Category: B2B Buyers

  • What “Professional” B2B Buyers Want

    What “Professional” B2B Buyers Want

    ,

    For obvious reasons, B2B marketers have always craved insights about their current and potential buyers. Such insights can enable astute marketers to craft more compelling value propositions, run more effective marketing programs, and deliver better customer experiences. Every year, I review several research studies that focus on the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of B2B buyers.…

  • Four Keys to Strong Customer Relationships

    Four Keys to Strong Customer Relationships

    , , , , ,

    A recent report by Accenture Interactive provides several interesting insights on both the fragility of B2B seller-buyer relationships and what B2B companies need to do to strengthen long-term customer relationships. Service is the new sales was based on interviews with 748 business buyers and 1,499 B2B sellers across 10 countries and 16 industries. All of the…

  • Why Your Marketing Content Should Be “Job Focused”

    Why Your Marketing Content Should Be “Job Focused”

    , , ,

    The first step to designing an effective marketing strategy and creating compelling marketing content is to understand what your potential customers are trying to accomplish when they purchase products or services like those you provide. In most cases, people don’t buy a product or service because they want that product or service itself. More often,…

  • A Fresh Look at Millennial B2B Buyers

    A Fresh Look at Millennial B2B Buyers

    , ,

    The role of millennials in B2B buying decisions, and their distinctive attitudes and behaviors as business buyers have become major topics of interest for B2B marketing and sales professionals over the past five years. Since 2014, numerous research studies – including studies by the IBM Institute for Business Value, Google/Millward Brown Digital, Merit, and Heinz…

  • Have the Differences Between B2B and B2C Marketing Disappeared?

    , ,

    Recently, it’s become popular to downplay the differences between B2B and B2C marketing. Some industry analysts and commentators have forcefully argued that all marketing should be viewed as “business-to-human,” “human-to-human,” or something similar. It’s certainly accurate to say that virtually all forms of marketing involve the communication of messages to human beings. It’s equally true…

  • Marketers Get Better At Strategic Content Management

    , ,

    Marketers have made noteworthy progress in managing content strategically, but still have work to do to match content with the right audience segments and customer expectations, and to fully leverage content management technologies.That is the major theme of the third annual content management survey published recently by the Content Marketing Institute. The objective of this…

  • Why B2B Buying Cycles Are So Long

    , ,

    (The following is a post I published about two years ago. Since then, the number of people in the average B2B buying group has increased, and buying cycles are getting longer. New research by the Aberdeen Group explains why long buying cycles are still a fact of life for B2B marketing and sales professionals.)The Original…

  • Two Ways to Make Personalization Welcomed

    , , ,

    In my last post, I discussed the inconsistent and often contradictory attitudes of consumers and business buyers regarding personalized marketing. On one hand, numerous research studies have confirmed that most consumers and business buyers want personalized offers, messages, and experiences, and are willing to provide personal information in order to receive such offers, messages, and…