REACHING YOUR BUYERS DIRECTLY
The frustration of relying exclusively on the media and expensive advertising to deliver
your organization's story is long gone. Yes, mainstream media are still important, but
today smart marketers craft compelling information and tell the world directly via the
web. The tremendous expense of relying on advertising to convince buyers to pay
attention to your organization, ideas, products, and services is yesterday's headache.
Chip McDermott founded ZeroTrash 1 as a nonprofit organization to rid the streets and
beaches of Laguna Beach, California, of trash. Population and tourism had exploded,
and the city had not kept up in providing sufficient infrastructure for public trash and
recycling. McDermott used the web to rally the community with a grassroots movement.
“The spark of the idea was that trash was becoming commonplace on the streets and
the sidewalks of Laguna Beach,” McDermott says. “We started to tackle the problem
with a Facebook 2 page for ZeroTrash Laguna and quickly built it to hundreds of
members.”
People use the ZeroTrash Facebook page to organize events and to connect local store
owners with residents. Facebook was instrumental in launching the ZeroTrash First
Saturday movement, where store owners and volunteers walk the city and pick up trash
on the first Saturday of each month. The store owners love it because people support
local stores and keep the shopping areas clean. In turn, McDermott has tapped store
owners as sponsors who fund the purchase of supplies and tools like trash pickers, Tshirts, trash bags, and gloves.
McDermott also uses Twitter (@ZeroTrash) to get the word out. The social media sites
serve to keep people updated about what ZeroTrash is up to. For example, on a recent
First Saturday, the Laguna Beach community helped to remove another 590 pounds of
trash and 375 pounds of recyclables from the streets; McDermott used the social media
sites to report these totals to interested people.
After the initial success in Laguna Beach, ZeroTrash now also serves Newport Beach
and Dana Point in Southern California and Chico in Northern California, and is
launching in Seattle, Washington, soon. “We want people to take individual ownership
of each new local ZeroTrash community,” he says. “How can they get people with a
passion to take control and start in their own communities? The obvious answer is to
use social media to influence people.”
There's no doubt that getting the word out about an idea, a product, or a service is much
simpler when you can rely on social media sites like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. The
web allows any organization—including nonprofits like ZeroTrash, as well as companies
large and small, candidates for public office, government agencies, schools, artists, and
even job seekers—to reach buyers directly. This power is clear to nearly everyone
these days, but many executives and entrepreneurs still struggle to find the right mix of
traditional advertising and direct communication with buyers.
The Right Marketing in a Wired World
Century 21 Real Estate LLC 3 is the franchisor of the world's largest residential real estate
sales organization, an industry giant with approximately 8,000 offices in 45 countries. The
company had been spending on television advertising for years but, in a significant strategy
change, pulled its national television advertising and invested those resources into online
marketing.
Wow! I've seen Century 21 TV ads for years. We're talking millions of dollars shifting from
TV to the web. This is a big deal.
“We are moving our advertising investments to the mediums that have the greatest
relevance to our target buyers and sellers, and to where the return on our investment is
most significant,” says Bev Thorne, chief marketing officer at Century 21. “We found that
our online investments provided a return that was substantively higher than our more
traditional TV media investments.”
Thorne and her team learned that people who are in the market to buy or sell a home rely
heavily on the web and that the closer they get to a real estate transaction, the more they
use online resources. “We are embracing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Active Rain, and
others,” Thorne says. “YouTube is a central component of our activities, and we seek to
utilize it even more.”
Many companies spending large amounts of money on television advertising (and other
offline marketing such as direct mail, magazine and newspaper advertising, and Yellow
Pages listings) are afraid to make even partial moves away from their comfort zones and
into online marketing and social media. But the evidence describing how people actually
research products overwhelmingly suggests that companies must tell their stories and
spread their ideas online, at the precise moment that potential buyers are searching for
answers.
It's an exciting time to be a marketer, no matter what business you're in. We have been
liberated from relying exclusively on buying access through advertising or convincing
mainstream media to talk us up. Now we can publish information on the web that people
are eager to pay attention to.
