes

Creating B2B personas through the lenses of a Persona Buying Cycle™ help bring these positive outcomes:

• • Make personas relevant throughout the major touchpoints of the end-to-end buyer’s journey
  • Make personas more practical to each functional team interacting with audiences, buyers, and customers
  • Make demand generation, lead generation, opportunity management, and customer experience more effective
  • Provide a common communications platform for understanding buyers
  • Foster alignment between marketing and sales by mapping to specific buyer goals and behaviors

In a dozen years, we have seen the then straightforward buyer-seller dynamics become more complex.  How B2B views the use of personas, from a pragmatic standpoint, now must adapt.

(Become part of the dialogue.  Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus as well as subscribe to the Buyer Persona Blog on the tonyzambito.com website.)

Related articles

• Marketing is in the Throes of a Buyer Revolution
• The Art of Buying

• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle (tonyzambito.com)

Consider this: 45 percent of all business inquiries result in a sale – eventually, yet according to the Sales Lead Management Association, 80 percent of sales teams do not call leads that are initially deemed unqualified.

Translation: if you are a BtoB marketer, who is not currently engaging in lead nurturing to help further qualify and sway “unqualified” leads, you have a huge opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and capture more of those sales.  And because lead nurturing is proven to contribute to higher quality leads and larger average order sizes, you may even increase your ROI from sales you would have made naturally, as well.

Here’s another study to consider: In “Understanding the Industrial Buy Cycle,” GlobalSpec’s research shows that for purchases over $1,000, like many BtoB buying decisions, buyers were exposed to three or more pieces of content before they converted.  During this peak discovery phase, buyers may be researching your products along with competitors’, as well as reading relevant white papers, attending related events, etc.  In today’s over-communicated, overly saturated environment, BtoB brands have an opportunity to be the "go to" resource of key information that can assist the buyer during this discovery phase, and shine a favorable light on their company in the process.

The challenge, and perhaps the reason why lead nurturing is so under-utilized today, is that when leads are initially deemed unqualified, marketers do not want to waste time and resources chasing a dead end.  Companies who want to incorporate nurturing into their lead gen strategies without sacrificing scale should keep these best practices in mind:

1. Simply emailing your contact list repeatedly will not develop relationships.  BtoB brands should ensure they are utilizing a smart lead scoring program, as well as a marketing automation system, that allow for insightful communications to engage with prospects on a one-to-one basis.
2. Lead nurturing is a multi-touch, multi-channel approach that may take weeks to months.  An individual lead nurturing journey may require marketing touch points across email, phone, mail and display.  Prospects must be engaged holistically to develop a lead and help an individual move seamlessly though awareness, consideration and, eventually, conversion. All channels will support these developing relationships and should be used accordingly.
3. Communications must be relevant to the prospect where they are along the journey. A phone call after downloading a white paper can be seen as desperate, whereas an invitation to a webinar would be seen as instructive. Test programs and develop insights with your data that enable you to create "communication maps" – a series of useful, informative tools, such as white papers, webinars and research reports that guide prospects to conversion.

Why do all this?  I’ll leave you with one last study.

In study from Aberdeen Group, “Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation,” the “best in class” companies profiled were twice as likely to have lead nurturing programs in place.  Those companies enjoyed higher revenues, better campaign response rates, lead qualification rates and average order sizes that were 47 percent larger than non-nurtured leads.

Simply put, if you aren’t making nurturing a natural part of your lead gen process, you may be throwing potential customers out the window too soon - and leaving revenue on the table.

For more best practices on lead nurturing, register to attend our webinar led by industry expert Ruth Stevens: http://bit.ly/YuFq6E.

It looks like the San Francisco 49ers couldn't quite make it past the Baltimore Ravens in this year's Super Bowl. In business, we also strive to pull ahead and stand out among leading competitors. Winning customers in a business arena can be a challenge. So, when faced head-on with competition, will your website stack up or are you just throwing a Hail Mary?

1st Down - Branding: Does your website and homepage reflect your product or services and who you are as a company? If the first impression of your website does not resonate with your demographic, you have lost their attention at kickoff. A cohesive brand image and identity is essential to gain credibility among your consumers or clients.

2nd Down - Layout: Ease of navigation is key to pull readers into your content without overloading them with data and endless text. Think of your layout like a game plan where you want clients to look, click and how they drive into your website will steer them to take action or forfeit the search altogether. Simple, organized layout wins hand over fist against dense copy, dozens of tabs and multiple, competing messages.

