Why Must Future MBAs Know More About B2B Buyers?

February 9, 2012 — Laura Ramos

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

These are foundational concepts of any good MBA course focused on market strategy.  If you don’t start with “who” you want to reach — and understand whether or not the audience represents a lucrative market for your products or services — then B2B marketers stand to waste a lot of time, effort, and money. 

Ask Phil Kotler, if you don’t believe me!

Yes, this is all true.  But today it’s not enough.

B2B marketers set themselves up for disappointing results if they stop short at positioning and fail to look at what motivates purchase behavior and how buyers buy. This is a tough one for many B2B marketers — those with a tech bent in particular – because we tend to think we sell to companies, not people. And we tend to talk a lot about our companies, products, and features, not about the problems and issues buyers care about.

Profiling, personas, and “behavior”-graphics are tools B2B marketers should use more to shape marketing strategy. Knowing how the business purchase process work — all of its intricate, convoluted glory —  is as important to choosing where to play in the market as are understanding what you do uniquely, the market potential for your offerings, and how you should communicate and deliver your capability to the market.

I explored the how and why of B2B buyer behavior with Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s Marketing 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making class at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business this evening. I was the “special guest lecturer” — which means I got to talk with a bunch of bright, aspiring marketing students about business buyer behavior and why great marketers need to know their audiences intimately to succeed.  Some of the more interesting points of the discussion centered on:

1) Whether or not B2B personas are any different than B2C — and how the process of building personas is very similar, but the components and features that make up the B2B persona are different.

2) Which characteristics distinguish the B2B buyer from the B2C — and whether B2B buying motivations and behavior more or less complex than B2C.

3) Why knowing the difference between decision makers, influencers and gatekeepers (like purchasing agents) is important in understanding buyer behavior.

Still surprising to me, the students seemed more interested in Xerox and what I did as the head of industry marketing there than in hearing about theory or research insight. Examples shared on thought-leadership, promotion of educational/industry content (in the form of webinars), and integration of social media into the marketing mix were popular.

As always, I asked Prof. Shanmugam’s class to comment on my presentation and discussion through this blog post.  (Professor Shanmugam offers class participation credit if they comply with this request!) Please read their comments to learn what this future group of MBAs think about as they reflect on our session together.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , . 12 Comments »

Exploring Buyer Behavior With Santa Clara University MBA Students

April 28, 2011 — Laura Ramos

B2B marketing is about positioning products or services to companies that can help solve business problems, right?

Not entirely.  Good B2B marketing is about selling to people, not companies. People who run these companies have needs, wants, and motivations just like anybody does — and B2B marketers must understand, message, and cater to those motivations to engage buyers and develop qualified leads that feed the revenue generation engine of the company — sales, both direct and indirect.

Tonight I shared this insight, and a few others, with with Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s Marketing 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making class at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. We talked about business buyer behavior and why great marketers need to know their audience intimately. Previously, I put the slides on Slideshare - which you can find there with a few minor changes. From my perspective at the front of the room, here are some of the points that caught the class’s interest the most:

1) Unlike consumers, whose motivations can be fickle and subject to emotionally charged (and sometimes irrational) factors, B2B buyer motivations are more straight-forward. B2B buyers want to purchase products — or hire other companies — help them solve problems, make them appear competent to management, peers, and other executives, increase their prospects for future employment, and — ultimately — increase their wealth from this success. Sure there are other factors, like power and recognition, that factor into the B2B buyer psyche, but keeping the boss happy rates right at the top.

2) B2B buying is a group effort; there is never only one “persona” that you have to understand — and communicate to — in your marketing activity.  Figuring out these key personas and the role each plays in the buying process is difficult.  New advances in marketing analytics — and the emerging ability to mine social channels and profiles – makes this easier, but it’s still a lot of hard work to get buyer profiling right.

