PDF In response to my last two posts, an “Open Letter to Buyers” and an “Open Letter to Buyer-Centric Organizations”, I have tried to articulate the evolution in the conversations I’ve had about why social is disruptive to business as we know it, why a buyer-centric approach is so critical to the long-term viability of your business, and why your team needs to pay attention now. Continue reading “Welcome to the Buyer-Centric Movement” »
Posts Tagged ‘buyer behavior’
Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to Buyers
November 7th, 2011
We owe you a mea culpa…. We’ve been seller driven, not buyer driven. We’ve focused on selling you what we think you need (what we sell) versus helping you make better decisions. We haven’t helped you make the business case for why this is a significant problem. We’ve automated our marketing systems to better reach you, but never asked if or what you’re interested in. We’ve treated you as a company, not as a group of individuals with different needs, perspectives, and roles. We don’t know what a “day in your life” looks like to give us context as to why you don’t have the time to sit through our “canned” presentation, educate us on your business, and sift through all of our market claims.
Continue reading “Recent Social Executive Council Post: Open Letter to Buyers” »
Anti-Marketing is the Anti-Matter Equivelant for Marketing and is Now Back in Vogue
October 13th, 2011Anti-marketing is coming back into vogue. Anti-marketing is the anti-thesis of the flashy, emotional appeal. It is the lengthy, detailed, fact laden, and intellectual outline of the context of the problem, value proposition, feature and functionality comparison. In short, it isn’t short, but substantive. Not “anti” marketing where marketing is evil, but more like Anti-matter and matter. Marketing and anti-marketing cannot exist in the same space, but one cannot exist without the other. Anti-marketing is the long form of campaign marketing; not a “quick read”, but it is designed for those who want a more qualitative understanding of a solution to make an educated decision.
Look at ads pre-Madmen 1960’s where text was a large portion of an ad, but Madison Avenue changed and started to focus on eye candy to appeal to your emotions. Now, appeal to impuse purchase outweighs the educated, thoughtful, and careful deliberation.
Social Marketing Economics: Cost of Attention versus Cost of Rejection
February 22nd, 2011What would a world look like where an organization didn’t need marketing? All new sales came via referrals, the sales organization were just focused on order taking, and most of the customer costs were in retention and producing the best experience.
Yes, there are many businesses that look like that, but for most of us; we can never have enough new customers and we have to work for them
The challenge with the traditional marketing approach is that we focus too much on generating attention and interest, but we get lost in the costs. Point in case, email marketing is focused on the conversion rates from a campaign. So, we get a 10% open rate and a 2% conversion from the email campaign. But, if you think about it, 90% didn’t open and 8% rejected the offer. Continue reading “Social Marketing Economics: Cost of Attention versus Cost of Rejection” »
Breaking Down Social Commerce
November 18th, 2010If you read Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group’s post with their report on social commerce, you will know that they do a great job (as always) breaking down the “what” of social commerce. They outline clear stages and shows best in class examples. A great read if you haven’t already.
Most of the time, most companies need help in working through the process of “how” does it apply to us and how do we build a social business strategy that makes sense. Social commerce is a large component, but usally part of a larger business strategy.
To that end, I thought I would throw in our 2 cents worth (no pun there) on developing a social commerce plan for your organization piggy-backing on Jeremiah’s post:
