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PDF We see buyer marketing as a new emerging marketing discipline like email and search engine marketing emerged to become formalized marketing disciplines within organizations.
Today most of our focus is on products or services, possibly customers, but no one is putting the buyer’s needs in the middle of our business management. CRM is focused on transactions, marketing automation on interactions, but we don’t have systems to understand buyer’s needs and to focus our energies on solving those problems. Rather we focus on selling our solutions.
A question that has come up lately is “Are we measuring success based upon addressing the buyer’s problem or consistently delivering our solution?”
So, we put together the first draft of what we see as a framework for addressing what “Buyer Marketing” is or is not:
- Understanding of buyer’s perspective and approach to solving problems in the market.
- Elements of buyer marketing would include: buyer maturity segmentation, buying adoption through the buying process, buyer targeting within the market, and the engagement with buyers through to purchase.
- Marketers ability to segment “potential” buyers from “likely”.
- Refinement of go-to-market planning and adoption measurement based upon satisfying the buyers’ pain rather than the delivery of the solutions capabilities.
- Organizational alignment towards assisting the buyer in decision support at each stage of the buying process.
- Emerging marketing discipline like direct, email, search engine, and social marketing.
- Natural ROI benefits from better marketing effectiveness, shortened sales cycles, and lower cost of customer acquisition
As our own evolution has unfolded, we realized that we were really focused on buyers rather than social, even when we spoke about social in terms of strategy or target marketing. We were using social to help us better understand our buyers to better anticipate their buying process and to better solve their problems. Here is our own evolution from social to buyer marketing:
At the end of the day, this is what successful companies do better than their competitors. Any tool to assist in making our systems more buyer friendly is going to create tangible value for both the company and the buyer.
Matthew is a Social Marketing Executive and is co-founder of Social Gastronomy, LLC and the Social Executive Council. Prior to founding Social Gastronomy, Matthew has over 18 years’ experience as an executive in marketing, product management, and sales. Matthew has an extensive background in the SaaS Software, Social Media, Mobile, IT Services, and Telecom industries. He has prior entrepreneurial experience as a founder and executive in several early-stage venture-backed technology companies, as well as, holds several US patents for a mobile marketing technology. Matthew is a prominent blogger and regular industry speaker on social marketing and strategy topics. Matthew’s blog can be found at www.socialgastronomy.com/blog. For more information on Matthew, you can check out his LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/in/rosenhaft or contact him directly at mrosenhaft@socialgastronomy.com.
