Marketing Articles About Buyers Search Results
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Is The Effective Online Marketing Strategy. Launching a website doesn?TMt suffice its function as there a lot more to it. In order to expand your business and reach the customers and buyers all around the globe one needs to have a mass approach...
(09/04/08 09:00 PM)
- Professional Copywriting - Convert Visitors into Buyers. The core objective of professional copywriting is not only to improve the search engine rankings but also to convert visitors into buyers. What persuades the audience to revisit your site is its conte...
(08/22/08 09:01 AM)
- Professional Copywriting - Convert Visitors into Buyers. The core objective of professional copywriting is not only to improve the search engine rankings but also to convert visitors into buyers. What persuades the audience to revisit your site is its conte...
(08/04/08 09:01 AM)
- Copywriting - 5 Steps To Prepare . What sells your product? Too many people build a website with graphics, thinking they will get the attention of prospects that will turn into buyers. Now graphics may get attention, but it's the w...
(07/28/08 09:01 AM)
- Communication Is Everything. If you are serious about being successful in an online business, then you must be able and willing to work hard to communicate with your buyers. If you aren't willing to put in the kind of time neede...
(07/27/08 09:01 AM)
- Three Key Determinants of Your Company's Readiness to Plunge Into Social Media. By looking at your company's readiness in conjunction with your market, your competitors, and your buyers, you'll be able to determine what the potential is (or isn't) for social media. What's more, you'll be able to assess where you should be diving in, or what's a realistic starting place.
(05/27/08 09:00 AM)
- Three Factors to Consider Before You Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon. Should your company should start a blog, open a Facebook account, or be on YouTube? Start by taking a giant step backward and assessing the social media landscape as it relates to your market, your buyers, and your competitors. Here are three key factors to consider.
(05/20/08 09:01 AM)
- Podcast: Keynote Dan Ariely Reveals the Hidden Forces That Shape Irrational Behavior. We design our marketing campaigns for "rational" buyers. But do buyers ever act rationally? In a preview of his keynote at the MarketingProfs event next month, NY Times bestselling author and MIT Prof Dan Ariely talks about the irrational factors that influence buying decisions, revealing some fascinating insights for marketers.
(05/06/08 09:01 AM)
- Engagement?A New Information-Based Form of Advertising. An engagement between a buyer and a seller begins with a single point of contact. It could be as a sale or an inquiry that, with the appropriate follow-up, can be converted into an ongoing experience for both the seller and the buyer.
It is such an experience or set of experiences that create what we define as an engagement?or at least the potential of creating one.
(04/29/08 09:02 AM)
- Social Shopping and Getting Your Share of the $600 Stimulus Check.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of social shopping sites. Several times per year our family, just like everyone else, is tasked with purchasing various gifts for relatives, Christmas, birthdays and other such moments. Like most guys out there, I rarely, if ever know what to buy!
Enter social shopping sites. According to a recent AP article on MSNBC "Web surfers buying into social shopping sites":
Social shopping sites with such names as Kaboodle, ThisNext, Wishpot and StyleHive combine two of the Web's most prominent activities: engaging in commerce and chatting with like-minded folks. The sites don't directly sell things, but encourage users to share links to good bargains, obscure finds, products that work and ones that don't.
All of those sites are pretty sweet, if you ask me. While not a 'social shopping' site per se, I'm partial to using Gifts.com as well. I've gotten some solid ideas from there as well.
With Valentine's Day just around the corner (hmm...what should I get this year???), now is a great time to test out all of the social shopping engines to see what kind of goodies they recommend.
Personally, Kaboodle and Gifts.com had the most ideas for gifts I'd likely purchase. However, the others had some good ideas as well. Wishpot is actually powered by results from Shopping.com.
Now, how does all of this have anything to do with the likely "stimulus package" that we're about to receive? (If you've not tuned in to the $150B economic stim pack banter, here's a square assessment from the WSJ[sub]). Well, if you believe that Americans will follow a similar behavior pattern following tax refund time (Tax-refund season helps kick off the spring shopping season. Last year, retail sales jumped 12% to 20% in March), there's going to be a portion of us, 12% to 28% of us, depending on who you ask, who will go out and immediately spend the money, it's a marketer's world and the smartest marketer will win when seeking their fair share of the potential 'windfall' check that consumers are likely to receive this late spring to early summer. Here's where really knowing your customers and their behavior can pay off. A few ideas:
- Go back to your customer or buyer profile and figure out who in your customer base will be getting the lion's share of the stimulus monies. For reference, families with <$110K in earnings and individuals with <$75K will be getting the most, while the lowest income and highest income segments of the population will be getting the least. Needless to say, this won't be the time to go after your high rollers who just got a check for $200...