GROWING YOUR BUSINESS: HOW MARKETING AND PR
DRIVE SALES
Successful selling no longer follows the playbook that worked even just a few years
ago. The rules have changed here, too, yet most organizations and the salespeople
they employ haven't made the transition.
Because of the wealth of information on the web, the salesperson no longer controls the
relationship between buyer and seller. Now, buyers are in charge. They can see what
your CEO is saying on Twitter and LinkedIn. They can check out independent blogs to
learn what it's really like to be a customer. Buyers actively go around salespeople,
gathering information themselves and engaging a company representative only at the
last possible moment. By then, they are armed with tons of information. In the old days,
salespeople controlled the information. Now it's the buyers who have the leverage.
It gets worse. As you probably know, salespeople have a bad reputation in the
marketplace. Except for salespeople themselves, almost everyone I talk to associates
sales with being hustled and taken advantage of. They think of dealing with a
salesperson as a purely adversarial relationship. The very word sales summons sleazy
connotations, so people get defensive immediately to protect themselves.
It's Time for a Sales Transformation
During the past several years, hundreds of people have asked me to extend the ideas in this
book to the area of sales. Almost every day, I hear from people who have transformed their
organizations' marketing and public relations functions and are now ready to do the same
with their sales departments. Like anyone following the new rules, I listened. In 2012, I
began research on how the ideas in this book apply to sales. I found incredible examples of
how content also influences sales, so I wrote a follow-on book to the one you're reading.
Released in 2014, it's titled The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling,
Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your
Business (an excerpt from it is included at the end of this book). This chapter explains the
basics of how to apply the ideas from the Sales and Servicebook. If you work in a larger
organization, you'll learn how to work with your sales colleagues. If you're an
entrepreneur, business owner, or employee of a smaller organization, you'll see how to
integrate marketing and sales to grow your business.
Before we dig in, let's take a moment to look at how these two disciplines differ. By making
certain we understand the difference, we can then close the gap between marketing and
sales and grow business faster.
Marketing generates attention from the many people who make up a buyer persona. Sales
content (and salespeople), on the other hand, communicates with one potential customer
at a time, putting the buying process into context.
Reaching many people: The job of marketers is to understand buyer personas and
communicate with these groups in a one-to-many approach. That's what most of this book
is all about. Web content as a marketing asset captures the attention of a group of buyers
and drives those people into and through the sales process. The content marketers
create—blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books, webinars, and the like—can
influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a research-based understanding of
buyer personas, this content generates sales leads.
Influencing one person at a time: The role of sales is completely different. The goal of a
salesperson is to influence one buyer at a time, typically when the buyer is already close to
making a purchase decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience
of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyer. They add context to the
company's expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers' content fulfills
its potential by connecting buyer to salesperson when the buyer is interested.
If, like me, you run a small business, you're probably playing both roles—communicating to
your wider marketplace and engaging with one interested buyer at a time.
In this chapter, we're going to build on some of the ideas and concepts I've already
introduced. In Chapter 3, we talked about reaching buyers directly with your organization's
online content, and Chapter 10 was where we put together a detailed plan to identify and
target buyer personas with individualized approaches. But to extend these ideas to sales,
we're also going to talk about some new concepts, particularly how content influences
individual buyers when they close in on a purchase decision.
Let's start the chapter with some ideas for how you can build a website that walks buyers
through the research process as they consider doing business with your organization and
moves them toward the place where they are ready to buy (or donate, or join, or
subscribe). Remember, that's the goal of all web content! We'll also spend some time
discussing how you can work directly with the salespeople in your organization.
How Web Content Influences the Buying Process
As I've said many times in these pages, when people want to buy something, the web is
almost always the first stop on their shopping trip. In any market category, potential
customers head online to conduct research. The moment of truth is when they reach your
site: Will you draw them into your sales process, or allow them click away?
While many marketers now understand that content drives action, and quite a few have
embraced the ideas in this book, the vast majority focus their content effort only at the very
top of the sales consideration process. In other words, they create content to attract buyers
but none to support the salespeople. That's a big mistake!
People don't go to the web looking for advertising; they are on a quest for content.
