Buyer Roles, Buying Stages, and Perception Challenges

We looked earlier at the evaluation of existing content assets that can be done at each stage of the buying process, and for each buyer role involved.

A similar exercise needs to be done to assess where the need for content is greatest. For each stage in the buying process, and for each role, a list of the perception challenges we face in the market can be created. From here, we will know the ideal messages for buyers to absorb.

These "messages" can be facts that are actively or passively sought by buyers. Actively sought examples are messages that are searched for, such as the specifications for integrating with a specific third party system. Messages that need to be delivered passively, however, are not actively searched for - such as corrections to misconceptions such as the idea that your solution is not appropriate for larger organizations.

Evaluating Messages

To begin, much like the evaluation of current content assets, a matrix can be created that has buyer roles along the y-axis, and buyer stages along the x-axis. In each box, the messages, information, and perceptions that need to flow out to the market can be listed, along with an assessment (red/yellow/green) of whether you are currently being successful in getting those messages out to the market. The value of this exercise is in its ability to shine a light on areas where you may have a significant messaging gap.

Successful marketers are able to inject these messages, perceptions, and criteria throughout the overall education process of a buyer, slowly altering perceptions, guiding the way in which solutions are evaluated, and ensuring that needed information is discovered.

The need to get this broad variety of messages out to buyers, now that buyers are in control of their own buying processes, is what has led to the growth in nurture marketing, as well as the business use of social media as a publishing platform. At each stage, a failure to successfully get these messages out to prospective buyers can quickly lead to buyers failing to progress in their buying process - the three types of leaks in the funnel covered in an earlier post.

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Marketing Dashboard: Active Discovery

One of the most valuable areas to gain an understanding of is the current state of how your prospects actively discover your company and your solutions. The richness of insights that can be gained with a deep understanding of how buyers are using search is nearly without parallel. Each insight allows you to guide investments in a way that maximizes their effectiveness in driving your revenue performance.

Basics of Discovery

The first area to look at is the set of 10 or 12 “main terms” that buyers most commonly associate with your solution category or industry. These are the main search terms that would ideally lead prospective buyers to your web properties. A dashboard comparison of both the number of searches being performed on each search phrase (the search engines' webmaster tools provide this information quite readily), and the number of visitors to your content based on those main terms gives a very good understanding of if you are successfully being discovered through this avenue. A few powerful insights can be gained here that allow a reallocation of investments:

- Need More Category Awareness? The raw number of searches being performed gives a good indication of the upper limit of your success with active awareness efforts such as search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Broader awareness efforts such as analyst and public relations may be needed to increase interest in your solution category if this is the case.

- Are you Being Discovered? The number of visitors, and more importantly the percentage of visitors, who reach your site for each search term gives you a good indicator of how well your paid and organic search efforts are performing against each term. If a term is performing poorly, either an investment in search engine marketing against that term, or a focus on content around that term may improve your chances of being actively discovered by buyers seeking information on that term



Deeper Searches

As looked at earlier, however, the way in which buyers seek information is changing. With the average search phrase being more than three words in length, it is equally important to understand what is happening with the broader universe of search phrases being used by buyers. With a robust content strategy, the raw list of search phrases that are used by buyers to find you can be quite instructive in itself. However, as a high level dashboard to provide an understanding of the current state of your revenue performance, the best way to view the longer tail search phrases being used is to have it provide insight into what buyer stage your audiences can be loosely categorized into.

To understand this, divide the searches that guide visitors to your website into four main categories:

- Navigational: searches that are simply a replacement for typing in your website URL, usually just your company name

- Main Terms: searches for the main search terms you have deliberately optimized against

- Long Tail (branded): deeper searches, often with multiple words in the search phrase, or for specific content, and with your company or brand name in the search phrase

- Long Tail (unbranded): deeper searches, as above, but without your company or brand name in the search phrase

This dashboard view provides some rich insights into how well your company and solutions are being actively discovered. First, the relative amounts of visitors who discover your offerings based on long tail phrases vs main terms provides an indication of whether your content marketing strategies are working effectively. Given that the majority of searchers use lengthy search phrases, if the long tail columns are not larger than the main term and navigational columns, there is very likely an opportunity to be discovered by many buyers who are actively seeking solutions such as yours that is being missed. An increased investment in content creation may be warranted.

Second, a comparison of your relative strength between long tail search phrases with and without your brand name (ie, “Sourcefire intrusion detection products” vs. “intrusion detection system comparison”) provides an understanding of whether the buyers discovering you tend to be more at an education stage (understanding the category) or have moved more into the discovery stage and are looking to better understand your specific products.




Of course, overall trends are also very much of interest. The effectiveness of natural search or content marketing strategy grows slowly over time, and its success is best observed by following the trend in these high level numbers over time.