3rd Down - Subscribers: Capturing visitors is a must; and integrating email marketing is the first step to turning these new subscribers and leads into loyal customers. Make the call to action simple and provide something immediate of value. Continue educating and send relevant communication for these prospects to stay engaged with you and your company.

Touchdown! Fans: Done all of the above? Fantastic. Now integrate a blog and social media channels that your business utilizes. Get up close and personal with customers and clients, hear their praise and criticism of your industry and learn to be transparent- love this. Knowing your audience on a personal level will be invaluable, and the insights can leverage your business ahead of the game.

Extra Point - Content Strategy: From the copy on your homepage, to articles on your blog and pictures and questions asked on social media, creating a compelling message and valuable content unites all elements of your brand. Know your voice, where you want to position your business in the industry and your customers' trust and loyalty will follow.

Need a conversion?
Think you may be lacking in one or more of these areas? No problem. Give us a call or shoot us an email today and we will get you and your website trained and ready for the big game.

One of the biggest takeaways from the session was that mobile is still evolving and it’s important that clients are assessing their individual needs and goals for an effective mobile marketing campaign. While clients may have certain ways of making email, search and display work for them, mobile is a very unique channel in its own right. Any marketer taking on mobile advertising needs to setup unique creative, emphasize the value proposition and call to action and keep the lead form very straight forward in order to encourage a conversion. We also discussed the importance of targeting with mobile in order to maintain a base of high quality leads.

The LeadsCon panel discussion opened up a lot of great ideas and I look forward to continuing to be a part of a very exciting channel that has a lot of potential for 2012.

Successful across multiple verticals including consumer services, financial, retail, insurance and automotive, lead generation is a win-win for both the buyer and seller since the consumer is requesting information on a product that they are interested in and the brand is pitching their product to somebody who is already interested and has granted permission to the company to send them more information.

Since lead generation is a cost effective medium to acquire new potential customers, following are eight steps to creating a successful lead generation program:

Step #1- Establish a comprehensive plan that ties in sales and marketing goals and then establish goals for the lead generation campaign. While lead price should be a factor in measuring success, it should not be the sole metric but rather there should be a focus on back end ROI.  Since not all leads are created equally, attention should be given to quality over quantity.

Step #2- Identify the acquisition channels that best match your campaign’s core demographics and target audience.  Not all channels of media will be a fit for every client, therefore, try working with a digital marketing agency or expert who can help you determine what channel or channels will work best for your business based on their previous experience and knowledge.

Step #3- Maximize your campaign with an effective landing page.  The job of a landing page is to convert interest into leads, so it is important to make sure that your landing page provides a clear answer to your consumers’ needs.  A small increase in your landing page conversion rate generates more conversions for the same cost, so make sure that your messaging, imagery and form is maintained and speaks to your consumer.

Step #4- Implement and execute your campaign with relevant publisher placements.  To guarantee successful results, work with partners who reach your target audience and provide you with quality placement.

Step #5- Track your campaign performance and analyze your lead results.  Are all your leads coming from one specific publisher or acquisition channel? Are you receiving quality leads?  Are there additional fields you would like to add or remove from your form?  It is important to look at your leads in order to optimize your campaign for peak results.

Step#6- Establish a remarketing strategy. All leads generated from online efforts may not result in conversions during your initial effort at making contact with a prospect.  Ensure that you have a remarketing plan in place that is consistent and follows up with potential customers.  Make sure your call center and remarketing email messages are aligned with your initial message when a lead is collected.  Timing is also of the essence when following up with prospects.

Step #7- Based on overall results, continue to test and optimize your lead campaign to ensure optimal performance and results.  Some methods of testing include testing landing page elements such as headline copy, call-to-action copy, key product or service benefits, hero image, number of fields collected, A/B or multivariate testing, analysis of the conversion funnel process and testing and expanding new partners and acquisition channels.  Continue to test and improve on your remarketing efforts as the campaign continues to grow.

Step #8- The most important step-  MAKE THE COMMITMENT -  a lead generation campaign takes a lot of effort, testing and relationship building to become very successful for the long term.  Make a strategic and financial commitment as part of your marketing initiative especially if leads are integral to your business.  The initial ebb and flow of a campaign will only become more consistent if you are committed and follow some of the approaches outlined above!

