If you’ve done b2b marketing in the past decade, you know most of the research buyers do around products and services has moved online.
You know this. But do you know what to do with this knowledge.
Eloqua’s “Accelerating the Revenue Engine” session today at Dreamforce 2011 looked at how to do buyer behavior marketing in an increasingly social world. The panel, led by Eloqua’s Chief Technology Officer Steve Woods, included Geeta Sachdev, Senior Vice President of Marketing at SolarWinds and Heidi Melin, CMO of Taleo.
“Our biggest marketing opportunity is the product itself,” Geeta said. That means, anyone who touches the product is a potential marketer on behalf of the product: employees, customers and prospects.
The key, Melin noted, is to deliver the right content to the right audience through the most appropriate channels. For Taleo, that involves several steps: creating relevant content, identifying and engaging influencers in their industry, integrating the marketing process into the sales process, and adopting the tools that help decode online buyer behavior.
“We have tools to be able to approach marketing more as a science and less as an art,” Melin added.
In order to know how to nurture a lead, you need to understand how their buyer behaviors online, Sachdev said.
Taleo CMO, Heidi Melin, at Dreamforce 2011
For instance, if the prospect is coming to your site or social media properties indirectly, then the content probably needs to be more educational – not merely educating about your specific product but the industry as a whole. If they are coming through the organic search, then they probably have more solid buying intention. The content needs to adapt to those signs.
Buyers are becoming increasingly social, tapping their network of peers for advice on everything from movies to large scale technology solutions. For marketers to have any impact in this seismic shift, they obviously need to reach buyers in this social sphere. But, even more importantly, its taking in and analyzing this buyer behavior.
As Melin put it, there are so many metrics that marketers can examine today – some are about quantity, some are qualitative – that open communication and the management of expectations are critical.
“10 or 15 years ago, marketers were in silos. Today, as a CMO, I look for people who team really well,” Melin added. As buyer behavior becomes more socialized, teamwork is that much more valuable.