3) B2B marketers can get caught up in the execution treadmill and tend to focus more on tactics and metrics than audience and business outcome. Simple tools, like the POST methodology and behavioral modeling (like Forrester’s Social Technographics), can keep business marketers from losing sight of marketing’s real purpose — to help build demand ahead of the pipeline and help to scale the sales organization.

4) Current customers can help to inform buyer behavior as well as acquire and influence new buyers. Case studies, customer testimonial, and affinity marketing all help to demonstrate that B2B sellers understand customer needs, can help to solve key problems, and do so in as a business partner, not just as a supplier.

As I did in October, I asked the class to share their reactions to what I presented by commenting on this blog post.  (Professor Shanmugam offered extra credit if they complied with this request!) Compared to the last cohort, these students appeared to me to have more experience with sales and marketing. A couple mentioned that they currently work in sales. They asked great questions about whether segmentation applies in account-based sales management (it does!) and what I see as the key differences between the role of the CMO and the CSO (Chief Sales Officer) in revenue generation.  Please read the comments to see whether my views resonated with these future MBA graduates and how my talk reflected their own experiences.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , . 32 Comments »

3 B2B Buyer Behavior Principles: Segmentation, Personas, and Profiling

October 20, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Business-to-business marketers have long struggled to reach decision makers and measure marketing results. Over 50% of the almost 570 respondents to my 2006 Forrester survey put these two issues at the top of their list of marketing challenges. It’s not branding, it’s not budget, it’s not competitive threats.  Finding the right prospects to engage, and demonstrating that marketing had an impact on this process, is what keeps B2B marketers awake at night.

I think B2B marketers, especially those in high tech firms, struggle because they don’t spend enough time understanding who their best customers are and what distinguishes those customers from the rest. Knowing your customers takes discipline – it’s simply not about conducting satisfaction surveys or publishing customer success stories.  B2B marketers need to analyze business buyer behavior and using the findings to inform their go-to-market approach. It’s about knowing and managing your Buyer’s Journey.

Tonight, I had the wonderful opportunity to share my insights and perspective with Professor Ravi Shanmugam’s Marketing 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making class at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. We talked about the fundamentals of business buyer behavior and how to “get to know” your audience. If you would like to see the slides, I put them on Slideshare.

At Xerox Services, we believe in customer segmentation, profiling, and analytics. We deliver professional managed print services as multi-year contracts worth several millions of dollars.  Not your typical corporate purchase: there are a select number of organizations who need (and can afford) what we offer. But the business value is clear: we save our clients more than they spend.  This means that account identification and profiling is very important since we orient around a sales-centric go-to-market model.

From an industry marketing perspective, we also know that “knowing” who your buyer is — what are the key issues that concern him/her and how Xerox Services can help — is also crucial to making those sales interactions meaningful and to building a lasting relationship. Drawing from this experience, I shared with the Marketing 551 class, the following principles behind B2B buyer behavior and analytics:

1) Segmentation.  Critical to helping marketing to focus on “who” in the market you want to engage with your messaging and offers. Based on your market definition, segmentation shows you where the best market opportunity for your products and services will be.

2) Personas. Once you know “who” to target, personas help you understand “what to say” to them. As a representation of a real market group (i.e. segment), personas help marketers crystallize their message and speak in the voice of the customer, not market-speak. The best marketers create personas based on attributes that are relevant to purchase decision-making — not on generalities like industry, buying role (decision maker, influencer, etc.), or functional area.

3) Profiling. While most marketers are very familiar with firmographic information, and how to use it, many have yet to understand the importance of profiling behavior. One example of behaviorial analytics is Forrester’s Social Technographics, which describes a buyer’s propensity to engage in online, social behavior.  In this always-connected world, business buyers are becoming more willing to take purchase cues from peers and “knowledgeable experts” than traditional, company-lead media and messages.