- Run a contest or a survey or something to get inside the heads of your customers. If you're doing a regular email newsletter, throw in a survey question or two that takes a fun approach at getting after "what they're going to do with their checks". Segment out those that intend to 'spend it' for a separate marketing effort around the time that checks are distributed.
- Be mindful of all of the recession talk. People might not splurge on that big gas grill they've been lusting over, but they might be interested in securing a raft of gift cards or gift certificates to kick off their Christmas or birthday shopping. Now would be a great time to mention that yours have no expiration date and that they're a great way to stretch their dollars for themselves and their loved ones
Whether or not you agree with the efficacy of the stimulus package, if you look at this from the perspective of 'customer behavior' and tap into the most 'likely to buy' segment of your customer base, you're setting yourself up to capture your fair share of the $150B that's likely to be doled out.
(04/04/08 09:00 PM)
- Private Bid Notification Services. In addition to the government's bid notification services from FedBizOpps and Grants.gov, there are many private firms that provide these types of services. You can find some of these firms by doing a Google search on phrases such as "find RFPs" and "bid notification."
Although you have to pay for it, there are several advantages to using a private bid notification service:- Many of these services can also provide you with information on solicitations issued by state and local governments. While more and more state and local governments are putting their bid opportunities on the Internet, not all of them have geared up to do this.
- Since FedBizOpps and Grants.gov may not cover all all bureaus and departments within each federal agency, you may be able to get access to these bureaus' bid opportunities via a private service rather than having to search for them by going to individual websites.
- If you are interested in seeing bid opportunities at two or three levels -- federal, state and/or local -- you can may be able to receive these opportunities via daily e-mails or through online access. This can be a real time-saver.
One of the private serices that has been around for a long time is Bidnet (see clip below), which offers customizable packages to meet your specific needs and interests. However, since Bidnet is only one of many private services, it will probably be worth your while to research and compare these services with respect to their prices and offerings.
(04/02/08 09:02 AM)
clipped from bidnet.com
With BidNet, you will have access to Government Bids from thousands of Federal, State and Local agencies, and see bid opportunities you won't find anywhere else. Our diverse network of agencies will give you the competitive intelligence needed to compete effectively for the nation's largest buyer of goods and services - governments across the nation and right in your hometown.
- Many of these services can also provide you with information on solicitations issued by state and local governments. While more and more state and local governments are putting their bid opportunities on the Internet, not all of them have geared up to do this.
- Podcast: A new role for sales as expert content filters. I just had a great interview with Robin Carey, co-founder of the The Customer Collective. Salespeople have become the second choice for information among buyers who'd rather just go to the Internet. But this actually creates opportunity for those who...
(03/26/08 09:00 PM)
- Making B2B lead generation messages more memorable . In B2B marketing, when you have many potential buyers who are involved in the buying process, how do you connect with these people in a memorable way? If you look at most lead generation messages, they often contain industry jargon...
(02/27/08 09:01 AM)
- #1 Lesson from 2007: Using a Sense of Urgency in Marketing.
If there's one theme that keeps coming back to me from the past year, it's got the be the proper use (and the ease of misuse, if you're not careful) of a sense of urgency about doing business with you and your company. I'm not talking about the cheezy 'limited time offers' that you see over and over on TV (limited my ass...you mean, limited by your budget for spewing out shitty ads...) but genuine urgency created by inflection points in your business which moves the needle on buyer behavior.
Keep in mind here that I'm talking mostly about B2B, which, from my perspective, makes this even more exciting. B2C gets all the urgency in the mass media, and sometimes it's a rare day for most B2B organizations to be able to substantiate a genuine sense of urgency within the base of prospects.
That said, urgency is not for everyone. It's a powerful weapon that's not to be used without forethought and and crisp and clear understanding of not only the immediate implications, but also future consequences of the slippery slope that it can create, as discussed in a concise little bit about urgency in the Marketing Experiments blog.