The end goal for a lead generation program is to maximize leads and increase the bottom line.  With the help of these 8 steps, a successful and effective online lead generation program can be created and achieved.

The mobile space encompasses all users who view the internet either through their mobile smartphone device or through a tablet.  Shortly, we will be heading into a post PC world where total usage of smartphones, tablets and upcoming products will eclipse total usage of the desktop/laptop. What's amazing is the speed at which this transformation is taking place.  In 2011, there were a total of 117.9 million smartphones in the US and that number will continue to rise to 155.6 million in 2012, a 32% increase. Tablet usage is growing even faster, with the US tablet user base reaching 33.7 million in 2011, and expected to nearly double to 54.8 million in 2012, a 62.8% increase (eMarketer).

From the presentations at the summit and from speaking with other executives in the mobile business, it is clear that larger brands are taking steps to address the radical shifts in web usage taking place. Design wise, brands are encouraged to have responsive web designed pages, crafted with fluid proportion-based grids which adapt the layout to the viewing environment so users across a broad range of devices and browsers will have access to a single source of content.  A good example of this is JetBlue's newly redesigned home pages; larger buttons and simple navigation were purposely incorporated into the site to account for the increase in users accessing the site with their tablets.

The reality is that if they haven't already, brands need to also address mobile in their overall marketing mix and acquisition strategies.  A good starting point is to define what problem you are trying to solve with mobile marketing and then look to develop a campaign strategy that will address that issue.  Until now, many brands have looked at mobile as purely a tool to build stronger ties with existing customers.   However, with the growth of mobile usage, combined with the familiarity and comfort that consumers have with their devices, new customer acquisition and lead generation through mobile is increasingly becoming a reality.   When executed correctly, there is no reason why a lead generation and acquisition campaign cannot take place through a mobile experience.

Another area of interest during the summit was the growth of mobile applications in the marketing mix and the strategies being used to promote installations.   Again, with the incredible growth of the mobile app ecosystem, brands know they need to have a presence and a dedicated app strategy.  Mobile applications have greatly increased the number of innovative ways that brands can interact and attract consumers,  however, like building a great website, it is simply not enough to build an app and wait for users.  Brands are employing a number of tactics for driving installs, from viral campaigns to paid mobile media, but it is clear that a strong strategy on how you plan to promote your app is a key component even before building it.

Overall, it is an exciting time to be a part of the mobile advertising marketplace.  Successful digital marketing strategies such as lead generation, search and display have been adapted, customized and optimized for mobile devices and new strategies such as mobile application installs have been developed in order to address this new medium.  With a full range of mobile marketing solutions, it is great to see advertisers embrace the mobile industry as we enter the post PC age.

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)

IT Buying Process © All rights reserved by Kenny Madden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: The elements of the Buyer Choice Model

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Related articles

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

Buyer Trend: On A Quest to Be Demand Fulfilled

The conventional as well as social buyers of today can be said to be on a quest to have their demands fulfilled.  Demand being, for the purpose of this article, the catchall phrase to represent a buyer’s desire to have their goals realized, challenges met, problems solved, and concerns alleviated.  What the convergence of the Internet and the Social Age has proffered is the ability for buyers to chart the quest for meeting their demands with much more control, participation, and engagement than in any time in history.

The significant buyer trend of the past decade has become the blinding obvious – we know that buyers are self-directing 70% to 80% of their own buying process.  This trend is profoundly changing the landscape of business in macro as well as micro level ways.  It is the under layers of this trend that is having the most affect on marketing and sales in terms of the thinking towards demand generation.  I have emphasized thinking in this series of articles due to how trends require us to reshape our thinking.  When you change the way you think about things, the things you think about change.

One of the things we need to change our thinking on – and what is meant by the under layers – is what happens when buyers find you?  If our thinking is still in the context of push and generation, then there will be little difference in whether buyers found you or you found them.  Their thought processes are becoming more complex and intelligent engagement is what they seek to help them get their demands fulfilled.  What do buyers find – when they find you?  Do they find themselves akin to being in the middle of Times Square with flashing billboards, bright lights, and the consistent horns of taxi cabs?  Are they bombarded by insistent push messaging – loaded with the conventional features and benefits dogma they’ve come to loathe?