Paid vs. Organic Search

In order to deepen the insight gained from these views of your prospects’ active discovery of your content, it is important to understand what is driven by paid search (SEM) and what is driven by organic search (SEO) efforts in order to better coordinate efforts between them. Most B2B marketing organizations invest in paid search campaigns to drive awareness, and with most if not all of these efforts there is an ability to differentiate between traffic driven to your site via paid efforts vs. natural search efforts.

By splitting these two sources of traffic apart, and understanding the trends in each, you can better understand the performance of two very different categories of marketing investment. Paid search is predominantly a financial investment, and the results are generally directly in proportion to the monies invested (with a reasonable variation based on the skill of the search engine marketing team, of course). For this reason, you should expect the trend line of visitors from paid search to map closely to your SEM investments.

Organic search efforts, however, are very different. Effort, mostly in the form of time to create and promote great content, is invested, and slowly builds credibility with the search engines and with influencers in the industry. Consistent, meaningful investments in this avenue with therefore result in a slowly but steadily growing number of visitors driven by organic search results.

For this reason, a combination of investments can be very useful. Paid search (SEM) investments can be made in areas that are new, where results are weak, or where a short term boost is needed. Investments in content and influence to drive organic search results can be done over time in core areas of focus.

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Content as Advertisement

Content has long been a key driver of success for great B2B marketers in today's world. That's nothing new, and we've talked about related topics such as the content gap and the need to get more subject matter experts involved.

However, one challenge that remains is how to draw attention to your content. Earning attention is certainly the best way, by steadily creating great content, winning over the hearts and minds of a loyal following, and having that loyal following share your message with still more audience members.

That's a great way to build an audience, but it is NOT a fast way.

The Challenge of Earned Media

In a recent post, I talked about the flywheel effect that these investments had; slowly building a following over time that built up momentum and energy, but based on the continual push of great content, rather than the blast of major marketing spend.

An interesting hybrid option has been appearing recently, here's one I saw from American Express:


And here's a similar example from Accenture:



These are ad placements - these happened to be on LinkedIn, but where is less important than what. They are regular, paid ad placements that advertise not promotions or brand-related things, but pure content.

Buying Your Way to Earned Media

This is not a shortcut of the mantra of earned media; for this strategy to work, the content has to be interesting, relevant, useful, and valuable. It is, however, a turbo-charging of it. By using advertising to broaden the discovery of the information, Accenture and American Express are just fast-tracking the process.

The content must still stand on its own merits, but for those with a reasonable advertising budget, the laborious process of building a loyal audience can be facilitated with a bit of cash.

I'm sure that this is an affront to many content marketing purists, so I welcome what I'm sure will be an interesting discussion. Have you tried using content as an advertisement in this way? Did it work? Read More...

Is B2B Content "Likeable"?

With all the discussion about Facebook's new "Like" (or "Recommend") button for the web, I thought it would be worthwhile running a small experiment to answer the following question:

Do the readers of B2B content share more on Twitter or Facebook?

I will admit that I have certain biases, and I don't think that the human brain is very well adapted to truly merging business and social relationships as I wrote previously. However, in the interest of science, I thought the experiment was worthwhile.

I have reduced the automatic "sharing" options on each post to two - one that shares on Facebook, and one that shares on Twitter. I have historically been sharing content only on Twitter, so it has a bit of an advantage, so in order to somewhat compensate for that, I have added the Facebook sharing bar to the top of the post.

I could be proven wrong, but I suspect that, when I tally the counts a month or so from now, we'll see very little activity on Facebook in comparison to Twitter.

What have you seen for B2B content? Does it become shareable on Facebook? Read More...

Passive Discovery vs Active Discovery

In looking at the messaging architecture you put together for each buyer role and how they progress through their buying process, it’s important to think through how the message you need to get to the buyers will be discovered. Some will be "actively discovered", and some will be "passively discovered". It is crucial to understand the difference as it guides what strategy we need to take as marketers.

Active Discovery

Many of the marketing messages you want to be found by buyers will be found by the buyer explicitly taking an action (ie a Google Search) to seek out the information. This is the metaphor we think of for clearly defined information, such as feature capabilities, that are looked for specifically by name.

Here, the challenge is quite clearly defined; a buyer is actively seeking a piece of information, usually with search, although perhaps in community discussions or on social bookmarking sites. As a marketer, you need to ensure that your message is present, and in a way that makes it easy for the buyer to find it on a search engine. Although the art and science of search marketing is sufficiently challenging to warrant the creation of an entire industry, the problem being solved is quite clearly defined.

Passive Discovery

This is not the case, however, for more passive messages that need to find their way to potential buyers. Passive messages are messages that would not be actively sought by potential buyer, such as messages that alter pre-conceived notions of reliability, applicability of a solution to a certain industry, and perceptions of product usability, service quality, or price-point.

These messages, as they are not actively sought, must be built into other stories that can be discovered, or carefully presented by an "Information Concierge". for example, a pre-conceived notion of the applicability of a solution to a certain industry can be shifted by seeing that solution mentioned as a key part of a client success story. A sense that prices are higher than they actually are can be adjusted by sharing stories that relate to smaller or cost-conscious businesses. A perception of user challenges can be changed by stories that mention a large, vibrant, and happy user community.

Story-Telling and Passive Discovery

The use of the idea of stories is deliberate. There is no more effective way of conveying a passive message, such as a change in perceptions, than through a story that is shared by one peer to another. Word of mouth messaging is the most effective way of changing perceptions because it comes from trusted peers, and cannot effectively be bought or biased by marketing budgets.

However, marketers looking to change perceptions, introduce ideas, and challenge pre-conceived notions, must introduce stories that are easily told. These are not the dry, ROI-driven, case studies that celebrate and trumpet our showcase clients, but are stories that entertain, inspire, or challenge their audiences. There is no reason that we must avoid the idea of having fun with B2B marketing campaigns.

Marketers, especially B2B marketers, who are effective at finding and packaging the truly interesting stories that tend to get shared via word of mouth have an opportunity to subtly focus on certain messages or perceptions that they need to change in the market.

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The Buzz about Google Buzz – 6 things relevant to B2B

Yesterday, Google announced their next major foray into social media, with the launch of Google Buzz. While the main concepts behind Buzz are very familiar with anyone who is at all familiar with social media – friends, status updates, photo sharing – the way that Google brings it all together, and their sheer weigh in the market, means that this may be quite interesting.

As a B2B marketer, what does this mean?

It’s always challenging to gaze into the proverbial crystal ball, and in a market this dynamic, many things can change, but here are 6 things worth paying close attention to as Google Buzz rolls out:

1) Shift to the Main Stream:

Historically, social media has been somewhat separate from other parts of our world. You had to deliberately set up a new social service, whether Twitter or Facebook, and then actively make it part of your daily routine. It actually took an effort (albeit small) to get involve. This meant that social media was less adopted by the business mainstream, but was mostly adopted by the writers and bloggers within a business context. Therefore, social media as a marketing strategy in B2B was often used to influence influencers, rather than connecting directly with end prospects.

Now, Google has integrated all of the elements of social media much more tightly together – your email contacts automatically are your friends/followers, Buzz updates are right next to your Inbox, and a message blurs the boundary between an email and direct message. This means that, rather quickly, a significantly higher percentage of the mainstream audience will find themselves involved – actively or passively – in social media.


2) Reducing Business/Personal Boundaries:
With this steady integration of email, status updates, photos, and friends into one realm, it continues the trend of blurring the boundaries between business and social relationships, and between work and home life. Whereas I do believe that, in many ways, our brains are hard wired to see a clear difference (hence why it would feel extremely awkward to offer to pay your mother-in-law for Thanksgiving dinner), I do see the evolution of Google Buzz as reducing those boundaries.

What this means for B2B Marketers is that your buyers will have more personal stakes on the table when they get involved with your organization. Regardless of whether you are the cheapest or best, the encroachment of business on personal space will mean that strong emotional factors will be at play. If you are not a company with whom they feel a level of trust, a personal relationship, and a pride about doing business with, you may not be selected. Intangible factors, to be sure, but personal space is more about emotional factors than rational business decisions.


3) Small Groups, Waves, and Influence:
Google appears to be adding a focus on the “small group” that is less emphasized in many current social platforms. By adding an interim step between one-to-one and one-to-world, and providing a new way for these groups to interact (and be observed) online with Google Wave, they now have a much richer ability to understand how influence manifests itself in small groups.

This shift from large influencers to many smaller influencers is a key dynamic in today’s world, and by focusing on the small groups, Google has positioned themselves to be a key part of it.


4) Location-Based Social Connections Increase in Importance:
With a tight tie to the iPhone, and its location-based features, Google Buzz has moved location-based thinking one step closer to prominence in today’s market. Buzz has many features that are tied to both where you are, and more importantly, who is near you. With a human, face-to-face relationship still being highly relevant in building trust, these location-based features may increase the importance of classic off-line events like major shows and conferences.

Rather than being about the content, events will continue to shift towards being about who is there, and how to orchestrate face-to-face meetings. Location-based social networks will be one of the most powerful contributors to this shift in the dynamic of off-line events.


5) Google Knows the Influencers:

One of the most powerful insights that Google gains is knowledge of who the actual influencers are in any given market. Seeing exactly who is followed, what topics are discussed in small groups (and with whom), and what links are clicked on in shared status updates, gives Google tremendous insights into who is interesting and relevant in any given topic area.

