English: Rackwick on Hoy. The sea was still & a profound green that changed with the light. Rackwick was almost deserted in spite of the warm day. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“What exactly is a buyer insight?”

I was asked this recently.  It made me think.  It is a term you hear and easy to quickly assume you know.  Turns out, there seems to be confusion given the rise in the use of the term “insight”.

Defined

A good place to start is with a brief answer to the question itself.  Here is my guiding answer:

A buyer insight is a profound, not-so-obvious, revelation as well as understanding of buyers, which leads to new innovations, value creation, marketing & sales capabilities, and business growth.

The basis of this definition is a buyer insight must be profound and it must alter an existing direction into one offering growth.

Do Not Confused Fact With Insight

One of the biggest areas of confusion I have noticed is misinterpreting a fact as an insight. One way of putting it is insight goes well beyond fact.  To be profound means an insight is an often unforeseen as well as unarticulated observation, which leads to a new deep understanding.  This new deep understanding then reshapes business growth strategies.

Uncovering facts of how buyers do things can result in improving effectiveness.  However, improving effectiveness is not a clear direct connection to a profound insight.  Mislabeling fact as insight can actually impede deep understanding and innovation.

Simply put, labeling as a buyer insight the “how” of buying processes can lead to a dead end.  How companies and buyers establish criteria for purchase decisions is a focus on process and even established policies.  While in B2B marketing, this knowledge may be new, for B2B sales it is not.  I often get this reaction from B2B sales reps when they see some of the information resulting from buyer personas – “wait, isn’t this the same as Miller Heiman” or the many other sales training methodologies.

Many a good sales leader expects their sales force to be effective at understanding how to mesh the sales process with the buying process.  Marketing effectiveness is enhanced when we also understand the early stages of the buying process involving digital research and evaluation.  Understanding “how” helps us be more effective but such facts may not necessarily be a profound game changer we can call a buyer insight.

The Softer Side of Why

A buyer insight is derived from what I call the softer side of why.  They stem from buyer goals, fears, motivations, perceptions, why buyers think as they do, why they desire, and why they value certain things over others.  As you can see, these are often very hard for buyers to articulate.   They are usually not so obvious as well.  It takes hard work, digging deeper, face time, and use of skilled techniques to reach a special understanding we can call a buyer insight.

An common illustration we can all relate to can help make the point:

My hunch is many readers are Starbuck’s lovers.  A well known fact is Starbuck’s gained a level of insight on how customers were becoming loyal to Starbuck’s not necessarily for the coffee itself but for the experience.  Starbuck’s took insight to a deeper level.  Uncovering the insight of music being the largest element of the experience.  It was not apparent at first (not so obvious).  This profound insight led to a new business growth strategy.  The Starbucks compilation CD’s.  Which has proven to be a way of enhancing customer loyalty and creating a new revenue category.

In my recent article, How Activity-Based Buyer Persona Development Generates Opportunities, I used an illustration of a B2B situation whereby the decision to choose logistics and transportation carriers were being made in loading centers versus the front office.  What was the reason why?

The motivation was a personal goal and desire to get home on time.  The archetypal buyer persona was in their 30's and had family activities right after work.  One carrier’s system was perceived as taking longer than the other.  This perception resulted in the competitor system being chosen more often.  The profound insight led to a redesign of a new speedier ordering system.  A new marketing campaign was developed to subtly highlight you can get home on time.  This was not-so-obvious at first and something Directors of Logistics were reluctant to share with superiors - let alone the selling company’s sales or marketing reps.

These illustrations serve as examples of profound buyer insights, which led directly to business growth.

The takeaway here for B2B Marketing and Sales leaders is this: think of buyer research and buyer persona development as a gateway to profound buyer insights.  Challenge the presentation of facts as insights.  You are in need of game changing buyer insights to be a market leader – not mere facts.

(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.  If I can be of help, schedule time with me at So Helpful Tony.)

Related articles

• 5 Buyer Behaviors Reshaping B2B Marketing
• Map Content to the 5 Phases of the B2B Buyer Persona Buying Cycle
• How Activity-Based Buyer Persona Development Generates Opportunities
• 7 Big Questions for B2B Marketers in 2013

• What is a Buyer Insight? (tonyzambito.com)

If you use the phrase 'call tracking' with someone this week, it will likely conjure up images of NSA wiretapping, analysts hunched over computer screens in secret government bunkers listening to your private conversations, and injurious government spying.

In fact, the term 'call tracking' has been used more on Twitter this week than any other week ever. The entire world is talking abou the CIA/NSA program to track and monitor calls (along with emails, social media etc.).

But call tracking meant something entirely different--and something far less controversial just a few days ago.

Up until this week, call tracking was fiarly well-known tool used by millions of marketers to analyze which ads, campaigns, and search terms generate phone calls. There are several 'call tracking' companies, including LogMyCalls, that gather marketing data. Call tracking is like Google Analytics for the phone.

But, in the last 5 or 6 days the term call tracking has been commandeered by this government spying scandal. That's sort of unfortunate.

Call Tracking May Not Stop Terrorism...BUT It Does Stop Bad Marketing

Call tracking, as it has been known until this week, does not stop terrorism. But it does stop bad marketing.

Call tracking provides data that marketers need to make decisions about their marketing spend. It is a vital tool in a marketer's toolbox.

Call Tracking for PPC

Marketers spend BILLIONS each year on PPC campaigns, specifically on Google Adwords. They drive traffic to landing pages, track conversions and revenue. They track the number of people that fill out a form on that landing page.

Increasingly though, marketers are also tracking the number of phone calls that PPC campaigns produce. This data, provided by call tracking, is critical to filling the blindspot for marketers as they track their ROI.

Call Tracking for SEO

How many phone calls are your SEO efforts generating? Which searched keywords are producing calls?

For some SMBs and local businesses, phone calls are simply the most important leads there are. They are more valuable than any other lead type.