Being in the business of buyer personas for over a decade now, I’ve seen organizations still have this thinking despite having personas right in front of them.  The fatal flaw being buyer personas were developed as profiles with push messaging and demand generation thinking as opposed to how to fulfill the goals of buyers.  Buyers today are developing a sixth sense and becoming fairly astute at knowing the difference in how an organization is thinking.  The under laying aspect of this trend is this: what buyers are seeking today is to have their own demands fulfilled - not to have your demands for generation met.

What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?

The C-Suite today can begin to look at what really is going on in its’ interactions with existing customers and prospective buyers.  Questioning whether the incessant need to hit short-term quarterly results is blinding them to the need to shift their thinking.  In essence, finding that the drum keeps beating loudly on urging the troops to push harder and harder.  Evaluations can be performed to look at interactions and determine whether they are being used as an opening to push message or are they being made into an available opportunity for buyers to have their demands fulfilled.

CMO’s can begin to look at how to develop fulfillment models based on the demands of their existing customers and prospective buyers.  Fulfillment modeling will thus become an important new competency.  By fulfillment, I do not mean the mere availability of information and content as in the early days of direct marketing – where collateral was king then.  I do mean that CMO's will have to lead efforts to develop an appreciable deep understanding of the demand fulfillment goals and scenarios that drive purchase decisions.

When buyers are in the 70% window of self-directed activity or in the 30% window of direct engagement, CMO’s and CSO’s can ensure that buyers are able to connect in ways that allows them to continue their quests to have demands fulfilled.  As opposed to push messaging, buyers find tools and logic available to them that help them in their pursuit.  What CMO’s and CSO’s have to be on guard for, especially in light of the growing role of content strategy and content marketing, is if their content is more of the same – push messaging – or is it truly serving the purpose of demand fulfillment.

The Future

Perhaps I am playing on words and semantics.  I think not.  My many conversations while engaged in qualitative investigative efforts is telling me that the future will require a shift in thinking on exactly what takes place when buyers find you.  How organizations think on whether they are performing demand fulfillment or demand generation will be reflected in how buyers find organizations to be when they do find them.  Changing thinking and getting results from that change is one of the hardest undertakings an organization can go through.

The businesses of the future who think demand fulfillment first will find a new world of opportunities opening up to them.  It opens the road to creative and innovative ways to engage buyers in helping them to have their demands fulfilled.  Developing fulfillment models that no longer force buyers into the tired framework of push and generation – a framework that still exists and cannot be disguised with the label of content marketing or the technologies of social business.

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Here’s a stat…. According to B2B Magazine, more than 23% of B2B buyers are discussing products and services with their peers via social media.  In fact, online recommendations are increasingly one of the most effective methods for getting new customers and leads. And, you are more likely to look at a product or service that someone has recommended to you.

I recently had the pleasure of moderating an online roundtable discussion entitled Social Media and Social Marketing Across the Funnel. I gathered together a few of the industry’s best— Carlos Hidalgo from The Annuitas Group, Kathleen Schaub of TrellisOne, and Mathieu Hannouz of Neolane— to talk about social media and the overall  importance of integrating it into B2B marketing efforts. 

We looked at:

• What is the difference between social media and social marketing?
• Why is social media and social marketing so critical for B2B organizations?
• What are the key considerations for using social media and social marketing at various stages within the funnel?
• What’s working today for B2B organizations using social media?

In this lively session, we uncovered that many companies’ social marketing efforts continue to be disjointed and lack integration into broader sales and branding campaigns.

One of the key discussion points centered around the need for B2B marketers to  take a step back and think about their brand’s social media efforts…  Are they engaging and interactive, like a casual conversation with a friend? Or are they just throwing out statements and screaming “BUY NOW” over and over? 

The participants agreed:  How a brand engages in dialogue with a customer or prospect over social media says a lot about how that relationship will evolve – or not – over time.

We concluded that B2B marketers are struggling today because they don’t know how to get from the basics of using social media to employing true social marketing strategies and techniques.

That progression can start by examining what messages and offers are working across the various stages of the sales funnel and ensuring key messages are consistently reinforced across multiple communications channels. Remember, social marketing is a strategy, not a tactic!

Think about what social marketing really is… It’s people talking, sharing ideas and having conversations. It gets to the core of what we really are as humans, social creatures that share a bond through communicating. Social media is simply another vehicle for those conversations.