This understanding of influence by subject is not just a powerful data set, but as Google progresses further into real-time search, the ability to rank a result highly because a key influencer on that topic area suggested it will allow much more accurate search results. For those B2B marketers still focused exclusively on content and links as a driver of search ranking, this will be a trend to pay attention to.


6) Google Knows Your Interests:

Conversely, Google will also begin to build an understanding of each person’s interests based on their friends, the topics of their discussions, and what they share and respond to. As Google does this, they will be able to move from only being able to present relevant information when it is actively sought (via search), to presenting information that is passively sought (through general indications of interest). A “recommended” posts concept will allow Google to continually tune these algorithms.

This is a powerful transformation for B2B marketers, as many of the ideas and concepts we need to communicate and have buyers discover are not always actively sought. Being able to present a message to someone who displays certain indicators of intent, but may not have explicitly searched, is a powerful arrow in the B2B marketer’s quiver.



How Google Buzz truly ends up effecting us as B2B marketers is obviously determined by many factors. However, Google is clearly a major player in the market for finding and discovering information, and as they make a major new foray into social media with Buzz, these six trends are well worth watching.

What do you think? What will your organization be watching for as Google Buzz rolls out? Read More...

Mapping the Buying Process - A Framework

One of the recurring themes in this discussion has been the concept of thinking in terms of a buying process not a selling process. Many times when I speak about this topic publicly, there is general agreement in the audience, but the question of how to map a buying process often comes up. In some industries, it is significantly easier than in others, but some common techniques can be used across all industries to best understand how buyers ultimately arrive at a buying decision.

Mapping this process is more art than science in most cases, but the following question framework can help analyze how your buyers buy and if there are opportunities for better facilitating their buying processes. In each main stage of the buying process, one set of questions (below) looks at understanding whether there is a problem at all in this stage of the buying process, a second set looks at understanding how current buyers make it through that stage, and a third set looks at how your overall marketing performance could be improved in that stage.


Awareness and Education

Is there a problem: Are prospective buyers generally aware of your solution category and what it can do for their business?
- Ask industry analysts their opinion on the general knowledge of the market among likely buyers
- Survey your sales team on their experiences with initial calls
- Perform some first-hand survey research with likely buyers

What currently happens: How do existing prospects become educated about your category?
- Survey existing customers and prospects on where they read about topics in the general area of business you are in
- Analyze the traffic sources to any of your educational or thought leadership content
- Become an avid reader of industry newsletters and sites to understand their content topics and whether messages about your solution area are included

What are the options: How would prospects become aware of your category if they were not already aware?
- Look at the search results that are returned for searches on some of the terms related to pains that you solve (not terms that describe your category)
- Survey your marketing team on what events, tradeshows, and publications are well attended/read by key buyers in your industry
- Discover which industry sites discuss you and/or your competitors frequently
- Analyze which sites are referring web traffic to your site



Vendor Discovery

Is there a problem: If prospective buyers are going to find vendors to look into more deeply, are you on their list?
- Review competitor wins to understand whether you had been in consideration
- Look at the percentage of search phrases driving traffic to your site that already contain your brand or product names
- Poll your sales team on the frequency with which they were added as a last minute option, based on a cold call or chance encounter
- Analyze the percentage of leads that are originally sourced by marketing or arrived as inbound leads vs being generated by a cold call

What currently happens: How have prospects typically found you?
- Analyze the non-branded search terms that drive traffic to your website
- Poll your inside sales team on how their inbound leads heard of you
- Report on the breakdown of inquiries by source to understand what is driving early-stage inquiries
- Understand the percentage of leads in your marketing database that have been nurtured prior to becoming a qualified lead

What are the options: How would prospective buyers likely build their list of potential vendors?
- Determine whether the key industry comparison charts and analysts list your company
- Search for terms related to your category to see if your content is featured in the results
- Listen to webcasts, videos, or talks from key industry influencers to see if you are mentioned
- Act as a potential buyer and do your own "research" into solutions for the problems you solve to see if you are findable


Solution Validation

Is there a problem: When a buyer evaluates your solution, do they select you?
- Look at win/loss ratios for deals over the past few months or quarters
- Compare growth rates of your business vs competitors
- Build a discipline of analyzing losses with the sales team to understand buyer reasons
- Determine if you are ranked poorly in industry comparison charts

What happens now: How are buyers currently making their selection of a vendor?
- Analyze competitors positioning of your organization and your solutions
- Conduct third party win/loss surveys to obtain deeper information on buyer decision criteria
- Scan search phrases that include your brand or product names to look for objections or decision criteria
- Look at the marketing resources (whitepapers, case studies, free trials) currently being actively used by buyers to understand their current experience

What are the options: How can buyers’ decision process and decision criteria be better influenced?
- Identify key analysts and influencers who guide the market on how to think about key decision factors
- Map buyer objections to changes in buying criteria or positioning that can be inserted into nurture marketing efforts
- Audit common objections against current marketing assets to determine if gaps exists that would be better filled with a different marketing asset such as a free trial


This is, of course, just a framework for thinking about the problem. Every organization, and every industry, deals with a slightly different set of buying challenges. However, this framework can be quite useful for identifying gaps, challenges, or opportunities in the way your audience currently buys.