So, what's this urgency thing all about and how do you create it?
I guess that this will be different for everyone, but frankly, the most successful levers that I've found are timing around pricing and production and availability, quotas and caps. I'm keen to hear more about what you think. Again, I'm talking sustainable things here - not just a 50% off sale or something....
Timing and production to create urgency:
This is the fun one. A great example is an impending price increase. If you've been doing a great deal of lead nurturing with your base of prospects, this is especially useful because the already know and trust you. On the other hand, if you don't have a base of prospects that you're nurturing, then you're just another average dude with a deal. Seriously, there's a lot of you out there...this type of urgency play almost has to come from a position of trust to be truly effective. Sure, you can impose urgency on a facelist list of prospects, but your conversion will suffer.
Proper planning improves urgency results:
Again, you can take this for what it's worth, but like everything I preach about when I talk about thought leadership marketing or 'altruism before capitalism', you can't just wake up one day and say "I need to create a sense of urgency and get more sales." Crap, what's first. Wrong way Charlie. Not going to work. You need to plan this. You need to understand what the next inflection point in your business will be (obsolescence of an old product, price increase across the board, new product design coming out, office move/clearing inventory...something that's almost 'external' to you yet internal at the same time) and work in a sense of urgency into your marketing to coincide with (or, preferably leading up to) the genuine, non "manufactured" inflection point.
Quotas, caps and limited availability:
Take a page from event marketers (if any of you are attending sold out football games as we near playoff time, you understand the acute sense of urgency that surrounds ticket prices and the limited availability in stadium seating) and keep an eye on your quota for items, or your geographical territories that are quickly filling up or the number of 'limited edition' items that you can produce in one quarter. From a services perspective, such as social media speaking or marketing consulting (things which I have some familiarity with) the best creator of urgency is the calendar and the limited number of dates you have available.
This is not the end of the story. There's so much more to this urgency thing (like neuromarketing and buyer behavior) but for now, that's enough.
Action Items:What ideas do you have for creating urgency? Please share in comments!
(12/31/07 09:00 PM)
- Using the Physics of Trigger Events to Generate More Sales Ready Leads . Most buyers aren't ready to buy when we're ready to sell. This trite but true observation has significant implications when it comes to lead generation. It means that we must continue to nurture viable prospects until they are ready to...
(06/13/07 09:00 AM)
- How Much Do Business Brokers Charge?. Business brokers typically charge the seller approximately 10 percent of the final sale price. As a buyer, you are usually not responsible for any part of that commission. In some cases where the buye ...
(08/25/06 09:02 AM)
- Jargon Watch. Buyer's Guides. Payroll Software & Services - Jargon Watch ...
(08/24/06 09:00 PM)
- Recommended Payroll Capabilities. Buyer's Guides. Payroll Software & Services - Recommended Payroll Capabilities ...
(08/22/06 09:00 PM)
- Resources. Buyer's Guides. Payroll Software & Services - Resources ...
(08/21/06 09:00 PM)
- Guess what is the top B2B marketing tool?. Us poor B2B marketers...the top three things buyers look for in a product aren't under our direct control...price, service, quality. We can add sizzle to these, but ultimately, the buyer will discern the truth.
So what is our #1 marketing tool? Amazingly it is something we've only had for ten years...our websites. Results of a user survey by ThomasNet were summed this way:"Of course, competitive pricing, good customer service and high quality are a given, but the next single most important thing buyers mentioned is a detailed, user-friendly Web site. "
The article has lots of other handy tidbits from the survey:
Comments by users like this:
"Provide enough information within their Web site for me to make an educated decision-? comparative product details, listed prices, and list of distributors that I can purchase from if they don't sell direct."
This factual gem:
36% of the time users will seek out new suppliers for a new purchase.
Look at the top two of '10 Things Buyers Look For In a New Supplier'
1. Easy-to-navigate Web sites with accurate, detailed product and pricing information
2. Companies that are easy to find and have a strong Web presence
This shouldn't really be news to us B2B marketers...but after ten years, we may have grown complacent about our websites. From the details of this survey, I say our target audience has become even more discerning and faster to pass on poor (to them) websites. We can't become complacent!
Read more: It's Not Who You Know. It's Who Knows You (07/29/06 02:28 PM)
