Deciphering online buying patterns and regaining control of the sales cycle were just a few of the topics covered as executives from GrowthFusion, DemandGen International and BrightTalk shared strategies for harnessing online buyer behavior at BrightTalk’s 2013 Digital Body Language Summit.
The webinars also covered:
- Best practices for impacting the buying process through effective lead nurturing;
- Fundamentals of lead scoring; and
- The importance of customer analytics.
{loadposition SPIAA} Rajesh Kadam, Principal at Demand generation agency GrowthFusion, discussed ways to reel in prospects, lead nurturing best practices as well as tips to accelerating the buying process.
“There’s more than enough data speaking on the benefits of nurturing,” according to Kadam. “The question is, if you’re not doing it, well why not, and how do marketers need to do next to get started?”
“It’s nearly impossible to keep track of the information and data available to prospects, including information available during the buying process,” Kadam added. “Prospects cannot make the transition to buyer with everything going on.”
Winning Lead Nurturing Campaigns
To succeed with lead nurturing, Kadam suggested marketers gain a better understanding of their buyers, what motivates them and what are the elements of the ideal user experience. In addition, Kadam said marketers must define their nurture program as well as automate communications with prospects.
Kadam shared five goals of lead nurturing during the webinar:
- Accelerate the sales process by moving prospects through a structured buying cycle;
- Keep your company/solution top-of-mind;
- Reveal your benefits in serialized sound-bites;
- Capture qualification profiles; and
- Measure and increase the prospect’s interest.
Buying Patterns Exposed
During his session, titled: “Deciphering Customer Buying Patterns,” DemandGen CEO David Lewis shared insights, including the types of behaviors prospects commonly exhibit in a buying cycle, the impact of online engagement in lead scoring models, and how different types of activity patterns suggest to sales when it’s time to engage with a prospect.
Lewis compared the online buying cycle to a consumer entering a brick-and-mortar store. “In the physical world marketers can see the interest of a lead. When you walk into a store, you not only look at the store, you’re looking at the products, services and signage that’s available. It’s critical for marketers to pay attention to the behaviors of someone browsing through your web site, interacting with your nurture programs that are analogists to trying on clothes, looking at a price tag, wanting to engage with someone to get more information.”
Lewis added: “Using this as a backdrop to thinking about your approach to engaging with prospects and leads is going to make you rethink the content that is on your web site as well as the content you’re using in your emails.”
There are five key points to keep in mind when deciphering the customer’s buying pattern, according to Lewis:
- Thought leadership content normally attracts shoppers vs. buyers;
- Free trials and demos lure shoppers and buyers;
- Product comparisons/selectors lure buyers;
- Abandoned shopping carts are like fish falling off the hook and companies need to follow up; and
- Mix and mash nurture content to keep both types of prospects engaged.
Lewis also shared a few activity patterns marketers should monitor within their prospects, include: multiple site visits and frequency; above average time on site; above average page visits; viewing depth of product/service pages and whether or not the prospects attended online/offline events.
“If the prospect is committing their time to consuming content and researching for a particular need have an interest in purchasing the solution,” Lewis said. “Non-buyer indicators, such as corporate information content consumption, do not need to be monitored. You’re going to find that there are ‘content groupies’ — people that download a lot of content.”
Educating Prospects Through Rich Content
Val-Pierre Genton, Brightalk’s VP of Strategic Accounts, shared industry data based on the sales cycle and ways to shift control of the buying cycle back into the hands of marketers.
Professionals are increasingly educating themselves online and through mobile devices. Based on the Zero Moment of Truth data from Google, buyers are consuming an average of 10 times more information sources prior to making the purchase. As a result, partners and end-customers go further in their decision process before reaching out to sales. In addition, more than half (57%) of customer are choosing to delay commercial conversations with suppliers.
By creating more content, staff, partners and customer have become overwhelmed by text, noted Genton. “Although we use online and mobile devices to access information, we’re bombarded with content, text-space information that is very often organized in a way that makes a lot of sense.”
Genton offered some tips for making the effort to educate your prospects worthwhile:
- Two- to three-minute videos are good for trends, competitive insights and objection handling;
- Webinars lasting 15 to 45 minutes are good for technical solution and in-depth sales training;
- Animations are good for demystifying complicated solutions
- Two- to three-minute videos are good for building trust (top funnel);
- Webinars that run a half hour to an hour are good for technical or use case discussions (mid funnel); and
- Animations are good for showcasing the connection of customer pain and your solution (bottom funnel).
Genton noted the importance of driving content in the hand of end-customers through rich content such as video. “When you’re bringing content to life in an audio-visual form, you’re using less text space and it’s more memorable—we remember 50% of what we hear and see and only 10% of what we read.”
On June 25, BrightTalk will present the final session of its Summit sponsored by Actuate, a business intelligence software and enterprise performance tools provider. Click here to learn more and register for the webcast titled: “Customer Analytics: Turn Big Data Into Big Value.”