Thus, tracking which SEO tactics, keywords, and traffic sources are generating phone calls is critically important.

Call Tracking for Traditional Media

Many marketers place call tracking numbers on direct mail ads, in radio ads, in TV ads, and in print ads. These marketers need to know how many phone calls these tactics are producing.

So...call tracking may not stop terrorism, but it does stop bad marketing.

Hopefully within a few days/weeks the term 'call tracking' will be correctly used again.

But B2C marketing is primarily focused on so-called lead generation and customer acquisition. After all, the best way to get critical mass for your app or web service is to spend most of your marketing investment attracting eyeballs so that the ad server CPM model will work to your advantage. That’s a relatively static paradigm that’s been in effect for quite some time in B2C that promises to stick around for the foreseeable future.

B2B marketing, however, at least in the high end enterprise datacenter world that I’ve lived in for the past several years, is less about lead generation and capturing volumes of qualified names, as it’s not that difficult to identify the right customer segment profile, say, for network switches or routers. Vendors like Juniper and Cisco know exactly who those people are – but their challenge now is way more dynamic, as it's one more predicated on how to tailor the right conversation with compelling, exclusive content, even better if the selection and lifecycle of topics can be automated with a robust customer listening platform . . . strategic, differentiated content that’s relevant to very rapidly shifting market conditions, primarily driven by faster moving start-ups, emboldened by open source technology, with the will and daring to bet their company on the pursuit of bold innovation.

And what happens if you are the Cisco of your industry, a networking vendor that enjoys a dominant market share (today) of high end enterprise IT infrastructure, but rather than facing merely a positioning and messaging challenge to a captive audience of essentially the same products and services you have already been selling, you’re up against a tsunami-style computing trend that threatens to wash away your massive legacy installed base, incumbent advantage?

That’s exactly what happened in the last year and a half, when the competitive landscape shifted under Cisco’s feet, away from an expensive (hardware) device-centric purchasing and deployment model to one that cares less about the underlying physical infrastructure and more so about the ability to dynamically provision network capacity for virtualized applications. The SDN (software-defined networking) movement, predicated in large part on an open standard called OpenFlow, not only threatens to commoditize Cisco and other brand-conscious networking device-centric vendors, but to a certain degree, also represents a threat to VMWare as the primary platform for virtualizing IT infrastructure (see Nicera acquisition).

And thus the race is on in the strategic marketing domain within the networking industry to see who can create the best ‘marchitecture’ positioning to capitalize on the SDN computing trend. What are some other examples of how B2B marketing is being challenged to reinvent value proposition storylines?

Network Security: Up until very recently, and fairly consistently for the last several years, the prevailing orthodoxy was that antivirus and antimalware software were required to fully protect all clients or devices in the enterprise from malicious attacks. However, many CIOs woke up to the fact that the license fees they’re paying for subscriptions and maintenance are not only exorbitant but show little evidence of actually working – the so-called malicious threat environment is as bad as it’s ever been, and multi-threaded client-device screening for malware attacks, while impeding your employees’ productivity, that may or may not disrupt the continuity of your enterprise is, perhaps, a dubious business benefit. One very prominent large enterprise CIO recently sent out the first salvo, basically saying his company would turn off all such client-device screening and live with the consequences.

Another good example is what’s happening in storage; for years, the generally accepted protocols for provisioning network-attached storage in the enterprise – NFS, CIFS, iSCSI etc. – were considered sufficient to highlight compatible support for. However, again largely driven in the open source community and by Internet giants like Yahoo and Google, and the advent of Big Data everywhere, the Hadoop standard has very quickly become the requisite storage/computing trend to show relevancy for.

Finally, look at the movement to cloud computing – no serious business model can sustain competitive advantage without a portion of its IT infrastructure “outsourced” to the cloud, and yet, very few C-suite business leaders understand the broad implications of doing so from a security and management standpoint. For example, in order to expose a piece of corporate infrastructure and underlying data so that third parties’ applications (via APIs) can interoperate in the cloud (and across mobile platforms, too), the enterprise must create a tightly controlled, secured, managed and compliant API.

Let’s take a look at how the grocery shopping experience has significantly changed for Mary, a mom of three, starting with the planning stages of her shop.

Circulars

Then: At one point in time, browsing the sales circular for all of her favorite stores meant digging through piles of paper and taking note of any interesting deals and specials. Once that daunting task was complete, it was time to figure out what to do with the stack of potential savings. Should she find recipes based off of these sales items, choose recipes first and hope some of the ingredients overlapped with the sales, or just wing it, going to the store with no particular plan? As a result of this timely and downright frustrating practice, most of the circulars that she received ended up in the recycle bin.

Now: While consumers like Mary once had to be highly motivated to find deals, the deals now find her. Deals can automatically be matched to her grocery list, or she can browse the recipes that use the most on-sale items. Smart phones have also given her the ability to browse digital circulars from all of her stores straight from her smartphone. Adding sale items of interest to her grocery list or searching for recipes that include those sales is made possible with the quick tap of a button. This simplified, integrated mobile process has given sales circulars new life, finally delivering on its intended value. And with this new mobile medium comes new opportunity – opportunity for brand advertisers to get their messages out in the context of helping the shopper accomplish her goals, versus just alongside what she's doing. This also gives brands and retailers access to a mobile audience that is difficult to reach with other forms of digital advertising. And it doesn’t stop with circulars; brands can highlight promotions, discounts and other product messages directly to the consumer.

Safeway has done just that with its mobile loyalty program, Just for U, which tailors digital coupons to shoppers based on individual purchase history and buying patterns. As they continue to see success in their digital program, they move closer to discontinuing print ads completely. Besides Food on the Table, companies like Grocery Server, MyWebGrocer, ZipList and Pushpins are also using aggregated circular data to help consumers, retailers and brands take advantage of this digital change.

