Recently I attended the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego and had a chance to visit with Adam Needles, Vice President of Demand Generation Strategy at Leftbrain Marketing. We managed to find a nice, quite space at the bar where he shared his insight and offered some good advice for online merchants today.
Adam Needles: The modern environment for B2B marketing -- and for consumer as well -- is that in this era of Web 2.0 technologies, of search and social media, what we see more than ever is that the buyer is much more powerful than the seller.
Thirty to forty years ago, you had the Mad Men era on TV. These guys were successful, not because they were good marketers, but because they could go schmooze the guy who owns the television station, and the radio station, and the newspaper, right? Six, eight, ten channels -- all totally controlled. It was a paternalistic, top-down mass marketing mindset.
What's happened in this modern era, is that it's completely flipped. The way buyers make decisions today is to spend most of their time on their own, looking through channels and searching for information that's available on the Internet, and spending very little time on the eventual vendor's website or information resources. They're not responding to interruptive offers. So what we're seeing is that marketers don't have the right tactics to do one-to-one buyer-centric marketing.
This is why we're seeing diminishing returns on direct mail, on direct email, on numerous interruptive tactics. Advertising is suffering. We're using the same tactics to go out and try to interrupt in a mass way -- but the truth is, we need a totally different model. We need a bottoms-up model. We need to put the buyer in the center of the strategy, not on the periphery.
Claire Condra: So how do you help people change their way of thinking?
Adam: Over the last couple of years we've seen a big emergence of not only CRM, but more importantly marketing automation technology. The technology is really about being able to get out and drive, in a semantic way, one-to-one engagements with buyers. Instead of push marketing, it's buyer pull. A buyer does something and then is gone.
In order to be successful with it -- and it's very robust technology -- but to be successful, you need the right strategy. You need the content, and need to go through a buyer persona analysis and map it all out. You also need to think through your sales and acquisition strategy, and say for "this buyer," whether it's a B2B buyer or consumer, "how am I going to put them through stages? How am I going to learn about them? How am I going to have a content-based dialog that will result in me being able to better educate them and vet them as a buyer, as a consumer?"
We work with the technology, such as enabling platforms like Eloqua and CRMs like Salesforce. We help our customers to design strategy, content, and buyer-focused lead management knowledge, and then leverage the technology to be successful in developing what we call "buyer-centric" lead generation.
Claire: So if it's now "buyer pull," then you have to make yourself available to be found and discovered.
Adam: Exactly. I would say that getting found is now more important than ever. It's interesting that in the B2B arena, the number one source of leads today is from inbound channels, not outbound.
Inbound now accounts for more than 50% of sales, according to the guys at SirusDecisions, an analysis firm. We finally see the scale tipped in that direction. Absolutely.
So, are you still going to do an email-nurturing campaign to a B2B buyer? Absolutely. But that should actually respond to an inbound action, not be the precursor.
Claire: Is there any way that this can be tied in with location-based mobile?
Adam: There are a couple of things. (1) You can be using location-based mobile to segment and personalize the message. (2) Although it's still in its nascent stages, there are opportunities to use triggering, but it's still more of an interruptive tactic. I don't know that the mobile use case has been completely worked through.
What we do see is the redesigning of web assets to be clear and to work on any platform. You should be able to look at it and say, "Do we have any location data on this person?" The iPad has location data and mobile phones have location data. Take that, and use it to personalize the look and feel of the message. You can literally deliver a dynamic web page, web form, or web site that looks different for every customer.
Claire: Do you think that improving the quality of the content is low-hanging fruit that any company can use as a starting point?
Adam: It's that same mass mindset, you know how I said the buyer has been at the edge, rather than the center? And what has been at the center? For years, our products and services have been more important than the buyer. It's the reverse now.
Here's the number one opportunity -- content is no longer tactical and strategic. Because content is how buyers make most of their decisions, you need less product-centric content and more buyer-centric content.