I’ve asked the class to share their reactions to what I presented by commenting on this blog post.  By and large, these students are employed full-time at top Silicon Valley firms. They also tend to have technical/engineering backgrounds or current responsibilities. Take a look at the comments to see whether my views resonated with these future MBA graduates from my alma mater.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 41 Comments »

Best Practices For Marketing To Buyers “In The Cloud”

January 27, 2010 — Laura Ramos

“Cloud computing” is a very hot topic, and like social media, subject to much debate about “what is cloud computing?” and “what does it mean for business?” Simply stated, cloud computing lets your customers and potential buyers take advantage of services and resources delivered as an online utility. Buyers get the benefits of using your technology without worrying about the technical details as much as they would if they implemented software inside their data centers. The benefits can include: lower capital investment, faster implementation, reduced risk, proven security and improved scalability to handle the increased amounts of data. Purists believe that true cloud computing requires large scale sharing by infrastructure/application providers and their consumers alike. While my colleagues at Forrester try to sort out the market and make it easier for IT buyers to decide where to invest, I’d like to explore the idea of marketing to customers in the cloud. 

B2B marketing needs to embrace the cloud. Most executives see marketing as a large discretionary line item in the corporate budget. During tought economic times, that “discretion” gets cut more often than not.  Marketers perpetuate this short-sighted perspective when they focus more on program and campaign spending and fail to invest in the capital or IT support needed to make marketing execution more efficient and the results more visible to the organization. Cloud computing can give marketers ready access to technology and services that can drive demand and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs without the burden of traditional technology implementation and management.

Cloud computing will also transform the way marketing gets done. In this Web 2.0 world, buyers spend more of time online searching for information, interacting with like-minded colleagues, and comparing offerings long before the first sales call occurs. Cloud-optimized marketing strategies such as social media, paid search, search results optimization, content syndication, and engaging with buyers on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter deliver brand building and customer engagement results.

To futher explore how social media marketing in the cloud can help to build deeper — and eventually more profitable — customer relationships, I joined Jon Miller (VP of Maketing at automation rising-star Marketo) and David Alston (social media guru who heads up both community and marketing at Radian6) on a webinar, which you can access here.  During the event, we looked at a number of different cloud-related topics including:

1) How to use Forrester’s Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers.

2)Forrester’s P-O-S-T methodology – Why starting with People, Objectives and Strategy first, then moving to Tactics and Technology is the best way to ensure success when using social media to engage with prospects and customers in the cloud.

3) How to use social media monitoring to engage prospects, build communities, service customers, uncover influencers, and listen for the point of need.

Over the next few months, I will join the the Marketing Cloud conversation to continue to explore how cloud-centric service and technology providers may be in a better position to serve the modern needs of B2B marketers who see social media not simply as a way to reach new audiences. More importantly, these marketers see social media as a tool to help them build communities of like-minded customers; customers who will remain loyal, buy more over time, and advocate to others on the marketer’s behalf to influence the standing and reputation his/her firm in a transparent, community-centric manner.  The 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards winners in the B2B marketing categories demonstrate where this trend is heading.  But I would love to hear from you with examples of companies that you feel are doing an exceptional job of using social media to connect with business buyers who purchase high consideration products for on behalf of their firms.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

DMA Webinar: Tracking Online Buyer Behavior in B2B

January 8, 2010 — Laura Ramos

Next week I have the pleasure of speaking to several affiliate groups of the Direct Marketing Association about demand management. Please join me Wednesday, January 13, 2010, for a webinar-based panel discusison about: How to Track a Buyer’s Online Purchase Research Behavior: and then send appropriate messages to influence that buyer’s purchase.

As we see it, the Internet empowers buyers to research products and services long before engaging in a formal sales process — leaving marketers to guess when and how to engage with prospects. This almost guarantees that marketing messages will be sent to the wrong people at the wrong time — filling sales funnels with unqualified leads — a poor formula for permission marketing.