The grocery list

Then: When Mary used to make her grocery list, she used a number of formats – the back of a receipt, a piece of scrap paper, a notepad on the kitchen counter or a list spread across all three. She would try and add to that list throughout the week, but would regularly think of needed items when that list wasn’t around. More often than not, she would end up at the store with a list that was either: a) unorganized and missing several items that were eventually forgotten – until she found herself back at home and in need of said forgotten item, or b) at the store with no list at all, racking her brain for all the things she needed. Once at the store, she would make her way up and down the aisles only to realize she missed something at the front of the store – having to loop back to the beginning at least once during her trip. All of this to say, keeping up with a grocery list was less of a time saver and more of a hassle.

Now: Mary’s grocery list travels with her. If she’s sitting at work and suddenly remembers that she’s on snack duty for the soccer game this weekend, updating her list takes only seconds. With the ability to sync her list across multiple devices, she can start building that list on her tablet, and pick up where she left off on her smartphone. It also makes it possible for her to share her list with her family members, so that when they make a store run, they can check a few things off, too. When she’s browsing recipes on her phone and sees one she likes, she lets technology do the work for her by populating her list with the recipe ingredients. And when she makes an unexpected run to the store, she never finds herself without it. Once at the store, the ability to re-order her list based on the layout of that particular store makes her trip faster and more organized.

Now that we’ve seen what the planning stages of Mary’s shopping experience look like, let’s move to her actual shop.

The store run

Then: A quick grocery trip can quickly turn into a stressful chain of events. Because most grocery runs take place during peak hours, experiencing a relaxing stroll through the store to pick up a few necessities is highly unlikely. Between the crowded parking lot, busy aisles, out-of-stock products and long lines at the cash register, more often than not, Mary leaves the store with more stress and annoyances than actual food.

Now: On the days Mary is too busy to make it to the store, the store can come to her. Today's grocery delivery services aren't the Webvan of the dot com days past. Companies like Walmart, Amazon and Google are combining technology and logistics to provide grocery delivery services to their consumers in big ways. New companies are also being created for the sole purpose of digitizing the grocery shopping experience. Retail Relay Inc., one of the many e-commerce grocery startups that have emerged in the past year, matches local farmers, artisanal bakers and major grocers with the community to provide one-stop pick ups and deliveries to consumers’ doorsteps. Grocery delivery is not only greener and more convenient to consumers; it creates a more efficient marketplace.

Technology has made its way to the grocery store, and its arrival is responsible for bringing convenience to the masses. These technologies make it possible to engage the consumer when they first show intent. When Mary is in the planning process and at the store, retailers and brands can reach her at the most relevant point. Booz & Co recently reported that 52 percent of U.S. consumers use technology in their grocery shopping experience, and 31 percent use their mobile phones while at the store. Why assault the consumer with thousands of shopper marketing pieces, most of which are irrelevant, when it is possible to deliver the exact piece of information they need in their hands at the most relevant step in their path to purchase? Simply put, technology is impacting the grocery industry in substantial ways, and the brands and retailers that move to adapt will benefit with higher sales and increased loyalty.

Wikopedia

We are busy people.  Our business and personal days are filled with activities.  The activities we engage in usually are designed to help us accomplish either a business or personal goal.  For example, I get up early and go to the gym and engage in the activities of exercising.  Not because I just want to – but because I have a goal of losing weight!

Often times, marketing and sales folks have no idea about the activities our customers and buyers perform on a daily basis.  Yet understanding these can yield rich and robust insights into goals, which drive buying decisions.

A Day in the Life

Since childhood, we have probably heard this quote a thousand times:

“You never truly know someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes.” –American Adage, Source Unknown

This applies in the development of buyer personas.  Using an activity-based research approach allows us to walk in the shoes of our customers and prospective buyers.  What it gives us is something very important.  Context.

Context provides us with a day in the life perspective.  We want to see what customers are confronted with in their natural – not artificial – environment.

On-Site

When you have visitors to your home, you take pride in your home.  You gladly give a tour, telling your story about how you bought or decorated the house.  This comes natural to us.  Much in the same way, activity-based buyer personas, to yield rich buyer insight, require day-in-the-life perspectives.  When you get a call at home for a survey, your patience gets tested.  Let alone, trying to recall your activities can be a frustrating experience.  There are inherent limitations with phone only research.

These same principles apply here.  Customers and buyers enjoy not only talking about their place of work, but enjoy “show and tell”.  And, that is what you want.

See the Not So Obvious

Without getting too technical, a day-in-the life perspective is a combination of ethnography, business anthropology, and in the new digital age – digital anthropology.  These social sciences give us the techniques and tools needed to uncover what I like to call the not-so-obvious.  In other words, cannot be yielded by phone interviews only.

Let me illustrate:

I was engaged in a buyer persona development effort for one of the largest logistics and delivery firms in the world.  Through a series of on-site qualitative buyer interviews, I began to notice a unique not-so-obvious insight happening.  While the focus had been on getting national contracts - and the “buyer” was in the front office for these - I learned decisions were actually made in the back office.  Decisions on which carrier to use were being made through the push of a button at working stations in the loading and shipping areas.  Usually these decisions were happening around the same time everyday.  Also, a personal goal rather than a business goal proved to be the main driver of which carrier was chosen.  This led to an improved ordering system as well as a shift in marketing towards “back office” buyer personas.

Phone-based buyer persona research alone would not have yielded such insight for these reason:

• First, you would be confined to the status quo conversations with perceived notions of who the buyer is.
• Second, it would have been too focused on traditional sales "win-loss" research.
• Third, the focus would be on obvious insights
• Lastly, you would miss the big not-so-obvious insight

In this particular situation, on-site allowed for ethnographic insight (day-in-the-life), business anthropology (witnessing the culture of shipping and back office), and digital anthropology (discover the impact of how digital systems impacted decisions).

