Is your buyer standing quietly on the edge of the market, trying not to be noticed? Research shows that most B2B projects start without a budget or purchase authority—when the potential buyer does a web search. This is the Tentative Buyer, and she wants to learn as much as possible about the best solution—without being sold anything.

Content for the Tentative Buyer must be educational. It has to give the buyer a feeling of control over the research process, while gently, almost subliminally guiding her to your solution. 

Because the Tentative Buyer must feel she has done her due diligence, she won’t get on board with your product before she has researched all the alternatives—so don’t expect her to. Help her learn, compare, and self-qualify to be your customer.

The blessing and curse of the web in B2B marketing is that the buyer has taken control of the research. The curse: she has fast access to a virtual conversation that you can’t control. The blessing: she insists on doing the research herself—let her self-qualify, using your content.

How do you provide content that educates, and preserves the buyer’s feeling of control?

• Make the shift internally. Is your marketing department operating on pre-Web 2.0 assumptions? Here’s a simple test: look at your search keywords. Do they describe the buyer’s problem, or your solution? If the latter, root out those assumptions in your search campaigns and copy. Provide knowledge first, solutions second.
• Make your web site a self-qualification tool. Add a little interactivity to give visitors a feeling of control—and it let them do the work. Give them choices such as, “Are your stores in one city, or multiple cities?” Interface with your analytics or marketing automation system, and capture valuable lead information even while the buyer takes charge. (One of our favorite examples is this interactive presentation from Eloqua: http://illuminate.eloqua.com/. It does include the sales pitch, but it makes it fun.)
• Develop an educational series that is truly educational. White papers and webinars are effective for education, but notorious for their marketing pitches. To attract Tentative Buyers, lead with learning, and ditch the pitch. The title “What Financial Regulation Means for Main Street Bankers” has more educational appeal than “Streamline Banking Customer Care with the XYZ Solution.”
• Don’t talk about babies on the first date. Long registration forms for white papers, overzealous email drips, and too many commands to “Call us now!” conspire to make a Tentative Buyer feel less in control of the buying cycle. Don’t push for the lead. Let her get to know you.

After earning an education, the Tentative Buyer is ready to officially enter the market for what you offer, and become an Engaged Buyer. Continue reading and learn more:

Click here for Stage 1: The Unaware Buyer.
Click here for Stage 3: The Engaged Buyer.
Click here for Stage 4: The Invested Buyer.
Click here for the Introduction to the Four Stage Series.

Does your prospect need a whack on the head? If he is an Unaware Buyer, he doesn’t care about your product, even if he needs it. And he certainly doesn’t care about your webinar or your trade show booth. The challenge with the Unaware Buyer is that he goes out of his way to avoid any sales pitch, because he doesn’t think he needs to buy anything.

Content for the Unaware Buyer must be interruptive. It has to light a new spark, and cause the would-be prospect to do a double-take and change his mind about what you have to say.

How do you arrest attention from an Unaware Buyer?

• Speak loudly to the pain. Slow downloads? Dropped cell phone calls? High electric bills? Remind your buyers that their needs are too great, and their standards are too high, to live with that pain.
• Make it news. A new research finding is news; your appearance at the upcoming trade show is not. To be interruptive, the information must be new, not rehashed, and original.
• Make it entertaining. The ads people talk about at the water cooler are the ones designed to interrupt an Unaware Buyer into changing brands or “needing” a new innovation. Edgy creative turns heads.
• Know your persona. Develop solid personas for the Unaware Buyers to be sure that your content speaks directly to them, and also gets distributed through the media she uses.

We worked with a client to develop a survey reaching Unaware HR directors. The questions in the survey made the participants (our Unaware Buyers) consider the pain they were tolerating, and become interested in the outcome of our research. The survey results then had an immediate audience with the participants, and fed several effective marketing campaigns to reach more.

Interruptive content for the Unaware Buyer requires massaging before it is useful for the other stages: Tentative, Engaged, and Invested.

Click here for Stage 2: The Tentative Buyer.
Click here for Stage 3: The Engaged Buyer.
Click here for Stage 4: The Invested Buyer
Click here for the Introduction to the Four Stage Series

When I read the declaration "B2B marketers are the new publishers" I both cheer and cringe. I cheer because publisher are empowered--"publishing" means taking charge of an entire platform of content. I cringe because with power comes responsibility, and publishing is a big commitment to the readership (i.e., market). The mantle of a "publisher" feels to me like a solemn duty that goes beyond lead gen. What's that about?

So I read with interest this post by Rob Leavitt, "Can Corporate Journalism Work?" and the post he was editorializing by Ike Piggott, "Dear Journalist:".