Smart marketers are harnessing digital technology to monitor and track buyer research behavior long before the formal sales process begins — to estimate buying stage — to predict buying intent — to evaluate buying influence — to send appropriate marketing messages to the right people at the right time — and to more accurately score leads for sales funnels. This yields a better formula for permission marketing.

The DMA invited two top industry experts (and yours truly) to help B2B marketers clearly understand how they can improve demand generation process by identifying, monitoring, and evaluating the online research behavior of prospective buyers.

Joining me are:

Steve Woods – Eloqua – Chief Technology Officer / Co-Founder. Author – Digital Body Language.

Debbie Qaqish – The Pedowitz Group – Chief Revenue Officer. Demand Generation Agency – Digital Buyer Behavior applications.

I hope you will visit the DMA Northern California site and join us for this educational, lively discussion!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Social Media Use Soars Among B2B Marketers: Really?

August 4, 2009 — Laura Ramos

On July 20, BtoB Magazine, in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) published findings from the June 2009 online survey of 172 client-side marketers, 77 self-identified as primarily targeting B2B.  You can find the online version of the article here.

My colleague Josh Bernoff spoke at the ANA/BtoB conference today, called “B-toB Marketing in the New World“, and dropped me a quick note to say that his presentation — where he talked about “The Social Imperative in B2B Marketing” – was well received. He also shared an offhand remark along the lines of “those B2B marketers could sure use your help.”

At first, I found Josh’s comment a bit out of kilter with the title of the BtoB Magazine article, “Social media use soars among b-to-b marketers”. How can Forrester’s leading expert on social media strategy, co-author of Groundswell, find the ANA audience needing to know more about how to use social media successfully?  Then it dawned on me: use and success are not necessarily the same here.

The online article doesn’t include a key chart from the physical publication. The chart shows the percentage of b-to-b marketers using, or planning to use, the following “newer media” platforms.  (Again, planning and doing are two different things.) Reading directly from the July 20 chart, the data looks like this:

Your own Web site = 99%, email marketing = 94%, SEO-organic = 79%, Online ads/banners = 73%, SEM-paid search = 71%, Webinars = 66%, Social networks/social media = 57% (question: why lump these two together?), RSS feeds = 46%, Viral video = 42%, Podcasts = 38%, Video-on-demand and Wikis = 36% each, and Mobile, Gaming and Second Life bringing up the rear at 18%, 7% , and 6% respectively.

Surprisingly, not too different from Forrester survey findings published earlier this year. (See Figure 6 in particular).

The title touts the main finding, that among the 77 who responded, 57% of b-to-b marketers in this survey say they are using social media as a marketing tactic (remember, this is labeled as social network/social media), up from a mere 15% in 2007.

But let’s look at the numbers a little more closely: the first 6 items in rank order are not typically considered “social” media, but rather interactive tactics that many marketers have embraced gradually during the past number of years.

I think combining social networks and social media gums things up a bit because most marketers look at things like blogs, podcasts, microblogging (Twitter), open social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), wikis, and even video as the more “social” tactics emerging in the new campaign toolbox. So, having a corporate blog, for example, could lead respondents to say “yes, I am using social media,” and inflate the number a bit.

I’m guessing subscribers to the ANA can get a final version of the report and look at the data directly. But this article highlights how — despite the hype — “social media” is an emerging concept and the definition of what is “in” social media (and what is not) is not commonly shared.

What is more interesting is a paragraph from the August 3 press release published by the ANA prior to the start of the conference.  To quote, it says:

“In 2009, the most effective newer media platforms were as follows: Search engine marketing (SEM) (65 percent), Own Web site (59 percent), Search engine optimization (SEO) (55 percent), E-mail marketing (45 percent).”

Ah, so when evaluating whether these marketing approaches are ”effective,” the “social” media don’t yet meet a majority of B2B marketer expectations. While use is soaring, that use is still fairly experimental, and questions about how this activity pays of in direct business value begin to arise.