When buyers arrive at your site, you have an opportunity to deliver targeted information at
the precise moment when they are looking for what you have to offer. By providing
information when they need it, you can begin a long and profitable relationship with them.
Editors and publishers obsess over maintaining readership. So should you.
To best leverage the power of content, you first need to help your site's visitors find what
they need. When someone arrives for the first time, he or she receives a series of
messages—whether you realize it or not. These messages are answering the questions that
matter to the visitor.
•
Does this organization care about me?
•
Does it focus on the problems I face?
•
Does it share my perspective or push its own on me?
You need to start with site navigation that is designed and organized with your buyers in
mind. Don't simply mimic the way your company or group is organized (e.g., by product,
geography, or governmental structure), because the way your audience uses websites
rarely coincides with your company's internal priorities. Organizing based on your needs
leaves site visitors confused about how to find what they really need.
You should learn as much as possible about your buyers' process, focusing on issues such
as how they find your site or how long they consider a purchase. Consider what happens
offline in parallel with online interactions. The two should complement each other. For
example, if you have an e-commerce site and a printed catalog, coordinate the content so
that both efforts support and reinforce the buying process: include URLs for your online
buying guide in the catalog, and use the same product descriptions online, so people don't
get confused. In the B2B world, trade shows should work together with Internet initiatives.
For instance, you might collect email addresses at the booth and then send a follow-up
email pointing to a show-specific landing page.
For most B2B products and services, as well as higher-priced consumer goods, your buyers
will at some point need to reach out to engage with a representative of your company. In
that moment, you've gone from marketing to your buyers as a group to selling to your
buyer as an individual person. While this process may happen via email, the phone, social
networking, or an in-person visit, content still plays a vital role in getting the buyer ready
to buy. But you have to understand the process to help shape it.
Tips for Creating a Buyer-Centric Website
The online relationship begins the second a potential customer hits your homepage. The
first thing he or she needs to find is a self-reflection. That's why you must organize your
site with content for each of your distinct buyer personas. How do your potential
customers self-select? Is it based on their job function, on geography, or on the industry
they work in? It's important to create a set of appropriate links based on a clear
understanding of your buyers, so you can quickly move them from your homepage to pages
built specifically for them.
One way many organizations approach navigation is to link to landing pages based on the
problems your product or service solves. Start by identifying the situations in which each
target audience may find itself. If you are in the supply chain management business, you
might have a drop-down menu on the homepage with links that say, “I need to get product
to customers faster” or “I want to move products internationally.” Each path leads to
landing pages built for buyer segments, with content targeted to their problems. Once
buyers reach those pages, you have the opportunity to communicate your expertise in
solving these problems—building some empathy in the process. Then you can move
customers further along the buying cycle, handing them off to a salesperson when
appropriate.
As you build a site that focuses on your buyers and their purchasing process, here are some
tips to consider.
Develop a Site Personality
It is important to create a distinct, consistent, and memorable site. The tone of voice of the
content will contribute to that goal. As visitors interact with the content on your site, they
should develop a clear picture of your organization. Is the personality fun and playful? Or is
it solid and conservative? For example, when people search on the Google homepage, they
can choose to click “I'm Feeling Lucky.” That's a fun and playful way for them to be taken
directly to the top listing in the search results. That one little phrase, “I'm Feeling Lucky,”
says a lot about Google.
And there's more where that came from. For example, the collection of more than 100
Google-supported languages goes from Afrikaans to Zulu but also includes the language of
Elmer Fudd.1 If you choose this option, you'll see everything translated into Fudd-speak,
“I'm Feewing Wucky,” for example. You probably also know about Google's fun tradition of
modifying its homepage logo to mark special events. Called Google Doodles, these
whimsically altered logos vary around the world to celebrate everything from Australia
Day to Cezanne's birthday. This is cool, but it wouldn't work for a more conservative
company—it would just seem strange and out of place.
Contrast Google's homepage to Accenture's.2 At the time of this writing, the Accenture logo
appeared just above a tone-creating promise: “High Performance. Delivered.” The site
features photos with messages such as “We have advised clients on more than 570 merger
and acquisition deals in the last 5 years” and “Every year our systems process 300 million
airline ticket reservations.”