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The Content Gap - Lead Nurturing and Content Creation

Many articles have been written about B2B marketing’s evolution towards a model where marketers act as publishers. As buyers are in control of their own buying process, we as marketers need to facilitate them through education, nurturing, and engagement. The best, if not only, way to do this is with great content that adds value, is thought-provoking, and captures the attention of the prospective buyer based on where he or she is in her buying process.

Typically, buyers progress through stages of a buying process from Awareness, to Discovery, to Validation, and have unique content needs at each stage. Marketers who successfully cater their content to buyers at each of these stages do well in guiding and facilitating a buying process that results in revenue for their organization.

The start and end of the buying process are usually well covered by the traditional alignment of roles in an organization. Most marketers are quite experienced in creating the high level thought leadership whitepapers, educational sessions, and industry webinars that are ideal content for the Awareness stage of the funnel. Similarly, sales teams and product marketers are experienced at creating the “why buy us, why buy now” content that is appropriate for the Validation stage of the funnel, but a content gap is left in the middle of the funnel.

In the Discovery stage, prospective buyers have become aware of your solution category and the problems that you solve, and will likely have heard of your organization. Now, they are beginning to formulate their plan for solving the business pain that you solve, discovering vendors who they should investigate more deeply, and scoping the breadth and depth of the initiative in question. It is in this stage that “best practice” content is often most useful.

Depending on your industry and solution, this usually means content and writing that comes from your services team, subject matter experts, product consultants, designers, specialists, or engineers. These are the people who have the knowledge, expertise, and passion to write about what solutions like yours can accomplish, what the challenges and considerations are, and what others in the industry are doing. This is non-salesy content, but it is a level more detailed than the high level thought leadership that is appropriate at the Awareness stage.

The challenge is that these subject matter experts are not marketers, writers, or sales people. Their objectives, motivations, and compensation plans are not generally aligned with generating revenue, moving leads through a buying funnel, or creating great content that is appropriate for the middle of the funnel. Unless addressed, this can leave a critical content gap in the middle of the buying funnel, and lead to an awkward transition as buyers move from high level thought leadership content to much more tactical sales content without the educational transition of content in the Discovery stage.

Successful marketing organizations recognize this content gap, and find ways to motivate, compensate, and encourage the creation of educational, Discovery stage content by subject matter experts, but it can be a difficult process.

Has your organization identified a content gap? How have you dealt with the challenges it presented?

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Natural Search in B2B Marketing - Analyzing Discoverability

Being discoverable by your potential buyers is critical to success in many businesses. As buyers control their buying process more and more, the need to be found when a prospective buyer is searching for a solution to a business pain is increasingly critical. One of the most obvious elements to this is natural search engine optimization. If a prospective buyer is searching for terms related to your business or the pains you solve, you want them to discover your organization.

If they are early in the buying process, you may want them to discover your thought leadership writings, and recognize you as a leader in the field. If they are at a vendor discovery phase or moving towards solution validation, you may want to have them discover writings that clarify how to think about important aspects of the buying decision.

Measuring this discoverability, however, is an interesting challenge, as there are many search phrases that might be relevant to discovering your solution. Against each of these phrases, your main web site, your social media properties, and your competitor’s web properties may be discoverable.

The first challenge is listing the search phrases that are relevant to finding your solution. For each phase of the buying funnel, you will have a different set of phrases, and this will differ based on the marketing challenge you face. If, for example, your main challenge is a Flying Car challenge, you may wish to focus mainly on the awareness stage, and think about search phrases that are related to, but not identical to, your solution. If prospective buyers are unaware that your solution category exists, they may be looking for solution categories that are peripheral to yours. You will want to be discoverable when they are looking.

At each stage of the buying funnel, list out the key phrases that buyers may be looking for. At the vendor discovery phase, the prospective buyers may be searching for more exact solution category names. At the solution validation phase, the searches may involve your product name directly, but be searching for specific capabilities or objections.

With the search phrases listed, it’s then key to understand where your main web properties, your social media properties, and your competitors rank against those key phrases. One of the simplest ways I have seen of presenting this, is a table that shows your best ranking against each phrase in the form of points on a grid.

