I’ve always believed you need to engage B2B buyers from start to finish. This means building brand and moving into demand. Brand and demand belong in the same story. Brand vs. demand is a false choice. You need to account for this in your GTM plan.
This way, you can map storylines that include context shifts that happen as buyers gain knowledge and confidence. The higher the impact of your content on buyer perspectives and intent, the better your chances of getting on the Day 1 list.
The point is to get your ideas and expertise used as the “anchors” for how buyers interpret and think about the problem and how to solve it. You want your ideas to be the yardstick against which they measure the alternatives.
To structure these storylines, I find it’s better to get away from high-level stage buckets like Awareness, Consideration, and Evaluation or the acronyms TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. These are internal structures that distract us from what our buyers care about.
The other problem is that buckets like Awareness, Consideration, Evaluation leave interpretation up in the air. What counts as awareness content? Does that mean it’s not relevant during the consideration stage? What if the buyer is (theoretically) in the consideration stage when she learns about your company? Does that mean she will overlook the awareness content that positions your product?
Nope. It does not.
Gartner finds that most buyers will revisit nearly every buying job at least once before making a purchase. So, my question is really about the need to assess how marketers are addressing the B2B buying journey.
Is the traditional “funnel” feeding our irrelevance?
I’ve spoken with more than a thousand buyers when working on persona projects. When I ask them to walk me through the steps of buying my client’s product, not one of them has mentioned the common stages used to define the so-called funnel. In fact, most start with what they’re familiar with and then work backwards before moving forward again armed with new information.
Most complex B2B purchases take a lot of time. And traditional funnel buckets don’t help you get down on the ground with your buyers. Which is necessary when 70% of the buying experience is buyer driven and without vendor conversations.
Consider how your mindset shifts as you look at these buyer-focused buckets:
- Why should I care? (About the problem)
- What do I need to know? (To solve the problem successfully)
- What’s in it for me/my company? (Outcomes from the capability to solve the problem)
- Will it work? (Use cases and evidence)
- What if…? (How to minimize risk)
- Why you? (Validation they’re making the right choice)
- Will it scale? (How they get more value beyond solving the original problem)
Addressing the buckets above helps you relate to buyer context. And you can clearly see progression from start to finish. And, yes, it would be beautiful if buyers accessed the content you’ll create for each bucket as you intend. They won’t.
But you’ll have a structure and flow that ensures you’ve left no stone unturned when you use your well-built personas and ICPs to inform the storylines you map out and develop.
These contextual buckets help you address the progression of brand to demand. Your company’s point of view about the problem and thought leadership sharing your expertise will indeed contribute to building brand which build the memory structures to create demand over time.
It’s not brand vs. demand, it’s both. It’s a progression, a continuum – even if it looks like spaghetti to us. We can see this clearly as we match our buyers’ patterns of engagement against our B2B buyer journey plans.
Successful Buyer-Driven Experiences Rely on Context Shifts
B2B marketers know buyers have taken control of their purchase process. They’re pushing sales interactions out to after they’ve done their research, defined requirements, assessed their options, and formed their Day 1 list. If you aren’t on that list, you’re not in the conversation from that point forward barring a miracle.
Therefore, marketing has a huge opportunity to create experiences based on storylines designed to be buyer driven.
And the element that plays an outsized role here is context.
Think about the nature of questions and answers.
Your buyer is asking – why should I care about solving this problem?
He encounters content that clearly lays out the challenges the problem causes and the impacts from not solving it.
As he ingests this information, his context shifts. The new information allows for a new question to form.
Ok, he thinks. So, if I solve the problem, what’s in it for me and my company? What difference will it make?
Which just happens to be the “What’s next” content link at the end of the article.
And so on.
The Value of Focusing on Buyer Context
If you’re using the buyer-focused buckets above to help you define what content is relevant based on buyer context, that helps you with a few things:
- Increasing engagement due to content relevance from focusing on buyers, not products.
- Organizing distribution to help your self-guided buyers connect the dots. (no dead ends)
- Solidifying awareness via sharing meaningful, relevant, useful information.
- Building positive engagement creates memory structures, momentum – and buyer confidence.
If you’re really dialed in to your ICP and personas, you’ll also know when it makes sense for buyers to see content that’s relevant to share with others on the buying committee and place it accordingly to help them build consensus.
Because if the new measure of an “in-market” account is the number of people from that account actively engaged, you also need to make gaining that level of engagement a priority. The more people on the account’s buying committee familiar with your brand—and ideas—the better.
Just be sure you’ve shared content relevant to each of the distinct roles involved.
Powerful B2B Marketing Isn’t a Choice About Brand vs. Demand
Companies ask marketers to do more with less. Often, a lot more.
Taking a storyline approach to creating buyer-driven experiences helps you address buyer context by starting with brand and building momentum toward demand.
Addressing this brand-to-demand continuum in a connected, thoughtful way shows your buyers you know them, their problem, and that you have the expertise they need to solve it—without undue risk.
That’s quite a difference from random acts of content that may hit or miss and don’t work together to build buyers’ confidence and trust. Which is often what you get with a brand vs. demand approach.
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