Both of these homepages work because the site personality is compatible with the
company personality. Whatever your personality, the way to achieve consistency is to
make certain that the written material, as well as the other content on the site, conforms to
a defined tone that you've established from the start. A strong focus on site personality and
character pays off. As visitors come to rely on the content they find on your site, they will
develop an emotional and personal relationship with your organization. A website can
evoke a familiar and trusted voice, just like that of a friend on the other end of an email
exchange.
For an example of a site with a very distinct personality, check out HOTforSecurity from
BitDefender.3 BitDefender is a particularly interesting example because the online security
market is very competitive, making product differentiation a challenge. A cornerstone of
the company's marketing approach, HOTforSecurity was launched as a stand-alone site
focused on key influencers within the information technology (IT) security community. The
new site was not a redesign of the existing company site but, rather, an informational
supplement to the main BitDefender product site.4
HOTforSecurity is for people who are interested in the latest information on Internet
threats. The BitDefender team clearly understands that the best online initiatives are those
that deliver specific information tailored to a particular buyer persona. The HOTforSecurity
site was developed to appeal to three different buyer personas:
1. IT security press (both mainstream press and social media).
2. BitDefender users.
3. A group of “Internet security geeks”—the most important buyer persona for
HOTforSecurity.
The HOTforSecurity site appeals directly to the Internet security geek buyer persona. Who
else would appreciate dryly incredulous headlines like this one: “Windows 8 Stores Logon
Passwords in Plain Text.” The design is clearly that of an informational site that might be a
media property—in stark contrast to the slew of boring corporate tech sites. It delivers
valuable information to everyone interested in Internet security issues, not just
BitDefender users. It is not a sales site, so people trust it. While there are identifiers that the
site is an online property of BitDefender, it is a subtle tie. They don't brag about it, but they
don't hide the association, either. With a growing audience of approximately 65,000
Twitter followers and 550,000 Facebook fans, HOTforSecurity from Bit Defender is a great
example of online content that effectively reaches buyers.
Photos and Images Tell Your Story
GROWING YOUR BUSINESS: HOW MARKETING AND PR
DRIVE SALES
Successful selling no longer follows the playbook that worked even just a few years
ago. The rules have changed here, too, yet most organizations and the salespeople
they employ haven't made the transition.
Because of the wealth of information on the web, the salesperson no longer controls the
relationship between buyer and seller. Now, buyers are in charge. They can see what
your CEO is saying on Twitter and LinkedIn. They can check out independent blogs to
learn what it's really like to be a customer. Buyers actively go around salespeople,
gathering information themselves and engaging a company representative only at the
last possible moment. By then, they are armed with tons of information. In the old days,
salespeople controlled the information. Now it's the buyers who have the leverage.
It gets worse. As you probably know, salespeople have a bad reputation in the
marketplace. Except for salespeople themselves, almost everyone I talk to associates
sales with being hustled and taken advantage of. They think of dealing with a
salesperson as a purely adversarial relationship. The very word sales summons sleazy
connotations, so people get defensive immediately to protect themselves.
It's Time for a Sales Transformation
During the past several years, hundreds of people have asked me to extend the ideas in this
book to the area of sales. Almost every day, I hear from people who have transformed their
organizations' marketing and public relations functions and are now ready to do the same
with their sales departments. Like anyone following the new rules, I listened. In 2012, I
began research on how the ideas in this book apply to sales. I found incredible examples of
how content also influences sales, so I wrote a follow-on book to the one you're reading.
Released in 2014, it's titled The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling,
Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your
Business (an excerpt from it is included at the end of this book). This chapter explains the
basics of how to apply the ideas from the Sales and Servicebook. If you work in a larger
organization, you'll learn how to work with your sales colleagues. If you're an
entrepreneur, business owner, or employee of a smaller organization, you'll see how to
integrate marketing and sales to grow your business.
Before we dig in, let's take a moment to look at how these two disciplines differ. By making
certain we understand the difference, we can then close the gap between marketing and
sales and grow business faster.
Marketing generates attention from the many people who make up a buyer persona. Sales
content (and salespeople), on the other hand, communicates with one potential customer
at a time, putting the buying process into context.