Today, Josh told the Chicago conference audience, “to reach B2B buyers with social technologies, concentrate on objectives.” This is a key theme in Groundswell, a tenant of our POST method for setting social strategy, and the principle behind Social Technographics – you have to understand how your audience engages in social activity, and what you want to achieve by engaging with them, to make social media succeed.

Perhaps the most interesting points were made by several of readers who left comments about the July 20 article online, in particular Liz Stott, Marketing Strategist, Penton Media.  You should read the whole thread, but I can’t help but quote Liz to close this post:

“My only word of caution to marketers would be to determine if your prospects/customers are really using SM for business decisions, before you dedicate full time employees to community building roles. Marketers see SM as “free” – but it’s not free at all, especially when you consider the Value of Time, and the high costs associated with community building personnel.”

Couldn’t of said it better myself.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »

Tapping Social Networking Sites To Energize B2B Buyers

June 23, 2009 — Laura Ramos

On June 17, Forrester published my latest research on how business buyers use social networking sites to inform purchase decisions, the role these sites will play in future buying processes, and three key ways for B2B marketers to tap into open, social network value.  Just under half (45%) of buyers we surveyed early this year said they use discussion forums, online communities or social networking sites when evaluating products and services they want to buy at work — which much less than peers and colleagues, a source to which 84% of respondents turn when making purchase decisions.  This is not all that surprising. We find this result crops up consistently in our research over time — business and IT folks rely on word of mouth and advice from friends and associates when buying, so customer references and testimonial become crucial parts of any well executed marketing plan. 

More interesting are two key insights coming from this research: discussion forums and online communities are poised to become the online supplement for colleague interaction and the decision to join in community activity depends mostly on the quality of the participants — the discussion relevance, demonstrated experience, and shared thought-leadership.  The figure here shows the data.

June 2009 “B2B Marketers: Tap Into Social Networking Sites To Energize Community Marketing

June 2009 “B2B Marketers: Tap Into Social Networking Sites To Energize Community Marketing

 This represents and interesting challenge to B2B marketers who seem anxious to rush to put up a company-sponsored community site as a way of tapping into this emerging social activity. But sponsoring a gated, private community without understanding your company’s objectives in doing so and your audience’s willingness to participate leads to false starts, wasted time, and fruitless effort. Instead, B2B marketers interested in building community destinations should start by joining into existing conversations — and seeing if you can get some of your key customers to do so with you — before investing in a fully moderated, gated community. What do I mean by “join the conversation?” Namely:

1. Participate as a community peer. Use resources or social listening tools to listen into what buyers say about your firm and products. Join the conversation to hear about hidden pain points, discover innovative ideas, and share valuable experiences. Offer exclusive insight, talk openly about shared community issues, and address problems forthrightly to establish your credibility.

2. Energize customers to help tell your story. Give enthusiastic customers new ways to engage with each other and gain accolades from peers by using interactive content like videos, podcasts, and blogs to trigger the chatter, allowing users add to or rate the content, and giving them widgets and wikis to help share their stories.

3. Nurture loyal customers by supporting their success. Use open social sites to foster connections between your best customers by complementing techie forums with online social networking tools, creating a fan base on social sites like LinkedIn that feature customer advocates, extending physical events with an online social component, and encouraging participation with appropriate awards — like sneak peeks and exclusive chat access to top execs — for those who demonstrate a propensity to drive community activity higher.

In the B2B space, I believe private, gated community sites will trump public, open social networking for delivering business value over time because quality discussion and demonstrated expertise matter more to business buyers than the size or breadth of the community. Open social networking sites in the business world will remain just that — social places to keep tabs on friends and associates. Buyers interested in uncovering tips and tricks of the trade will seek out gated communities that feature social networking features like profile pages, friending, and question-and-answer but that focus on topics that make their businesses run better. Business buyers join communities to solve problems, follow industry trends, and get advice, so I expect participation on registration-controlled community sites to replace open public social networking activity during the next few years.