Insight-to Foresight

The former Chairman of Proctor and Gamble, A.G. Lafley, was a big believer in gaining qualitative insight, via ethnographic research, and had this to say about what it leads to:

“lead to richer insights which helps identify innovation opportunities that are often missed by traditional research”

Granted, we are talking about one of the largest B2C entities in the world.  We may be unable to afford or scale research like P&G.  However, there are lessons for B2B Marketing in every story.  I like this quote because it embodies where B2B needs to go.  And, what it misses in buyer foresight if it does not.

Activity-based buyer persona development can lead to obtaining rich (not-so-obvious) buyer insight.  This level of buyer insight can lead to tremendous buyer foresight.  Allowing us to uncover “what if” opportunities to innovate for customers as well as with customers.  Leading to the coveted prize of more revenue opportunities.

My advice to B2B Marketing and Sales leaders is this: if you believe buyer persona development is an activity for just content and messaging, expand your belief to bigger opportunities with customers and buyers.  Move beyond obvious insight to not-so-obvious insight.

More critically, do not miss out on big insight-to-foresight opportunities as A.G. Lafley aptly conveys.

Related articles

• What is a Buyer Persona? Why the Original Definition Still Matters to B2B (tonyzambito.com)
• What is a Buyer Persona? Why the Original Definition Still Matters to B2B (business2community.com)
• How Activity-Based Buyer Persona Development Generates Opportunities (tonyzambito.com)
• Do You Get A "So What" To Your Buyer Personas? (business2community.com)

Regardless of the controversy about them, the speed with which information about the latest conspiracy theories spreads through social media still reveals lessons about general human nature that marketers can use.

1. The Government Hired Adam Lanza: Focus on Being Trustworthy

Image via Flickr by torbakhopper

Conspiracy theorists have a knee-jerk response to distrust and suspect the government and the establishment generally. Whenever something terrible happens, such as the 9/11 attacks or the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, conspiracy theorists emerge to say that the federal government has had a hand in it because of some political agenda.

While most people don’t distrust the US government quite this much, everyone can name examples of when our leaders at the highest levels actually did behave deceitfully: Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. John Hardwig published a scholarly paper in 1991 suggesting that conspiracy theories are part of a growing skepticism of experts and the establishment, by everyone.

More to the point, everyone out there has been burned by someone, including businesses and brands that did not deliver on their promises. You want people to share information about your business and your marketing messages for the right kinds of reasons and not negative ones, so concentrate on distinguishing yourself as the brand that is trustworthy, not like those other guys.

• Be careful not to promise anything in your marketing message you can’t deliver.
• Then work to deliver more than you promised.
• Find ways to go above and beyond what your competitors do for consumers.

2. We Know the Freemasons Are Evil: Develop a Cult That Knows Better

It’s been noted by the psychology blogger Kevin Goodman and others that when people believe and perpetuate conspiracy theories, it gives their egos a boost. They enjoy being the ones who know the “real truth” about it all. It validates them to join with other truthers to form the intellectual elite of people who know better than others. They avoid mainstream media in favor of materials that reaffirm their special knowledge.

You may know perfectly well that your great uncle was a Freemason, and that he belonged to an ordinary fraternal order something like the Rotary Club. He would have meetings with the guys to socialize and to plan fundraising events for nursing homes. But meet up with the wrong person, and he’ll be all too happy to tell you how blind you are. If you really knew about the Masons, you’d know that they are an ancient cabal of evil power brokers. You won’t be able to convince this person otherwise.

Some brands have managed to capitalize on the element of human nature that wants to belong to a special group of people who are savvier than others. They’ve got customers who’ll carry around their beverage, fashion accessory, or laptop, who are almost more enthusiastic about their brand than they are.

• Position yourself as not simply being better than your competitors, but unique among them.
• Show appreciation for loyal customers with special clubs and rewards.
• Give customers opportunities and incentives to praise you and connect with you in social media.

3. The Airplanes Are There to Kill Us: Try Something Different

Some people’s imaginations may be getting the best of them. It’s been noted that creative people tend to see patterns and possibilities that others do not. Kevin Goodman suggests that conspiracy theories are possibly the result of “a maladaptive creative process.”

Part of the appeal of some of these theories lies in their novelty. It’s more interesting to believe that the Eye of Providence on the $1 bill is a sinister, all-seeing eye. It’s more intriguing to think that the contrails of an airplane are full of poison rather than water vapor. Ideas like this spread because they are more entertaining than the mundane true explanations.

Companies can get people’s attention by sending out messages that are unexpected, such as this humorous tweet by McDonald’s:

“Despite all the rumors there r no plans 2 bring #mclobster or mcsushi 2 the US menu. We r working on a new menu item called McWinning.”

• Try using types of marketing messages customers aren’t expecting, such as using humor or inspirational quotes.

4. The Illuminati Would Control Us: Empower People to Help the World

Some conspiracy theorists are quick to conclude that everything momentous that happens—terrorism, wars, economic downturns, even tsunamis—is the work of one evil elite that controls everything. It’s always the Illuminati, and Tupac was martyred trying to fight them. Or, it’s the big shots of the New World Order. Or, these two groups are the same people. It depends whom you ask.

In his book “Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture,” Mark Fenster argues that this is not as crazy as people dismiss it as being. It’s not that there really is such a group. But when people feel disempowered, deceived, and unfairly held back, they create an idea of an ideological enemy who is keeping them down. They must be vigilant and fight the powerful deceivers by exposing the truth about them.

Not everyone is up for railing against the New World Order, but everyone feels a little helpless in the face of world problems. Some companies have harnessed people’s desires to help make the world a better place. For example, Tom’s Shoes will donate a pair of shoes to a needy child when you buy a pair for yourself.

• Promote socially responsible aspects of your products and services.
• Enlist your customer's help in community causes.

5. The Obamacare Microchip: Keep Your Message Simple

Karl Popper argued decades ago that conspiracy theories arise when people try to simplify the causes of things so that the precipitating events are easier to understand. The theory circulating is that everyone will be required to have a microchip implanted in his or her body under the Affordable Care Act.

Nobody understands legalese, except lawyers and, hopefully, Congress. But the real intent of this verbiage was to collect data about people’s hip replacements and pacemakers.