Reaching many people: The job of marketers is to understand buyer personas and
communicate with these groups in a one-to-many approach. That's what most of this book
is all about. Web content as a marketing asset captures the attention of a group of buyers
and drives those people into and through the sales process. The content marketers
create—blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books, webinars, and the like—can
influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a research-based understanding of
buyer personas, this content generates sales leads.
Influencing one person at a time: The role of sales is completely different. The goal of a
salesperson is to influence one buyer at a time, typically when the buyer is already close to
making a purchase decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience
of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyer. They add context to the
company's expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers' content fulfills
its potential by connecting buyer to salesperson when the buyer is interested.
If, like me, you run a small business, you're probably playing both roles—communicating to
your wider marketplace and engaging with one interested buyer at a time.
In this chapter, we're going to build on some of the ideas and concepts I've already
introduced. In Chapter 3, we talked about reaching buyers directly with your organization's
online content, and Chapter 10 was where we put together a detailed plan to identify and
target buyer personas with individualized approaches. But to extend these ideas to sales,
we're also going to talk about some new concepts, particularly how content influences
individual buyers when they close in on a purchase decision.
Let's start the chapter with some ideas for how you can build a website that walks buyers
through the research process as they consider doing business with your organization and
moves them toward the place where they are ready to buy (or donate, or join, or
subscribe). Remember, that's the goal of all web content! We'll also spend some time
discussing how you can work directly with the salespeople in your organization.
How Web Content Influences the Buying Process
As I've said many times in these pages, when people want to buy something, the web is
almost always the first stop on their shopping trip. In any market category, potential
customers head online to conduct research. The moment of truth is when they reach your
site: Will you draw them into your sales process, or allow them click away?
While many marketers now understand that content drives action, and quite a few have
embraced the ideas in this book, the vast majority focus their content effort only at the very
top of the sales consideration process. In other words, they create content to attract buyers
but none to support the salespeople. That's a big mistake!
People don't go to the web looking for advertising; they are on a quest for content.
When buyers arrive at your site, you have an opportunity to deliver targeted information at
the precise moment when they are looking for what you have to offer. By providing
information when they need it, you can begin a long and profitable relationship with them.
Editors and publishers obsess over maintaining readership. So should you.
To best leverage the power of content, you first need to help your site's visitors find what
they need. When someone arrives for the first time, he or she receives a series of
messages—whether you realize it or not. These messages are answering the questions that
matter to the visitor.
•
Does this organization care about me?
•
Does it focus on the problems I face?
•
Does it share my perspective or push its own on me?
You need to start with site navigation that is designed and organized with your buyers in
mind. Don't simply mimic the way your company or group is organized (e.g., by product,
geography, or governmental structure), because the way your audience uses websites
rarely coincides with your company's internal priorities. Organizing based on your needs
leaves site visitors confused about how to find what they really need.
You should learn as much as possible about your buyers' process, focusing on issues such
as how they find your site or how long they consider a purchase. Consider what happens
offline in parallel with online interactions. The two should complement each other. For
example, if you have an e-commerce site and a printed catalog, coordinate the content so
that both efforts support and reinforce the buying process: include URLs for your online
buying guide in the catalog, and use the same product descriptions online, so people don't
get confused. In the B2B world, trade shows should work together with Internet initiatives.
For instance, you might collect email addresses at the booth and then send a follow-up
email pointing to a show-specific landing page.
For most B2B products and services, as well as higher-priced consumer goods, your buyers
will at some point need to reach out to engage with a representative of your company. In
that moment, you've gone from marketing to your buyers as a group to selling to your
buyer as an individual person. While this process may happen via email, the phone, social
networking, or an in-person visit, content still plays a vital role in getting the buyer ready
to buy. But you have to understand the process to help shape it.
Tips for Creating a Buyer-Centric Website
The online relationship begins the second a potential customer hits your homepage. The
first thing he or she needs to find is a self-reflection. That's why you must organize your
site with content for each of your distinct buyer personas. How do your potential
customers self-select? Is it based on their job function, on geography, or on the industry
they work in? It's important to create a set of appropriate links based on a clear
understanding of your buyers, so you can quickly move them from your homepage to pages
built specifically for them.