I know there are a lot of community-building advocates out there now. Let me know if you disagree with my position and why — looking forward to hearing from you.

PS:  I was on hiatus during July, so I’m backfilling my posts for June and July at this time.  Don’t be alarmed if you feel like you’ve missed something — it’s just me filling in some blanks.  Thanks for reading.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments »

New: Social Buyer Profiles and Groundswell Nomiations for B2B

May 29, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Social media continues to be a hot topic in 2009. If you have been following my posts on this subject, here are two developments that may interest you.

Try Out Forrester B2B Buyer Social Profile Tool

Social media give a voice to buyers who can now describe their experiences, accomplishments, and disappointments to a global audience. Earlier this year, Oliver Young and I published Forrester’s first research describing the social behavior of technology business buyers. We surveyed more than 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation.

If you’d like to know how social media fits into the marketing mix based on how willing your target customers are to engage in social activity, can use the Social Technographics® profiles of B2B buyers tool. This tool can help decision-makers to design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

Forrester’s Nominations for Groundswell Awards Are Now Open

For the third year in a row, Forrester will recognize the most effective social technology applications at the Forrester Groundswell Awards. Starting now, anyone is free to submit an entry and I’d like to encourage those of you using social media in your business marketing efforts to consider doing so.

The submission form is here. The entry deadline is September 2, 2009.

If you’re going to enter, please read the Forrester Groundswell Awards Rules before submitting your entry. You can submit each entry only once, and once submitted, you cannot modify it. Sorry, but that’s the rule.  I plan to blog and write about the most interesting ones, regardless of who wins. Although, judging from past winners, this year is bound to include many new and interesting examples.

This year the Forrester award committee divided the categories for the prototypical groundswell objectives (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) into business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). Specifically for B2B, we added a new category, “spreading,” to recognize social applications in which you sell ideas or products to employees of a company, then get them to sell others at that company — thus speeding adoption of your technologies or service sthrough social channels and activities your customers engage in internally. Besides the objectives categories, we also include a category for pro-social applications (“social impact”) and applications within an enterprise (“managing”).

That’s 13 categories in total, so while we expect even more entries than the 150 we received last year, there are more ways to win this year. To learn more about the awards and how to submit your applications, please visit the Groundswell microsite.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Digital Body Language: Steve Wood’s On B2B Marketing

March 10, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Steven Woods is one of the first people I met as the new B2B analyst for Forrester.  I say “new” because I had been an analyst for 5 years before taking on this role. Steve and I met at our Cambridge office and, together with Thor Johnson, he told me about Eloqua, the company he helped found in 1999.  He’s been thinking about what it takes to get B2B marketing right for longer than those 10 years.  He’s also helped develop software to automate key processes that top-quality B2B marketing requires.

I was both pleased and delighted when he sent me an advanced copy of his new book to read. Recently, while on a couple of transcontinental flights, I finished “Digital Body Language” and found it a worthy read.  In particular:

1) The case studies are great. The book is full of case studies from Eloqua’s customers. Companies that buy and use lead management automation are ahead of the curve in my book. As the first firm to actively market software for managing demand, Eloqua has a deep history to draw upon. The Concur, Kadient, National Instruments (who also won a Groundswell award for their online community), Sybase, Terracotta, and VFA stories are particularly interesting and instructive.

2) “Getting Started Now” sidebars offer key tips. Sprinkled throughout are short, one-paragraph pointers that B2B marketers would do well to follow.  In the copy I have, I found the text in the paragraph on page 91 repeated on 93, but other than that the suggestions are concise and actionable.