One of our panelists aptly summed it up as this: “The last thing you should be worried about is pushing your product or service over social media. Build the relationship first…You don't ask in the first meeting, ‘Will you marry me?’…  You ask ‘Can I buy you a drink?’”  And take it from there. Eureka!

While the discussion about the value of social marketing in B2B organizations is still evolving, its clear that by integrating it within an organization’s cross-channel marketing mix, and understanding its impact on the customer lifecyle, will ultimately have a positive impact on a brand’s relationship with its customers.

The new buyer experience economy has resulted in shifting the economic value of many sales and marketing tactics over the past couple of years.  One approach whose value is on the rise is that of Lead Nurturing.  It’s no wonder why – we have seen major alterations of buyer behavior and buying patterns with technology enabling more buyer control over the majority of the buying cycle process.  This makes nurturing a key element of preventing buyers from disengaging from the buying cycle.

The approach taken towards lead nurturing could make a huge difference.  With the concept of lead nurturing still in many respects a new one, companies are struggling on exactly what to do and perhaps how to implement lead nurturing.  A most common approach, of what can be referred to as “picking and choosing” activities, may actually be hindering the further evolution of lead nurturing.  Here are just a few reasons why:

• Lead nurturing activity is left in the hands of sales representatives who pick from a Chinese menu of choices to engage with potential buyers thus creating inconsistency.
• There has been a rearranging of the deck chairs so to speak on the same types of activities and then these collectively called lead nurturing.  The question though is there anything different going on for the buyer?
• We rely too heavily on technology and automation which in turn makes lead nurturing a program bedeviled with checklists yet lacking in a coherent plan.
• There is a lack of creativity in lead nurturing activities and plans.  The buyer suffers from this because there then is a high redundancy factor of similar types of content distributed via the web, emails, events, and that word most buyers cringe at – campaigns.
• Lead nurturing can suffer from multiple overlapping responsibilities for programs and areas of specializations.  What I mean is that some departments are charged with email marketing for example while others might be in charge of white papers as another example.  Each department marches to the drum of its own beat and implement plans.   The buyer then becoming the recipient of both lead nurturing activities and asks – why am I getting all of these at once – don’t they have their act together?
• Since lead nurturing is a new concept, it still struggles from not receiving the executive buy-in it should causing many sales and marketing teams to make best do with a limited budget.

The dilemma an organization can be faced with is the way lead nurturing has been approached.  Primarily lead nurturing being  approached as a program of activities as opposed to a program of experience.  Thus, an organization can significantly enhance its lead nurturing capabilities when it is linked to the overall buying experience and viewed as a significant element of buyer experience marketing.  Buyer Experience Marketing changes how we approach lead nurturing - from asking what activities should we do to what experiences should we create.

By linking lead nurturing to buyer experience marketing, we begin to shift the emphasis in lead nurturing from inside-out activities to outside-in experiences.  We begin to shift from a reliance on how many activities can each department dream up to how much do we know about the buyer and the types of experiences that will keep him/her engaged in the buying cycle.

This, in my opinion, is an extremely important linkage to be making.  By linking lead nurturing to an approach of buyer experience marketing, it allows us to take steps enabling the buyer to be a participant of experiences rather than a recipient of materials and activities.  It is definitely easier said than done however organizations should begin taking steps in this direction.  Why?  For this simple reason - buyers are certainly not going to wait for you to catch up.

In today’s E-to-E world (everyone-to-everyone), the B2B buying process is fundamentally changing. With 93% of B2B buyers using search to begin the buying process and 37% posting questions on social networking sites when looking for suggestions, successful B2B marketers are establishing best practices today on how to use social media to fill their sales pipelines for tomorrow.

A Peek Into The Future: Moving from Traditional to Social
We’ve all read the reports that confirm our suspicions: B2B marketing leaders are shifting the bulk of their spend from traditional to digital. In fact, according to Booz & Company’s B2B Marketing Survey 2010, we can expect a 67% increase in social media spend over the next two-three years, trailed closely by a 64% growth in digital and online marketing:

Good thing, too, because B2B buyers are becoming more aggressive in their search:

• 85% want B2B brands to interact and engage with them online
• 93% of B2B buyers believe that all companies should have a social media presence
• 9:10 say that when they are ready to buy, they’ll find you

First, What are Other B2B Marketers Doing?
A recent poll found that 43% of B2B marketers prefer Twitter when it comes to social media marketing; 32% leverage LinkedIn to generate leads; 16% engage customers on Facebook, and 8% rely on blogs:

100% of large and enterprise B2B firms realize the most value with Twitter as their #1 lead-gen tool:

Interestingly, 75% of B2B brands participate in Twitter (versus only 49% of B2C firms).