One way many organizations approach navigation is to link to landing pages based on the
problems your product or service solves. Start by identifying the situations in which each
target audience may find itself. If you are in the supply chain management business, you
might have a drop-down menu on the homepage with links that say, “I need to get product
to customers faster” or “I want to move products internationally.” Each path leads to
landing pages built for buyer segments, with content targeted to their problems. Once
buyers reach those pages, you have the opportunity to communicate your expertise in
solving these problems—building some empathy in the process. Then you can move
customers further along the buying cycle, handing them off to a salesperson when
appropriate.
As you build a site that focuses on your buyers and their purchasing process, here are some
tips to consider.
Develop a Site Personality
It is important to create a distinct, consistent, and memorable site. The tone of voice of the
content will contribute to that goal. As visitors interact with the content on your site, they
should develop a clear picture of your organization. Is the personality fun and playful? Or is
it solid and conservative? For example, when people search on the Google homepage, they
can choose to click “I'm Feeling Lucky.” That's a fun and playful way for them to be taken
directly to the top listing in the search results. That one little phrase, “I'm Feeling Lucky,”
says a lot about Google.
And there's more where that came from. For example, the collection of more than 100
Google-supported languages goes from Afrikaans to Zulu but also includes the language of
Elmer Fudd.1 If you choose this option, you'll see everything translated into Fudd-speak,
“I'm Feewing Wucky,” for example. You probably also know about Google's fun tradition of
modifying its homepage logo to mark special events. Called Google Doodles, these
whimsically altered logos vary around the world to celebrate everything from Australia
Day to Cezanne's birthday. This is cool, but it wouldn't work for a more conservative
company—it would just seem strange and out of place.
Contrast Google's homepage to Accenture's.2 At the time of this writing, the Accenture logo
appeared just above a tone-creating promise: “High Performance. Delivered.” The site
features photos with messages such as “We have advised clients on more than 570 merger
and acquisition deals in the last 5 years” and “Every year our systems process 300 million
airline ticket reservations.”
Both of these homepages work because the site personality is compatible with the
company personality. Whatever your personality, the way to achieve consistency is to
make certain that the written material, as well as the other content on the site, conforms to
a defined tone that you've established from the start. A strong focus on site personality and
character pays off. As visitors come to rely on the content they find on your site, they will
develop an emotional and personal relationship with your organization. A website can
evoke a familiar and trusted voice, just like that of a friend on the other end of an email
exchange.
For an example of a site with a very distinct personality, check out HOTforSecurity from
BitDefender.3 BitDefender is a particularly interesting example because the online security
market is very competitive, making product differentiation a challenge. A cornerstone of
the company's marketing approach, HOTforSecurity was launched as a stand-alone site
focused on key influencers within the information technology (IT) security community. The
new site was not a redesign of the existing company site but, rather, an informational
supplement to the main BitDefender product site.4
HOTforSecurity is for people who are interested in the latest information on Internet
threats. The BitDefender team clearly understands that the best online initiatives are those
that deliver specific information tailored to a particular buyer persona. The HOTforSecurity
site was developed to appeal to three different buyer personas:
1. IT security press (both mainstream press and social media).
2. BitDefender users.
3. A group of “Internet security geeks”—the most important buyer persona for
HOTforSecurity.
The HOTforSecurity site appeals directly to the Internet security geek buyer persona. Who
else would appreciate dryly incredulous headlines like this one: “Windows 8 Stores Logon
Passwords in Plain Text.” The design is clearly that of an informational site that might be a
media property—in stark contrast to the slew of boring corporate tech sites. It delivers
valuable information to everyone interested in Internet security issues, not just
BitDefender users. It is not a sales site, so people trust it. While there are identifiers that the
site is an online property of BitDefender, it is a subtle tie. They don't brag about it, but they
don't hide the association, either. With a growing audience of approximately 65,000
Twitter followers and 550,000 Facebook fans, HOTforSecurity from Bit Defender is a great
example of online content that effectively reaches buyers.
Photos and Images Tell Your Story
Purchase answer to see full
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