Understanding the B2B Buyer – Part 3: The Rule of 3

There’s a Latin saying, omne tium perfectum, which loosely translates as “a set of three is complete.” Wikipedia suggests that a set of three is funnier, more satisfying or more effective because it “combines both brevity and rhythm while having the smallest amount of information to create a pattern. It makes an author or speaker appear knowledgeable while being both simple and catchy.”
So here they are, the three most salient characteristics of today’s b2b buyer:

Today’s B2B Buyer is Impatient

Today’s B2B buyer is autonomous. If your website, and even worse your salesperson is the primary source of information, forget about it…you’re lost. Google has said that a b2b buyer is already 57% of the way down the path to a decision before they deign to perform an action on your website. And, according to Sirius Decisions, they’re 70 percent completed with the research before engaging a sales rep.
The B2B buyer wants their info and they want it now. You’ll need a strategy for this. non-gated, bite-size, “snackable” content (videos, infographics) for early in the funnel and gated, more robust content (whitepapers, ebooks, webinars) for later in the funnel.
Most importantly, this content should be easy to find. You should develop a robust social strategy and optimize your landing pages for organic search. But even more, you need to be in places where your prospects are likely to look first. Work with partners to align your content with industry publications where your prospects are likely to do research.
In short, you need to surround your prospects with the most useful information possible.

Today’s B2B Buyer is Connected

According to Google, 68 percent of people check their smart phone within 15 minutes of waking up in the morning. A recent survey revealed that 61 percent of us have used our mobile phone in the bathroom.
Our screens are everywhere. And so is the b2b buyer. A whopping 91 percent of them are using their smartphones throughout the path to purchase. In other words, if screens are being used in the buyers journey, you want your products to be everywhere those screens are being used.
To do this, you must stay one step ahead of your prospects by powering your demand generation programs with intent data. Intent data tells you who is researching what and when. With this info, you can target only those prospects actively doing research, wherever and whenever they’re doing that research.
Today’s hyper-connected buyer essentially re-writes the language we use for demand gen. We should begin thinking not of discrete demand generation campaigns, but an always-on demand generation program that is ready to go when your prospects are ready to consume information.

Today’s B2B Buyer is Informed

The days of company-centric content are over. You should be creating customer-centric content.
If a b2b buyer has come across your content, he has recognized he has a problem and is now seeking its solution. It’s up to you as a marketer to provide that solution. However, it’s difficult to produce exactly the right content for every prospect and every problem. Intent data can help here too.
Every month billions of intent signals reveal what topics are surging in the marketplace. These intent signals depict the topics that your prospects are researching right now. By harnessing these intent signals you can create content that precisely aligns with these research trends, making your content that much more likely to produce content that addressees your prospects problems.

The Three Characteristics of the B2B Buyer

 
To learn how Madison Logic can address the three characteristics of today’s b2b buyer, download our whitepaper: Account Based Marketing: Targeting with Intent