Seth Godin has said that if a billboard displays the four words, “Free coffee, next exit,” then no other words are necessary. Even if what your company does is complex and nuanced, your explanation of it shouldn’t be.

• Use plain language.
• Keep your message as short as possible.
• Give potential customers a clear way to take action.

Most of your customers are not conspiracy truthers, but they share some of the same human motivations.

Business (Photo credits: www.roadtrafficsigns.com)

B2B business strategies were much simpler back in the day.  In the pre-Internet and pre-digital age, the target of one customer or buyer was an accepted viewpoint.  We are no longer back in those days.

We are in the new digital age.  This new age consists of more complexity, collaboration, co-creation, and new emerging buying behaviors.  Recently, I introduced the concept of the Persona Buying Cycle™.  It represents a view of understanding new buying behaviors via the B2B buying cycle.  Designed to help us address not only new behaviors – but address new complexities.

The Why

Last year, I suggested a single view of the buyer was a dangerous road to travel.  This view wired into B2B Business for nearly a century.  We now live in a new digital age of audiences, influencers, procurement policies, buying teams, committees, social collaboration platforms, and more.

Mapping content strategy to this new world means factoring in more views than a single buyer.   For B2B businesses, the dynamics of audiences, nurturing, insight, experience, and “consumer-like” branding are all new.  These new dynamics are fast emerging as success factors for succeeding in the new digital age.

One of the key insights behind this thinking, gained through a collection of on-site qualitative buyer interviews over the past two years, is this:

Over the course of the complex end-to-end B2B buying cycle, multiple people come in and out of this cycle.  They exhibit different goals, behaviors, as well as personas depending on where they are in the B2B buying cycle.

The key here is mapping content to the goals and behaviors of people participating in the B2B buying cycle.

(Let me note here a single person’s goals and behaviors can change throughout the course of a long buying cycle.  They can take on different persona behaviors depending on where they are in a complex B2B buying cycle.)

The How

From a strategy perspective, we want to map business and content strategies to the 5 phases of goals and behaviors discovered in your industry’s B2B buying cycle.  Here is a simplified illustrative chart to serve as an example (click on image for larger view):

I also use for this illustration the Customer Decision Journey suggested by McKinsey.  It is a realistic B2B perspective.  This chart is incomplete in a few areas for a very important reason.  What we want is an outside-in mindset.  This illustration is meant to highlight the need for understanding the goals and behaviors of B2B businesses as well as the people within them.  With this understanding, we can best be informed on developing content strategies.

The Operation

There are seven considerations for the B2B CMO and his or her team to ensure successful development of content strategies, which this chart helps to illustrate:

1. Personas were founded and based on goal-directed understanding of users/buyers – don’t lose sight of audience and buyer goals
2. Personas are a decision tool to help inform strategies – map strategies first before jumping to tactics
3. Behavior focus helps us to understand what audiences/buyers do, how they do it, why they do it, and how they think – important elements for developing content
4. Understanding goals and behaviors happens with on-site perspective.  Best results come from 3^rd party qualitative customer research expertise.
5. To make customer and buyer focus operational, we need to develop specific tools –personas - to align with the efforts of teams most central to each stage of the Persona Buying Cycle.  Single view buyer personas only collect dust.
6. Mapping the Persona Buying Cycle helps unite the enterprise around a common understanding of people who live within target B2B businesses and industries.
7. Content Strategies and tactics become more targeted and focused.  Avoiding the pitfalls of being overly product-centric or sales-centric.  Or, avoid seeing what content spaghetti sticks against the wall.

This is a continuing dialogue on one of the big questions for B2B marketing this year: how do we operationalize content marketing?  This view and approach not only helps to operationalize content marketing.  It helps us to operationalize a consistent buyer and customer focus throughout the B2B buying cycle.

(Be part of the dialogue with the latest thinking on Buyer Personas, Persona Buying Cycle, and Buyer Foresight - sign up for news and updates here: www.tonyzambito.com.)

Related articles

• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• 7 Big Questions for B2B Marketers in 2013
• 5 Buyer Behaviors Reshaping B2B Marketing
• 4 Reasons Why Content Marketing Should Care About Audience Development

• Map Content to the 5 Phases of the B2B Buyer Persona Buying Cycle (tonyzambito.com)

Do you host webinars for your business? Ever found yourself wondering why your attendance is low or whether you could do a better job with your presentations? Webinars are a great way to get your message out to the right audience, promote interaction with customers, create buzz about your business or product, and increase sales. With just a little finesse, you can make your online events work even harder for your business.

Choosing the Right Topic
Of course you need the right topic to get your webinar off the ground, something that will provide lasting value to attendees and generate interest. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Frequently asked questions—Are there questions about your product or service that you receive on a regular basis? Compile those questions and build a webinar around them.

Introducing a new product—New products often benefit from a little hype, especially if it’s a departure from the kind of things you’ve done before. Use the webinar to talk about benefits, uses, and options for the new product.

How-tos—How to implement new software in your IT department, how to access online capabilities for an insurance company, how to write a will, how to operate an exercise machine—no matter what industry you’re in, a how-to webinar can give people the information they need to take the next step.

Compelling Presentation
The success of your webinar depends largely on how compelling your visuals are. Google Slides, Sliderocket, SlideShare, and PowerPoint all enable you to create professional slides that will effectively showcase your brand and your content.

Nailing Down the Details
Great webinars are made in the details, so don’t neglect the fine print when it comes to designing your event. Consider the following:

• Should you record?
• How many people will be attending?
• What hosting service should you use?
• How will you invite people?
• How will you follow up?

Spread the Word
Reach out to the audiences you already have via email, social media, and your blog. When people sign-up, ask them to spread the word by inviting their friends. You can also create a short video to advertise your webinar and create word of mouth buzz.

