Social Gastronomy

Print PDF

Holy Grail of Marketing – Identify the “qualified” buyers as they enter the market. Welcome to Buyer Marketing….

Think about your own market…

• Most buyers in the market are not buyers – users, influencers, students, want-a-be’s, job searchers, consultants, vendors, etc.
• Most buyers are not actually in the market unless they have a need
• Most buyers are not aware of the market, just their need (symptoms, pain, or problem)
• So the market is “unqualified”, buyer is “qualified”
• Buyers are not tolerant any longer of “unqualified” messaging; ie. your market message when they don’t see the need

Impact we are seeing on markets…

• Gap between the way you go to market and the way the buyers enter the market = adoption
• Gap (along with other market complexities) causes a lack of visibility when buyers enter the market = inability to influence adoption
• All things being equal, closing the gap (indentifying qualified versus unqualified at the market level) to gain visibility would drive better influence, adoption, and increased market share = drive better adoption by pre-qualifying buyers

Buyer Marketing gives us the ability to close the gap, align your marketing to buyers needs, target buyers as they enter the market, and allows you to begin the dialogue relevant to their situation. Start qualified and you will stay qualified throughout the process. We all know in marketing that we see a huge waterfall when we convert from unqualified to qualified.

If you do it too late, your sales organization complains about the poor quality of leads. If you do it too early, well…. we don’t think you can do it too early…. actually we think that you should have done it yesterday… especially as we are seeing:

• Tremendous amount of noise from peer-to-peer social media in markets
• Increased urgency in new product/market launches to drive faster adoption
• Fears of a pending recession in the first half of 2013 which would see budget cuts and increased pressure to do with more
• Increasing need to juice ineffectiveness marketing and lead generation channels – buyers are tuning out unqualified messaging

Buyer Marketing is the next frontier in marketing – think early days of other marketing disciplines – CRM, web, search, email, automation, etc. Today it is a new concept for your team, tomorrow a game changer, and then a market requirement. We know as we are doing it today and seeing the game change now.