On the left side, place your own web properties, both your main web properties, and any social media properties your team runs. For comparison, place your key competitors’ web properties on this side of the chart also. Along the top row, build columns for each of the following search ranks: First place, top 3, top 5, top 10, top 30, and top 100. Then, for each of the search phrases in your list, each property a point in the highest category it is discovered in.

For example, if “widget transportation” is a search phrase of interest, and your website appears as number 8 on the natural ranks on Google for that page, you would give yourself one point in the “top 10” category for your main website. Note, that if you use a marketing automation system or web analytics package to understand which search phrases are being used to find you, this will only show you the phrases where you are already successful. Be sure to include search phrases where you would ideally be found, but currently are not.

Complete this process for all the search phrases (around 100 phrases is often a useful number to gain a good perspective), and you will find an overall discoverability profile for you and your competitors. Note that the first page of search results is generally seen as the only page offering significant value in terms of traffic, so the results that are lower down than that can give indications of progress, but are unlikely to be driving traffic.

This view gives an easily digestible sense of your natural search engine discoverability. It should be noted, however that results will vary by search engine, geography, and over time. It is not a report that gives a definitive answer, but it is useful for providing a perspective as to where you are as a business and whether you are making progress in terms of being discoverable. Read More...

Kadient: Search Rebranding Leads to Greater Insights

We all put a lot of effort into our search strategies, and spend a lot of effort carefully optimizing around key words or phrases. The reality is, however, that buyers evolve over time, and so do the terms they use to connect with you. Kadient noticed this when a rebranding of their company gave them a reason to have another look at how buyers discover them, and how they looked for solutions to problems that Kadient was able to solve.


It's a great reminder to all of us to take a fresh look at how we appear to our prospective buyers and whether that corresponds with what they are searching for in their buying processes. Here's the case study from Digital Body Language:

Kadient: Search Rebranding Leads to Greater Insights

Kadient is a leading vendor of sales-knowledge, RFP, and proposal-generation software, using a free trial strategy that enables buyers to better experience the product’s value and positively compare Kadient to other possible solutions. In order to reflect their evolution from a niche, premise-based solution to a broader software-as-a-service solution, they undertook an ambitious rebranding from its prior name – Pragmatech. In doing so, they realized that a significant effort would be needed to ensure that the search engine optimization work they had put into the Pragmatech name would carry over to the new name and new URL. They ended up, however, realizing some much deeper insights into how their buyers found them.

As they optimized their search efforts to the new name, the Kadient team made careful observations of the digital body language of the prospect who found their way to their site and also the ways in which the broader universe sought information on sales challenges. Kadient quickly realized that they had been optimizing against terms such as “sales effectiveness”, which reflected their solution, but the broader market was seeking help with “sales coaching”.

Armed with this insight, the Kadient team realized that they could tap into a new opportunity. By explaining to prospective buyers, who were searching for “sales coaching” why they should think about the more than just a glib guy in a suit giving an inspirational session, Kadient was able to engage with a much broader audience and make them aware of the Kadient solution.

By analyzing the digital body language of its prospects, Kadient quickly identified a broad new opportunity for market awareness and education, and has begun to engage with buyers who may not have even initially realized that the problem they were wrestling with could be solved by a solution such as Kadient’s.

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Assessing the Buyer's Toolkit - 10 examples

If, as B2B marketers, we're going to help buyers along in their buying process, the first thing we need to understand is how they buy. I wrote about Scoring the Stages of the Buying Process the other day, but the next step is to use that insight in order to help guide the buyer along.



To do this, we need to honestly assess our marketing assets in context of stages of the buying cycle. Each marketing asset helps a prospective buyer learn about your solution, but often in very different ways, from high level thought leadership when a buyer is in a market awareness/education phase, to education on capabilities when a buyer is in the vendor discovery phase, through to final validation of vendor selection.



Each organization's prospects' buying process is unique, and each marketing asset needs to be assessed in context of that buying process, but here are 10 examples I've discussed recently to give you a sense of the approach.


Case Studies: in a business information services company, used to show how various clients used the available information services in their businesses. As it was mainly used to spur ideas and educate the buyer on possibilities, these were used very early in the buying process. Education

Webinar: in a software company, a webinar discussing industry evolution and best practices with thought leaders in the field. Used early in the buying process to educate buyers and engage them in a nurturing process. Education

Book: in a software company, used to establish thought leadership, and to educate executives at potential prospects on market dynamics and the options available to them. Education

Seminar Invite: in a financial services company, used to build credibility, educate potential buyers on solutions, and begin engagement and nurturing process. Education/Discovery

Research Excerpt: in a financial information services company, used early in the buying process to establish credibility, and engage with new potential prospects or existing prospects who have disengaged. Education/Discovery


YouTube Video: in a software company, an entertaining viral video used to access potential prospects and bring them into a free trial process. Discovery