Designing an effective webinar takes a little strategic planning and know-how. Before you hold your next webinar, make sure you’ve chosen a topic that’s relevant to your audience, that you’ve considered all the details, and that you have a plan in place for building your audience. Then, sit back and enjoy interacting with your customers. They’re waiting to be dazzled!

All About the Future (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every company has aspirations to become the market leader in their space.  Leading your market has built-in advantages over your competition.  Market leadership helps to ensure a level of stability and longevity.

Getting there and staying there is the hard part.

The demands of the market and the buyers within them can set the bar very high.  Being the market leader can be very tenuous as buyers evaluate new emerging technologies and options.  Rising to the top also comes with a heavy responsibility.  Which is this:

Customers and buyers expect market leaders to provide them with a roadmap of the future.

Recently, this became a profound understanding for me, which I want to share with you.  I conducted a significant amount of qualitative buyer interviews during the past year or more.  There was a sense buying behavior was shifting in this direction.  It has led me to conclude this:

Organizations today, particularly B2B, must develop the capability as well as provide to their prospective buyers and existing customers future-oriented Buyer Foresight™ .

Michael Brenner, who has a fantastic blog B2B Marketing Insider, and I had a conversation on the subject of buyer foresight.  You can find it here: Marketing is in the Throes of a Buyer Revolution.

Buying behavior is shifting towards future-oriented thinking and planning for several important reasons:

Rapid Change in Technology

This is a big threat for existing customers and prospect buyers.  When it comes to high-ticket technology and solutions, the stakes are high.  A true source of fear is making a significant investment in technology, which may be obsolete in a year.  Here is a buyer voice on this matter:

“One of the things we really like to know is what is being planned in the future.  We expect honesty because the last thing we want is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars only to be stuck with an obsolete system.” Vice President, Business Integration and Operations

Innovation Leader

Customers and prospect buyers want to be associated with organizations demonstrating successful skills in innovation.  Future-oriented buyers are not interested in the status quo. They also want to share in the innovation.  Another voice:

“We are looking for a long-term partnership.  We want to actually be a part of what they create.  Even at the R&D stage.  We believe it helps serve us as well as serve them.” Chief Operating Officer

The Vision Thing

A concept I covered in my conversation with Michael Brenner is the idea of how customers and buyers desire vision.  They want to not only understand your future.  They desire to gain their own foresight into how their future can change if they enter a relationship with you.  A voice to articulate:

“Our committee does a five-year outlook planning session once per year.  It is a fun exercise really.  So, I like vendors who can give me a vision of where they think they will be in five years as well as how they think where we will be in five years.” Vice President, Portfolio Management

Developing Competency in Buyer Foresight

There are several ways to begin building buyer foresight into an organization’s DNA, which can be covered over a series of articles and conversations.  Here are just a few for starters:

• Conduct qualitative buyer research - on-site to get the best future-oriented perspective
• Create appropriate levels of personas for the Persona Buying Cycle™
• Recognize Buyer Insight which can be turned into Buyer Foresight
• Engage in buyer scenario modeling and mapping exercises which are future-oriented

The last of these suggestions, are important new exercises.  Adapting to what I have called in the past Buyer Scenario Modeling can be a significant path for organizations to take towards Buyer Foresight.

Buyers today are seeking relationships which keeps pace with the rapid changes in the new digital age.  Buyer foresight is a means to help you do just that.

Related articles

• 7 Big Questions for B2B Marketers in 2013
• One Way to Know the Ideal Buying Scenarios for Lead Nurturing
• 5 Buyer Behaviors Reshaping B2B Marketing
• 5 Buying Behaviors of the Persona Buying Cycle
• Marketing is in the Throes of a Buyer Revolution
• 4 Reasons Why Content Marketing Should Care About Audience Development

Now before you get crazy, I’m not trying to dismiss the importance of metrics. They have significance because they give marketers a window into degrees of consumer interest. And yes, then there’s engagement. We all know about engagement. But what metrics can’t accurately quantify is impact; metrics lack emotion. This is interesting because it is emotion that drives social habits. What do I mean by that?

I want you to think about your fondest memory. Maybe you were five years old. Perhaps you got the train set you always wanted for your birthday – always being pretty relative for someone presumably just entering kindergarten. Maybe you were sixty.  Perhaps you learned that you were going to be a grandparent. Whatever it was that made that moment so impactful, would you ever think to put a price tag on it; the impact it had on your life; its lasting generational importance? Of course not. Yet the return on impact for brands in each example is fairly predictable without being terribly overt.

As a five year old, you likely told all of your friends about the toy train. Your friends told their parents. Their parents told marketers via store visits, thus, raising the demand of the product. As a sixty year old, it probably didn’t take you long before you bragged to anyone that would listen about your coming bundle of grandjoy and started thinking of ways to spoil it – toys, dolls, games, clothes, even college funds. Emotion drives impact. For brands and marketers, impact should be your primary metric.

Social media is all about emotion. Why do you choose to follow certain people, TV shows, celebrities, or brands? Do they make you laugh, cry, or scratch your head? Do you relate to them? These questions should not be limited to measuring personal use. Social business is personal. For marketers and brands, the time has come to reevaluate traditional return on investment and re-frame it. It’s time to prioritize impact.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Coke continues to find innovative ways of turning a soda break into a social experience.

Read more, here.

You've never seen B2B marketing quite like this before.

This initiative just won "Best of Show" for best integrated campaign at the Summit International Creative Awards.

How are you using B2C approaches in your B2B marketing? Share your stories here!

It seems like as soon as I wrap my head around Google's latest algorithm update, there's another release that changes the game.

While SEO experts should live in the weeds of these updates to understand the nuances in how Google ranks content, marketers should recognize a few high level SEO trends that drive successful content marketing initiatives.

1. SEO used to be an exercise in optimizing content for spiders. Today, SEO is about optimizing content for the user.

This is an important distinction that should drive every piece of content produced, from how you choose the topic to the words you use to express the idea. Search engines think like people, but for some reason most brands don't speak like people. This is causing a disconnect between the brand and the consumer on every level - in relating to them obviously, but also in just being discoverable. No one searches in corporate speak.