And if your target persona includes the C-level and VP title, your best bet is to engage via Twitter and Web logs because that’s where they tend to hang out the most:

Kristi Grigsby, Senior Director of Marketing for INgage Networks says, “I have seen that my own experience follows the trend that is taking place market-wise: as B2B marketers, we continue to look for ways to apply this new medium to our business environment. It wasn’t that long ago when I began seeing Twitter as a valuable tool in my B2B outreach, rather than a simple means to provide B2C support. Now I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

So how do you take advantage of this “new normal” and use social media to drive lead generation for your B2B brand?

What You Can Do Today: 7 Ways to Use Social Media to Generate Qualified Leads

1. If Twitter is your social media drug of choice, be everywhere all the time by using hashtags and schedulers

-       Hashtags: If your event budget has taken a nosedive like many others, use the advanced search feature on Twitter to research what events your competitors and/or prospects will be attending. Be careful not to blast the conference hashtag with commercials but instead post insightful responses and informative resources for the hashtag followers. The idea here is to put yourself in front of a captive audience and drive qualified traffic by sharing thought leadership and educational assets.

-       Schedulers: In the “How to grow your Twitter following” post, research shows that a vibrant Twitter account updates more than 20 times a day.  As a B2B marketer, be direct (use @ replies) and establish yourself as the subject-matter expert in your field (i.e., share educational articles and links in between your branded tweets). To update your timeline about once every hour, try using a free scheduler like Twuffer, SocialOomph, HootSuite, or TweetDeck.

-       Also monitor Twitter for customer care inquiries and negative sentiment directed towards your competition. If someone is having an issue with your competitor’s product, this is a good time to step in and showcase your differentiators.

-       Participate in industry Tweetchats. This is a great way to directly engage with prospects, potential partners, and other thought leaders by asking and answering questions related to a certain topic. For a Tweetchat directory listing, start at Twitdom.com. One of its Twitter application directories—“What the Hashtag?”—is a user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.

2. Use the advanced search feature on LinkedIn to find prospects that fit your buyer persona. (NOTE: Save those searches and get alerts via email when new people match your criteria.) First research the connects and then outreach in a non-aggressive manner, offering your expertise around a specific business challenge of theirs you may have uncovered.

-       While on LinkedIn, establish yourself as a thought leader by answering user questions. If prospects know you are willing to answer inquiries from the general public, they may be willing to ask you questions directly—which may open up a selling opportunity.

-       Join a few LinkedIn Groups specific to your industry. These groups help you keep your pulse on the marketplace and in touch with people who share your interests (i.e., who could also benefit from your solution).

3. Use Facebook to establish the culture of your brand

-       Be sure you “like” your current customers and prospects. Engage them further by leaving messages or comments, and congratulate them on newsworthy items.

-       Share your solution videos with Facebook supporters in an entertaining way

-       Use photos to showcase your company culture so that prospects get an idea of what type of people make up the company. Treat this as an opportunity to also share behind-the-scenes goings-on, making your brand more personable.

4. Mobile: Use SMS short codes (EX: Text “ELAvate” to 247365) to give prospects a green way to opt-in for additional content. Use it as another touch point and reason to push out differentiators about your brand.

5. YouTube: Increase your search engine ranking + brand awareness online by tagging your videos appropriately. Try connecting your corporate videos to topic-specific landing pages, especially since YouTube is the #2 search engine.

6. Leverage the WOM value on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious

-       Ask employees to bookmark your high-quality conversion pages, which helps to increase your social footprint

-       Tag press release announcements and landing pages as they are released. (This tactic can generate exposure for your brand as long as you tag appropriately.)

7. Online Community and Chat

-       Find new customers through your online community presence, provide micro-groups that are specific to particular business challenges

-       Employ a live chat feature on your site so that you can engage visitors directly as they click on high-value pages

Embrace the B2B marketer’s “new normal,” and use social media to generate net new leads while building a viable sales pipeline.