Tradeshow: in a hardware company, attendance at a tradeshow attended by potential buyers. Used to connect with buyers who are seeking solution vendors. Discovery

Free Trial: in a software company, used to allow the buyer to get a feel for product capabilities and experience. Depending on the buyer, the use of a free trial can vary between a quick evaluation to determine inclusion in a vendor list, to a deep evaluation to make a final decision. Discovery/Validation



ROI Calculator: in a software company used to assist in justifying a purchase to others within the organization and to ensure access to budget. Validation


Whitepaper: in a security services company, used late in the buying process to remove objections and answer key selection questions. Validation


The point is not that there is a right answer to where a webinar, a whitepaper, or a seminar invite fits in a buying process, it depends entirely on content. Each marketing organization must understand the buying process their buyers go through, and then objectively map each of their marketing assets to that process. By understanding what information is needed at what stage in the buying process, we can help guide our buyers through it. Read More...

Flying Cars, Wall Flowers, and Red-headed Stepchildren; 3 Types of Marketing Challenges

One of the most common questions I get with marketing audiences is where in the funnel to focus on to get the best return on their investment. The answer depends on what your marketing challenge is. I categorize them into three basic types of challenge.



The Flying Car: You are able to solve a problem that most of the world is unaware can be solved. Given that they are unaware that a way of solving the problem exists, potential buyers continue to do things as they always have, even if inefficient, and are not looking for your solution.



The Wallflower: The problem that you solve is known, but you are not a vendor that comes to mind when prospective buyers are looking for vendor options.



The Red-Headed Stepchild: The problem you solve is known, and you are a vendor who is evaluated when potential buyers are looking for solutions, but you are not selected.





Obviously these categorizations are very broad, but most marketing organizations are able to categorize their main marketing challenge loosely as one of these three. Once you have done so, you can begin to focus in on marketing options that best tackle each of these problems.

If you are challenged with a Flying Car marketing issue, focusing on awareness and education efforts is key. Educating the market through news, press, and analysts, or directly as Exeros did are great initiatives. Similarly, viral marketing initiatives can succeed in getting the right message to the right audience if done well.

If the main challenge you face is the Wallflower marketing issue, focusing on search engine optimization, search engine marketing, webinars, and events to build awareness of your solution in that category. In tackling this challenge you are mainly looking to grow traffic and inquiries (with the right audience), so the techniques and metrics are well established.

If, however, you face a Red-Headed Stepchild issue, you must focus on efforts that build your credibility and reputation as a vendor and guide the prospective buyer to consider factors in their decision that highlight your strengths. You can do this through great lead nurturing, working with key bloggers and influencers, or even opening up your internal processes to your buying audience as Kadient did to build buyer trust.

By defining what type of marketing challenge you face, you allow your team to better focus on the techniques and communication vehicles that best tackle those challenges. Read More...

Scoring the Stages of a Buying Process

When we talk about lead scoring, the goal that comes to mind most often is determining which leads are ready for handoff to sales. This, however, is only part of the picture. Some of us are able to map out a full buying process that is common to many or most of our buyers. If this is possible, as it was for Terracotta, then we can use lead scoring in a different way to provide a much more meaningful way to connect with potential buyers.



If there are specific stages in the buying process to look for, then you can apply the same methodology of lead scoring to determine which phase of the buying proces each buyer is in.



Each buying process is unique, so there is no universal process that all prospective buyers go through (see the example from the Terracotta case study to the right). However, there are three general phases that are common; awareness, solution discovery, and solution validation. Within these phases, prospective buyers of your solution may go through individual steps that you can map out.



Exploring free trials, learning about increasingly detailed aspects of solution capabilities, design, or implementation, reviewing case studies, viewing help documentation, and doing topic-specific searches can all be signs that a prospective buyer is at a specific stage of the buying process



Mapping the stage of the buying process allows some unique approaches to marketing:

• Offers or communications can be targeted at specific stages of the buying process in what is essentially buying process specific psychographic segmentation
• The size and shape of the lead funnel can be understood and shared with a broader team providing insights into marketing effectiveness
• Conversion gaps in the lead funnel can be identified allowing refocusing on specific points at which buyers are not moving forward in the buying process

If your prospects' buying process is one that can be effectively understood through observation of their digital body language, and application of lead scoring techniques to the overall buying process, the benefits of doing so are tremendous.

Read More...

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

The buyers are in control, we all realize that. But it's significantly more difficult to market when we acknowledge that it's a buying process not a selling process, as it is very difficult to know where the buyer is in their buying process at any moment in time. Without that knowledge, it's very difficult to deliver the right message to that buyer.