So, how do you do this? Research.

A combination of both keyword research and social listening will show you what words and phrases consumers use. Once the content is written and optimized appropriately for search, the language used in social media should reflect the language used in the content.

The same keywords should be used in a similar tone since search engines are now considering social interactions in search ranking. You not only want to be shareable, you want the language used when sharing your content to be the language that will serve you best.

2. Links still matter, but the game has changed.

Without getting into the weeds, it is important to know that linking to quality websites and being linked to by quality websites is still important.

In fact, when a website links to your site and also links to another website of higher authority on the same page, your site will benefit from the authority of the other linked site.

Another important factor in outbound links is, just as above, the language you use. The anchor text should clearly indicate what you're linking to and the text around the link should be carefully considered too.

3. The power is in the long tail.

This isn't news, but it is so important that it should be emphasized.

There are 500 million active domains competing for the attention of consumers. Unless you have a huge budget, you aren't going win big, broad buzzwords.

Optimize your content for the long tail keywords that niche audiences are looking for and publish often. Not only will you rank higher for less competitive topics, but Google will assign you higher authority for publishing regularly.

4. Traditional marketing tactics will boost digital marketing initiatives.

Google likes to tell us that if we build a quality website and publish quality content, users will come. While that might be true to some extent, it is important that marketers realize that traditional tactics can actually help boost content efforts.

Press releases, for example, provide branded mentions and links that will increase the authority of your website while also increasing exposure. Despite what some might say, email is still extremely effective in creating opportunities for awareness and sharing.

Penguin 2.0 was just released and everyone is in a frenzy to figure out the next button to push to get out ahead of the competition. That is important and every serious brand should have someone doing that for them.

But it is equally important that everyone involved in digital marketing understands basic SEO trends in order to ensure content is being produced in a way that will drive success.

Use this list as criteria to check off on each time content is added to your website:

1. Am I using the language of my target consumer?
2. Am I linking to authoritative websites?
3. Am I optimizing this content for a specific user by targeting a few long tail keywords?
4. Am I promoting this content using more traditional marketing tactics?

*as posted by Noah Echols on IQ's blog

In the article “Designed for Learning: A Tale of Two Auto Plants,” authors Paul S. Adler and Robert E. Cole write, “A consensus is emerging that the hallmark of tomorrow’s most effective organizations will be their capacities to learn,” and to survive they will need to execute new processes swiftly and effectively, communicate them to the right people, and inspire further innovation. Adler and Cole go on to explain two different “organizational designs” that people believe support this kind of learning: the lean production model and the human-centered model.

Now, if any of you love cars, you may know where I am going with this. Toyota and General Motors utilized the lean production model in their joint venture at the NUMMI plant, and Volvo used the human-centered model at its Uddevalla facility. The lean production model features small, specific tasks for each worker and a team whose members are interdependent and work in a way similar to the Ford assembly line: The lean production model is quite regimented, has little (if any) room for unique individual contribution, and is tightly controlled by management. The main goals of it are efficiency and an overall elimination of waste from production processes with a focus on “value” for the customer. This method is good at achieving these things in some ways, but it lacks some of the elements I believe are necessary for organizational strength and readiness: making the working environment beneficial and enjoyable for the employees.

Just as many people gradually came to realize that marketing is not only about the product or the media (it is also about “how customers behave” and other factors), the Uddevalla, human-centered method of production demonstrates a recognition that the happiness, satisfaction, and level of involvement of the people making the products affects the quality of work and the organization as a whole. According to Ake Sandberg in his book Enriching Production: Perspectives on Volvo's Uddevalla plant as an alternative to lean production, “The double goal of good jobs and productivity” inherent in the human-centered method “is the essence of what we want to call enriching production. Production that is enriching to work and workers and to investors and owners.” For example, workers using the human-centered method would work with their team to build an entire car together while workers using the lean production method would each build one part of the car.

Now, back to the idea of value presented in the lean production example. Value to the customer is important, but I also said that I believe more in the human-centered method because it addresses the wellbeing of the employees. The good thing is that these are not mutually exclusive. More satisfied workers who have a greater stake and involvement in their work are able to offer more to the job. In combination with the right culture, structure, and expertise, process creates learning that yields excellent developments in innovation and quality.

Analytics professionals need this lean environment too. Especially with the large proliferation of data for consideration, process can have a big impact on streamlining an organization’s day-to-day operations. So, I would like to hear from those in our community who have fine-tuned or completely changed their processes. What prompted the changes, and how have they fared?

To recap, the following prioritization of the main organizational quadrants is the next generation view of evaluating organizational readiness for analytics practitioners.

1. Culture
2. Process
3. Structure
4. Expertise

I am excited to see what the future holds.

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

AdTruth, the global leader in securing digital relationships, is teaming up with Adform, a provider of digital media trading technology and campaign management solutions, for a live webinar on May 30^th to discuss how the entire online advertising ecosystem can benefit from improving audience recognition across desktop and mobile.

The two companies will delve into how Adform is using AdTruth’s universal device recognition technology to reach both desktop and mobile audiences efficiently and at scale.

During this session, attendees will benefit from:

• Discussing the principles of universality: The ability to work on all device types and in all use cases
• Programmatic-level performance: The ability to support billions of impressions at millisecond speeds
• Privacy-by-design: The approach that is at the core of device recognition technology empowering marketers and agencies to execute online campaigns while respecting consumer privacy and choice

Attendees will learn from Adform on how they’re utilizing AdTruth’s device recognition technology to support its platform’s desktop and mobile real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities to increase campaign reach and audience engagement.