To uncover more vital statistics for B2B marketers, watch this video by Earnest Agency:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The big question is, what do we say to encourage opt-ins. How do we label the big red opt-in button for maximum action? 

You'd think that after all these years, there would be "best practices" that were tested again and again so that we could just plug-in tried and true verbiage and watch the forms fill themselves out. But no such luck. 

So I ran a one-question poll on LinkedIn (roughly the target demographic) to seek wisdom from our customer base. The question was "which button would prompt you to click?" 

The choices were :

• Learn More
• Join Now
• Sign Up
• Enroll Today
• Register

I pinged roughly 2000 people using my links and my Twitter, Facebook and e-mail contacts. Over the course of a week I got 87 responses. Not a very impressive 0.04 response rate for asking 1 question to people who actually know me! 

Nonetheless the answers were intriguing, enlightening but only partially definitive. 

LEARN MORE was the clear winner. Fifty-five percent of all responders said this would prompt at click. Among VP and C level responders, three-quarters chose this one. Two-thirds of the older responders (35-54) liked this one and women liked this much more than men – exactly 14% more. 

I suspect this wins because it requires the least investment or commitment. The offer is the next step – find out what all this is. But my hunch is that while this button will draw the most clicks, it will NOT prompt the most registrations because the same lack of intention will be applied. Once they find out more, they won't be all that interested and then they'll abandon the site. 

JOIN NOW came in second drawing two-thirds of the 18-24 responses. It is the transparent, straightforward choice. You are committing to something, you know there is an implied quid pro quo and you are going for it.  I suspect that this button will yield the most actual opt-in registrations. 

SIGN-UP ranked third. Four times more men picked this choice and 17% of all manager-level responders preferred it. It, too, is very straightforward and almost imperative. You know that if you give up your information somebody will send you some stuff. Even in a nanosecond, it requires a conscious decision to want in. 

ENROLL TODAY with 4 percent and REGISTER with 2 percent seems like the losers. Maybe they are a bit old fashioned in terms of connotation or perhaps they feel too formal or academic. Maybe they imply much too much intention and commitment. Either way neither clear word seems to have any motivational amperage. 

So what did I learn? Five not-too-surprising things … 

1. Asking the customer always beats your best guess.
2. Women and men have significantly different responses.
3. Age and status impact response.
4. Low commitment yields potentially more clicks.
5. Now you can use this info to label your buttons

Back in the "old days," we met in person or maybe at an industry conference or even at a cocktail party. You never knew when the next connection would come along. For those of us who weren't in the business of collecting leads, you didn't add that many new people to the Rolodex each month. Chances are you added people who themselves didn't add too many people. This fact let us all be a little lazy. We could take a few days or even weeks to recontact our new connections and they remembered us. They remembered the conversation and why they were interested in talking with us in the first place. This only worked because they didn't have many other new connections calling them.

That was a long time ago though. Today, you meet hundreds of people every month especially if you use any of the popular social networking tools. The people you meet are also meeting hundreds of new people. Back when we didn't meet that many new people, we could take our time in following up and know that people would remember us. That's not the case anymore. Since we meet so many more people and don't have the face to face connection we once had, our new "friends" are a lot more forgettable. They blend into each other pretty quickly as we add more and more connections. Why did you want to follow that person in the first place? What did you ask them to send you?

After a couple days, you forget because you're onto the next thing. It's the reality of our hyper-connected online world where we're doing five things at once and our brain spends a lot of time trying to figure out what's worth remembering and what can be discarded. When you don't follow up after a few days, chances are your new contact's brain has put you in the trash bin.

What's true for individuals is even more of an issue for brands online. When people research online, think about how many of your competitors they visit before getting to your site. During these visits, they are looking for the same information and making the same comparisons. They also might ask you for a specific piece of information or a question about a product feature. And, if they asked you, they probably asked your competitors. To further complicate this, while researching your, say, digital camera, they're researching refrigerators and doing a hundred non-research tasks as well. To draw the analogy, they're meeting a bunch of "people" online all at the same time and have a different interest in each one. Because of this, your potential customer might have a hard time even remembering what they asked you or why at that moment they wanted to learn more about you. When you wait a few days, this memory fades even further. It gets to the point that when you do finally respond, your message might find its way into their spam folder as unsolicited junk.

