2023年6月14日

角色往往缺乏與現實顧客。買方獨立。買家使用自助信息,減少銷售聯係。你了解你的客戶嗎?我的意思是,真正的了解你的客戶。如果你投資你的營銷預算的一些角色,你可能會被告知他們45歲男性中層管理者喜歡足球與高級內容策略或他們30歲女性角色享受音樂節。三大問題在B2B營銷使用角色,但有三大問題在B2B營銷使用角色:你賣的不止一個人。B2B銷售可能涉及10決策者不同的團隊與不同程度的資曆、經驗和懷疑,和各種不同的優先級。使用多個角色使事情非常複雜,非常快。角色告訴我們任何關於為什麼那些人需要我們的產品或服務。 This is despite the fact the best way to sell is to make customers aware you can solve a pressing problem they have. Personas are usually based on poor quality data. This means they bear little resemblance to real-life customers. All too often, their "insights" come from what a tiny minority said on social media, or what one existing client divulged to an account manager once. These are not things to bet your business’s future success upon. melita on Adobe Stock Photo Understanding Your Existing Customers The good news is that you have something far better and more reliable than persona-creating martech at your fingertips: You have your existing customers . The most successful companies strive to understand their clients in a profound way. They seek to find out what keeps them up at night. They uncover what customers love and hate about their jobs. They deep dive into previous experiences of working with suppliers and vendors. And they find out how individuals work with their colleagues who are also making buying decisions. In short, they look to understand what it's like to be them. Of course, you can also talk to non-customers. In fact, a series of one-to-one interviews can deliver deep, actionable insights . Using an external consultant and remaining anonymous until the end of the interview helps ensure responses tell you what you need to hear — not just what you want to hear. It avoids respondents bringing their existing knowledge of your brand, product or service to the party. Do You Think You Know Your Customer? Of course, a bigger problem is that many companies aren’t aware that they don’t know their customers as well as they should. Many moons ago, I took part in a pitch for a major printer company. The company was having trouble selling its own brand printer cartridges to customers. Many preferred to buy cheaper knockoffs online. We asked people at the company if anyone had ever thought to ask those customers who do buy their cartridges why they choose to buy them despite the higher cost. No one had. To put it in another way, the company didn’t know its customer, but people who worked there weren’t aware of it. As it turned out, the customers mostly bought their own-brand cartridges because the quality was noticeably better. And when you’re printing your precious memories, quality matters. This simple piece of customer insight helped the company build a marketing campaign focused on the impact of high-quality printing, which directly increased its sales. Learning Opportunities How Customers Buy Is Changing How customers buy is also an important part of the puzzle. And this is something that’s shifting all the time. Understanding how buyers buy today can transform the way you market your products. Research by Considered Content shows customers have become increasingly independent and aloof. Two-thirds (66%) of B2B buyers are now self-serving more information before contacting vendors for information. And more than half (53%) of buyers would prefer to buy without contacting sales at all. In real terms, this means freely available content — and not your sales team — needs to answer all their questions. In other words, content needs to be a self-service experience. For example, the aforementioned survey also found that a quarter of buyers want to be able to get all the information they need online before contacting a salesperson. Yet this is offered by just 9% of marketers. And 28% of buyers want to be able to view testimonials, case studies and reviews from named businesses. Again, only 9% of B2B marketers offer this on their sites. So, investing in creating quality content for every decision maker, at every stage of the buyer journey, that is easy to find and ungated, is critical. And the better you know your customer, the easier it is to produce content that’ll move them to the next stage of the buyer journey and further toward a sale.