Join the conversation May 30^th, 2013 at 6 a.m. PST/9a.m. EST.  Register Now

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

So, what about expertise? There is no doubt that it can be important. Most often, expertise can provide a degree of perspective to a discussion, but again, we are looking at businesses in a fast-paced world. What worked in 1997 is not a guarantee – or often even a good indicator – of what will work in 2014. What benefit strategy testing and decision-making are fresh ideas. How are you going to achieve true innovation and breakthroughs by bringing up past ideas and processes? The answer is, most likely, you will not. Breakthroughs often come not just through an examination of new ideas but through new ways of thinking about those ideas. Think of it this way: If you have a new product idea that follows the same model your company has been following for many years, how new is that product really going to be? Not very.

Recently, I came across an article by a schoolteacher that I thought started a good discussion about how to approach innovation and showed how expertise isn’t the be-all, end-all. In his article entitled “The Disruptive Peacock, or Why the ‘wrong’ [sic] Way Might Be the Best Way,” Adam Webster explains the idea of disruptive innovation, the concept of “doing the opposite of what is expected/what convention tells you will be successful.”

It might sound a little “out there” at first, but the example Webster used really brought it home for me. Think of soft drinks, he said. What should most drinks be like to be successful? They should be cheap, tasty and aspirational, he explains. So, what if you say, “No, my drink will be expensive, not that tasty, and functional?” Most people would think that you would have a flop of a product, and maybe in most cases you would. But, as Webster points out, Red Bull showed that the opposite could be true, and they not only made it work for them. They made it their brand. And people liked it.

Sometimes expertise can actually be a hindrance, as it likely was in the Red Bull example. “But experience tells us that won’t work,” someone in that campaign likely would have heard if expertise was the driving force. This is why a culture that empowers people, allows them to take risks, and really strives for innovation is so important.

Now think about electronics. Success in this area in the last 10 years has come not from companies who just created new gadgets. Success has come from companies that recognized or anticipated new ways people think about the world. Introduce a new way of thinking with a product that supports or drives that change, and then you start to get somewhere. As useful as expertise can be, it does not help you do this.

Now, another measure of expertise is diversity, and, as my colleague Dejan Duzevik said, expertise can be a “driver of growth and success as long as the measure of expertise is diversity.” Note, though, that driving growth and success are not necessarily the same as driving creativity or innovation.

So, tell me: Has expertise ever stopped a good, new idea or project from moving forward into the adoption or implementation stages in your organization? How has it helped you gain perspective on a project?

1.  Logo – (Noun) “A symbol adopted by an organization to identify its products or services” We all know it’s never about what you have, it’s about how you use it that makes the difference! Since you've spent the time and/or money on this masterpiece called your "logo," make sure it shows up everywhere including business cards, social media sites, and any other promotional materials. Your logo is your company's identity in a picture and the more you show it off, the quicker your brand recognition will grow.

Does this really matter, you ask? Consider this… how likely are you to remember a random fast-food restaurant you visited when they use generic bags and soda cups versus the restaurant that brands every cup and bag with their logo? That garbage in your car becomes advertising and will make an impression every time you see it.

2. Interact – Who knew this was a part of branding? Speak directly with your target and, even more importantly, with your clients. Share and respond to social media comments, answer your phone using your company name and/or slogan, and use interactive communication tools such as surveys and email marketing. Remember, everything you send and share should always include your logo and slogan.

3. Solve – Your mission should be simple. Every business offers a product or service that offers results and/or a solution; and just because you know that, it does not mean your target market does. Leverage your interactive tools to share a clear, concise, and consistent solution that is unique to your brand identity. Remember, the process you use to help your clients may be complicated but your message should be simple enough to earn the trust and comfort of your clients.

Branding is more of an art than a science; it takes creativity, time, patience, and just like a painting, it will even go through an ugly stage. An initial brand launch should focus on creating awareness for your unique product or services. Luckily you have a friend in the industry- whether your current brand is sour or your business is brand new, HMG can help you too!

A key component of understanding buying decisions is gaining a reality check on how buyers perceive you and whether you match to their criteria.  How well organizations are perceived will serve as one of the primary influences shaping buying behaviors and purchase decisions.

Buyer research can reveal many aspects of what comprises buyer perception.  Buyer experience is now becoming one of the most important factors contributing to and influencing perceptions.  The new digital age is introducing new types of criterion buyers place a value on, which can directly affect their perceptions:

Buyer Experience: previous as well as current experiences can have an enormous impact on how buyers perceive you. Do you think waiting an extra day to return a call was no big deal?  Think again.

Engagement: evidence is building on engagement being a factor in shaping buyer perceptions when making purchase decisions.  What the "engagement experience" tells buyers can make a big difference.  This differs from buyer experience in this way: when you ask customers and prospects to engage - meaning interact - it better not be painful.

Knowledge: the sharing of knowledge and insight is fast emerging as a one area shaping how buyers perceive companies.  Content marketers need to watch for information fatigue setting in with their buyers.  Suffocating buyers with content is not the answer.  On the other hand, if buyers feel like they have to perform a tooth extraction tor pry information from your organizations, then they will move on.

Community: buyers today are getting tuned into joining various communities specific to their industry.  Are your efforts tuned into the communities buyers are at?  Are you contributing to this community - or "selling" and annoying the community?

These are just four factors affecting how buyers can perceive you and your organization.  Based on hundreds of buyer interviews I have done to date - I can say the above directly impact the why and how of purchase decisions.

Now What?

Getting to understand how buyers perceive you can be challenging.  Two ways you can get a handle on buyer perception is:

• Have buyer research performed specifically for perception
• Have mystery shopping performed to get insight on how buyers experience their interactions with your organization

Understanding how buyers perceive you can often be a surprise.  When I have provided insight into buyer perception, I often get the "I had no idea" response.  Given the hyper-competitive digital world of today, this might be one area you should have an idea about.

(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

• The Art of Buying

• 4 New Values Affecting How Buyers Perceive You (tonyzambito.com)
• 5 Buyer Behaviors Reshaping B2B Marketing (tonyzambito.com)
• Is Your Lead Generation Off-Target? (blogs.imediaconnection.com)