If you interact with others online (and since you're here, you do), make yourself a follow up rule. For those people you meet or inquiries received online for your brand, get back with people immediately. If it takes more than two days, you probably can forget about it. It doesn't need to be an elaborate response or one with every detail about the customer's question, just a note that you're working on getting an answer and that acknowledges what they asked (i.e., not an automatic response). That buys you a little extra time to come back with a meaningful response and ensures that you aren't forgotten.

It may be common sense, but how many times did you wait for that response that never came? Ironically, you might not even have an answer to that one because you've forgotten that you even asked.

Jonathan Richman is the author of Dose of Digital, a blog about e-marketing in healthcare. He works at Bridge Worldwide as Director of Business Development. You can follow him on Twitter (@jonmrich) and he promises to respond if you send him a tweet.

Each minor step you make will increase process flow and drive incremental conversion. The objective is to instantly orient visitors and make it as easy and as intuitive as possible for them to do what you want them to do. Everything starts with the understanding that a click onto your landing page is a gift from God with a half-life of a nuclear isotope. It begins degrading as soon as it granted (8 seconds) and it represents the BEGINNING of the conversation not the end.

As a site operator or marketer you must do everything possible to extend the 8 seconds into a registration, a download or a sale. Most of the moves are logical and require no extra technology. According to MarketingSherpa, the average e-mail landing page converts between 5.6 and 11.3 percent of those who click, depending on the offer. E-commerce landing pages produce conversions in the 5.6-7.6 range.

So here are the "rules" -- for LANDING PAGE OPTIMIZATION -- BEST PRACTICES

1. Use Readable URLs. Don't get fancy. The URL validates your credibility and reassures visitors that they are in the right place doing what they came to do.

2. Mirror the Offer Copy and Design. Where they land absolutely has to look, feel and read like where they came from. The e-mail, the mailer, the keyword all must be reflected in the landing page. If not, your prospect is confused and given an incentive to exit. It helps if all of this looks like the website too.

3. Repeat the Call- to-Action High on the Page. You hooked them with this in your communications. Remind them why the came and what you want them to do as soon as they get there.

4. Create Distinct Landing Pages. Too many marketers dump clicking visitors onto their home page. You might as well abandon them in Grand Central Station. For each marketing vehicle you need a separate corresponding landing page that mirrors the look, tone, copy and call-to-action of the ad message. These can be easily templated and cloned. Its about creating distinct and simple URLs and mapping marketing vehicles to landing pages. Its also about focusing on one task and one goal at a time.

5. Focus on Action Sequences. Site visitors expect a logical step-by-step flow. Give it to them. Anticipate how they think and what they want and build the landing page to deliver simple, easy-to-follow buying or registration sequences.

6. Use Short Copy Above the Fold. Never Scroll. It’s a game of glimpses and nanoseconds. Say it short and in 250 words per page or less. If the copy is dense signal impact or call out key ideas by using subheads. The population is aging so 10 point type is the minimum readable size. Use images to reinforce and illuminate. You are not writing an epic, you are writing a postcard. If they have to scroll, they abandon. Fight for simplicity. Most successful pages are dark type on a white field. 

Also relax the need to include every branding element and hero shots on the page. Clickers know who you are and where they are. They are anxious to do something other than romance your brand or fight your intramural battle. You have captured the attention of a prospect now capture the order. Most successful pages lose the hero shots and have minimal brand elements. A landing page is not the forum to work out your entire branding gestalt. It’s about facilitating action.

7. Limit Navigation. The purpose of a landing page is to close. Eliminate any choices that don't focus on the goal. Don't kid yourself about up sells and cross sells. Get the download, the registration or the sale first, then make your second move. If they want to see your whole site, they'll go there.

Right now they've granted you a click. Your job is to eliminate extra opportunities to go elsewhere and do other things. Reduce clickable elements. Eliminate as much navigation as possible. Its a magic focused moment. Keep it that way. Keep your eye and their's on the prize.

8. Collect Only Absolutely Necessary Data. Don't be too nosy. If you can get bye with just an e-mail address take it and follow up later. Forms scare a healthy number of site visitors who instinctively understand that if they give you data, you'll be hocking them till the end of time.

Obviously orders and payments require collecting more data. But streamline everything you can. Make it as easy to enter data as possible. Don't ask visitors to type the same stuff over and over. But do ask them to opt-in for future communications either newsletters or by permission to message them again.