Here I was, figuring out how to change from a marketer to a journalist. Meanwhile, Ike recommends to his jobless journalist friends that they become marketers--even as "embedded journalists" like the ones who go to war. Perfect. As print trade pubs dwindle and vanish, and custom publishing is getting a larger share of B2B marketing budgets, it makes perfect sense for journalism and marketing to blur somewhere in between and cut out the publication as middleman. Ideally, marketers get the quality content they need, and journalists find their new place. The blending won't be ideal, of course: journalists will defend objective truths while marketers defend the company line.

Over time, will these blend? Will the company line be held to a higher standard? After the corporate debacles of the last decade, this is already happening. As we marketers take on the mantle of "publisher," it will behoove us to uphold the standards of the journalist.

B2B Marketing Directors are particularly busy these days.

While the economy shows signs of improving, they are skeptical and cautious. They will believe there's an upturn when their budgets and headcounts go back up. Until then, they are running as fast as they can on the tightest resources.

In addition to their own jobs, they are covering for the Events Coordinator who got laid off a year ago, one line-of-business Marketing Manager who hasn't been rehired, and the downsized Product Specialist who used to be so good at sales presentations.

As if they weren't busy enough, B2B marketing consultants and content strategists are telling these harried Marketing Directors that they must also take over the role of print trade media, and think and act like publishers.

The consultants and strategists are correct, but many B2B marketers, in actual practice, are giving this approach lip service at best. Many I know spend too much of their time revising budgets, reporting on metrics, managing people, sitting in budget meetings, and--low on the to-do list--generating content. They have no energy to dynamically transform their content strategy, as it is recommended they do. Deep down, they know it is an imperative--but the notion is overwhelming.

What's the answer? A simple shift in perspective can make the marketers' job easier, not harder. Know the buyer intimately, and write the marketing plan from their point of view.  In fact, to knowing the buyer intimately is a requirement of today's "brand as publisher" imperative that is often underestimated.

Releasing a new product? The product launch schedule and list of features are your drivers. Customer-requested enhancements, and their advantages, are your buyers' drivers. Going to a trade show? The schedule of your company's events is your driver. Recommendations for events IT managers will find interesting is responsive to your buyers' drivers.

The prospect's point of view will uncover better ideas for content, ensure the most appropriate delivery channels, and engage prospects--all of which will make a Marketing Director's job easier.

There’s a chronic disconnect between the motivations of B2B marketers and their prospects. Until marketers fix it, they will contending with their prospects instead of influencing them.

Does your marketing organization suffer from this disconnect? To find out, take a look at your marketing plan for the upcoming quarter. If it is like many, it is driven by internal events like these: 

• A new product is launching: two webinars, datasheets, and a website update.
• It's the spring trade show season: presentations, ads, giveaways, and events.
• The latest client case study will go out: email, press release, trade pub article.

Here's the disconnect: this is your agenda, not your prospect's. Prospects don’t care about these drivers--they have their own. What's the biggest one? Avoiding vendors.

Companies don't buy things; people do. While many marketing plans are driven by corporate concerns, buying behavior is driven by human emotion. Effective marketers communicate to address those emotions. 

Can you put yourself in the shoes of “Sally scared” and “Hal the hero”? Does your content strategy help you speak to their emotions? When it does, your marketing plan will naturally fit their agenda.

Once tweeting and checking-in have become mainstream, the next trend in communications will be "passive conversation discovery," blogs Eloqua's Steve Woods. This conversation will be similar to the algorithm on Amazon.com that gives us our recommendations based on the items we have purchased or browsed.

I can see this coming by observing the emerging features of Google Reader. I can star blog posts I read, and share them with other Google users who follow me in Reader. Soon, I'm sure Google reader will cheerfully greet me with the message, "Hello, Veronica. Here are your reading recommendations for April 2," and present me with blog posts and articles it has searched that are similar to what I read on April 1. Not what I selected, mind you, but what it discovered for me. (Google Reader Play seems to go in this direction, but I can't quite figure it out yet.)

Beyond the blog posts I find in my Google Reader, conversation discovery would lead me to tweets, Facebook pages, and discussion threads. It would help me filter all the social media, and lead me to what it deems to be of interest to me.

Or rather: what you, as a B2B marketer, deem to be of interest to me?

The challenge for B2B marketers will be to make our content discoverable in these new contexts--not just static pages optimized for "traditional" search engines, but dynamic conversations, optimized for the next wave of search. That means not just writing about the product, but gettting other people talking about the product.

If that is interesting to you, please share this blog post with all your Friends.