Jeff Hartley and the team at Terracotta faced that exact challenge, and used a very interesting approach to lead scoring in order to categorize their buyers based on where they were in their buying journey. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with Jeff while writing Digital Body Language, and hopefully you'll enjoy this case study as much:

Terracotta: Lead Scoring A Buyer’s Journey in Open Source

As a leading open-source software company, Terracotta has a challenge that most marketers would gladly choose to manage: too many leads. However, that wealth can create problems when you only have a few direct sales professionals. Those leads were generated from interest in a very strong, full-featured, open-source
version of its software – but which were ideal prospects to target for commercial service offerings?

The Terracotta marketing team turned to lead scoring to allow them to understand the process their buyers went through in understanding and evaluating their products. First, they categorized the buyer’s journey into a path called RESITD – Recognize, Evaluate, Sample, Integrate, Test, Deploy. Lead scoring was used to categorize each buyer in this buying path. The key metrics of each phase differed, depending on the likely approach a buyer would have:

• Recognition: Awareness metrics such as the number of visits


• Evaluate: Reading of introductory documents on Terracotta benefits


• Sample: Downloading of the Terracotta open source product


• Integrate: Forum activity, application-specific integration documents, or
  downloading of pre-packaged integration modules


• Test: Reading of detailed tuning guides, sample test plans


• Deploy: Reading deployment guides, reading about enterprise subscription or deployment services, and “phone-home” capabilities in the software itself

This framework allowed Terracotta to map and guide the buyer’s journey, even in an environment where direct interaction with the end purchaser was quite rare. Sales professionals at Terracotta were provided with deep insights into the buyer stage for each of their accounts, and were sent real-time notifications as buyers progressed from one stage to another.

Over 6 iterations, the Terracotta team continually refined their algorithms for understanding their audience. Insights such as a tight focus on recency and frequency as factors in evaluating any sign of interest came from this iterative refinement process. Evidence of a need for the high scale clustering software that Terracotta provides could be deemed out of date if it was more than a few months old, due to the changing nature of buyer needs. This detailed, automatically-created map of a buyer’s journey allowed their sales team to focus on the key prospects who were ready to move forward with a purchase, and allow marketing to guide the evolution of the others.

Understanding the buying process is a critical thing to focus on in B2B marketing, and Jeff and the team at Terracotta have done a great job of mapping it out and scoring prospects to understand their stage. Read More...

Kadient: Blogging About Internal Processes Connects With Buyers

Transparency is a great approach to marketing, even when you might think that the internal workings of your organization might not be of any interest to your audience. Heather Stokes and Heather Margolis at Kadient found this out when leading bloggers took note of their internal efforts to develop user personas. The personas were being used to best focus their development efforts for their Sales Enablement products, but the effort Kadient had put in to understand their users (including life sized cardboard cutouts of Anya and Luke, two of the personas) won them recognition, awareness, and credibility with potential buyers in the social media sphere of influence.

The effort resulted in traffic to the Kadient site and an increase in credibility for their products and company. As with many investments of this nature though, it can be hard to measure the economic return. What are your thoughts as B2B marketers? Are these "inner-workings" efforts worth doing? Have you measured them successfully?

Here's the case study from Digital Body Language:

Kadient: Blogging About Internal Processes Connects With Buyers

Kadient’s move into Software as a Service (SaaS) brought with it a fundamental shift in their marketing to connect more deeply with their buyer and user audience. A company-wide effort to develop and use buyer and user personas sparked numerous discussions on exactly how “Luke” or “Anya”, and several other personas, would use the product in his or her daily life, and how it should be built, marketed, and sold in order to best connect with him or her.

As they focused more on connecting with their buyers, Kadient fleshed out the personalities with increasing detail. Hobbies, personality traits, and even cardboard cutouts were created to provide insights into Anya and Luke. When a development or marketing meeting was held to discuss the market, the discussion would always focus around their buyer and user personas.

This effort was then noticed by David Meerman Scott, an influential industry blogger and writer, who highlighted Kadient’s efforts in his online forum. Although the main topic of the writing was the use of buyer and user personas, Kadient was identified as a leader in their field. Anya and Luke were highlighted in detail, allowing any reader of the blog to identify with their goals and challenges.

Two other industry bloggers, Charles Brown and Scott Sehlhorst of Tyner Blain, quickly picked up the story, and added their own commentary, further establishing Kadient as a company intently focused on the success of their customers. A Google blog search for Kadient shows these blogs highlighted at the top of the results, adding credibility to any buyer considering Kadient’s solutions. The combined traffic of these blogs was estimated at more than 20,000 regular viewers.

A 37% spike in web traffic to the Kadient site corresponding to this discussion on the blogs highlighted to the Kadient marketing team the importance to their prospective buyers of a company dedicated to continual understanding of the buyers’ needs. Although this was not an effort that generated direct sales leads, the value it provided in awareness and credibility was tremendous, and the cost was essentially zero.

Read More...