...where buyers have all the power
We live in a digitally connected world, where we all are constantly connected to each other and have gotten used to instant messaging.
All the information we could possibly be looking for about any topic is at our fingertips – all we have to do is to make a quick online search on our phones, tablets or computers.
Buyers are now quite capable of informing themselves about almost anything online, especially when it comes to a company’s products or services. It’s evident that marketing teams need to be able to “catch” potential buyers and adapt to wherever they are along their buying journey.
Knowing not just where your prospect comes from but also where they want to go and what they want to achieve is key.
*Interesting Read: Intro to Buyer Personas and Buyer Journeys for B2B Orgs
Doing so improves alignment between your marketing and sales teams, because marketing needs to know this information before they know which leads to hand over to sales and when.
Now more than ever, B2B marketing needs to adopt a customer-centric strategy – to offer personalized and relevant content based on their prospects and customers’ expectations.
While B2C marketing is able to rapidly adapt to changing consumer behaviours and provide a hyper-personalized experience (both online and offline), the buyer experience in the B2B world can be likened to entering an empty warehouse, where no assistance or personalized approach is provided (even if you expect it). In an attempt to make the sales process more manageable, businesses have created all sorts of hurdles for the interested buyer. Accessing key information for buyer decision-making takes several steps, making harder for one business to buy from another business.
Now don't get us wrong, we all love a good brain teaser from time to time. However, buyers have better things to do than to follow a complicated route to get access to information. For most B2B buyers, a typical journey resembles something like this:
According to Marketing Land (2019), 74% of marketers were using online forms as their main tool in their Lead Generation Strategy. This is not reassuring, knowing that most buyers won't fill out a form to access gated content and most companies won't follow-up on a most leads who filled out a form.
The truth is... buyers do not want to spend time filling out a form and wait to receive the information they need.