3) Understanding digital body language is essential for B2B marketers. Sure Eloqua wants to associate the term “digital body language” with their brand, but call it body language, foot steps, or finger prints, knowing how prospects behave online is a crucial part of marketing data collection, profiling, and segmentation. Firms that qualify leads based solely on explicit information like company name, contact title, and expressed answers to qualification questions miss out on acquiring key information about whether a prospect is serious or only tire-kicking.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of lead management automation and firms like Eloqua that bring this technology to market. But looking beyond the technology — which Steve barely mentions in his book — business marketers need to focus more on customer profiling and data management, lead scoring, nurturing, and closing the loop with sales to upgrade marketing from the “make it pretty” department to an essential business operation based on customer insight and demand development. You can learn more about these topics by visiting Steve’s blog, where he recounts  many of the points made and expands on stories published in Digital Body Language.

Congratulations, Steve!  And thank you for helping to raise the marketing professionalism bar as you inspire B2B marketers to succeed.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

Using B2B Social Technographics To Set Marketing Strategy

February 27, 2009 — Laura Ramos

Earlier this week Jeremiah Owyang and I presented our recommendations on social media strategy to a client who had hired us to conduct research like the “Social Technographics of Business Buyers” report. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the results were similar enough that using the Forrester syndicated data as an example would have led us to the same conclusions.  As a reminder from my previous post, 91% of IT and business buyers exhibit Spectator (i.e. reading blogs, read forums, watch video) and 58% exhibit Critic (i.e. post ratings or reviews, comment on a blog, contribute to online forums) behavior – making these categories of social behavior the most common.

Because Spectator and Critic behaviors were also common among this client’s target audience, we recommended that the client pursue some very specific objectives in their social media plans.  In short we said they should use social media to:

1) Listen to what these socially active buyers are talking about. This means investing in the means (which this client already had) to monitor online “buzz” about topics of interest to these buyers. Sound hard?  Not really, it can be as simple as setting up searches on Google’s advanced search page. For the blogosphere, it means using one of the blog-specific search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Blogpulse, etc. Or setting up a TweetDeck page to monitor several topics, or using Twittersearch.

2) Talk with them. Reach out and participate in discussions, comment on blogs, publish content/reports, syndicate podcasts or videos online.  Do this on sites and destinations that are NOT associated with your brand or company, as well as your own.  As Jeremiah puts it, “you have to fish where the fish are.”

3) Provide new opportunities to interact with and support each other. This is where you get to show how you can add value.  Use listening and talking activity to direct interested parties to your site and to content that they can read, rate , and comment on. Now you have the start of an engage online audience.

We specifically told them to demonstrate they can achive these objectives in ways that measurably change their interactions and relationships with buyers BEFORE pursuing a more advanced community-building strategy.

At the conclusion of this presentation, the listeners asked two very interesting questions that gave me pause. They wanted to know, “In light of the findings, should we continue to pursue our community strategy?” and “Can we use communities to support and talk with our customers?” These questions made me wonder if they had heard a word we had said!

Let me go back to first principles — first principles in the POST methodology to be specific — to explain my frustration.  POST says “understand your audience first and learn whether or not they are engaged in social activity.” Ok, the results show clearly that technology buyers are a socially active crowd. But most are Spectators which means they aren’t talking, voting, or creating content. You have to figure out indirectly — by studying what they search for, click on, read, and down load –which topics interest them the most.  You must also talk with them to test you findings and see if you can get them to read and follow you.  Then you should try this with another audience or topic, and then another. 

Jumping directly to the conclusion that “communities” — and investing in community platforms, community software applications, social business software, whatever — is putting the T before the P in POST.  This is backwards and doomed to fail.

While the Social Technographics of business buyers is high, this finding does not mean that any and every social approach will send them flocking to your corporate Web site or community pages. Marketers who use social media successfully concentrate on P = people/audience and O = objectives/outcomes first. Almost exclusively.  The choice of technology, tactic, or tool becomes a distant second. 

A word of advice to CMOS: if your marketing department comes to you and says “we need to build a community”, ask them “For whom?” and “How will this community impact our business in measurable ways during this economy?”  These P and O questions will get them to focus on the right things, not just the technology.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , . 1 Comment »
« Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.