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Archives for March 2014

How B2B Buyers Use Content Throughout the Purchase Decision Funnel

decision making mazeFor B2B buyers, brand content and third-party content play critical roles in helping them make purchase decisions. Throughout the purchase cycle, B2B buyers at all levels within the organization consume, share, and discuss both brand content and third-party content and rely heavily on it for vendor selection and product and services selection.

A new study from Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and NetLine Corporation found that online content is highly influential for B2B buyers. The study surveyed executives from 30 different industries and found that three needs drive B2B buyers to actively seek out content to support specific decisions.

Nearly two out of three B2B buyers (62%) seek out content to learn about new market developments and industry practices, while nearly the same number of people (60%) seek out content to discover new solutions that could address specific needs. Just over one in two B2B buyers (52%) seek out content to address a project that is already in progress (or about to commence) for their companies.

The report also found that B2B buyers can be segmented into three categories of buyers in relation to their use of brand content during the purchase process: researchers, influencers, and decision makers. Depending on which category a person falls in, their content needs and consumption habits differ. For example, researchers look for broad content and focus on finding educational content that can help them better understand industry trends and advancements. Influencers are most interested in trusted third-party content and vendor-branded data sheets, technical specifications, and use cases. On the other hand, decision makers want research reports, analyst commentary, and data.

Notice that the three categories of buyers—researchers, influencers, and decision makers—each play different roles within the decision-making process. Researchers are busiest early in the process, but they’re still active toward the end of the process. The activity level of influencers and decision makers grows as decision making moves closer to the end of the decision funnel.

This activity level also correlates with the content use cycle of brand content from the beginning of the decision funnel to the end of the decision funnel and beyond. Following are the three primary steps of the B2B purchase decision making process, so you can see how the data from the study ties to each.

Step 1: Information Gathering for RFP Development

Early in the decision-making process, 40% of B2B buyers who responded to the CMO Council survey indicated that they use content to identify potential suppliers and partners. For example, 51% use third-party content to get objective information about best practices and best-in-class solutions. In this early stage, research reports are highly influential and very useful in raising awareness of brands, products, and services.

Brands should keep in mind that the decision making process begins with 68% of B2B buyers searching for content using search engines and portals while 40% go directly to brand and vendor websites. Not to be overlooked, 25% of B2B buyers find content after clicking on an email link sent by a trusted third-party or a friend or colleague.

Lesson for Brands: Early in the decision-making process, brands must be represented in third-party, thought leadership content.

Step 2: RFP Review and Vendor Selection

During the second phase of the decision-making process, B2B buyers look for objective content to support their findings from step one. They use this data as they review RFP responses from vendors. This content comes from third-parties as well as directly from brands, so brands must have their data-driven content readily available.

For 44% of respondents to the CMO Council survey, technical details and specs about products ranked as the second most valuable type of content to make buying decisions. This data-driven content can come from third party reviews, etc., but brands must have it at consumers’ fingertips as well. B2B buyers rely heavily on industry studies, technical specifications, analyst reviews, expert commentary, and third-party content during step two.

Lesson for Brands: During the second phase of the decision-making process, brands must ensure B2B buyers have easy access to data that supports its claims within its RFP response. Furthermore, brands must be represented in third-party content such as expert commentary, analyst reviews, and industry studies.

Step 3: Post-Purchase Supplementation

After the vendor has been selected, the use of third-party and brand content doesn’t end. In fact, the study found that 82% of B2B buyers continue to use content after the purchase has been made to identify potential add-on purchases. They use content for education, to stay current on industry trends that might affect their future purchase needs, and to identify new solutions that could benefit their companies. Just because the single transaction is over doesn’t mean there aren’t ongoing opportunities for brands to connect with these B2B buyers in the future.

Lesson for Brands: After the purchase decision has been made, brands must continue to be represented in third-party content of all kinds, and brands must continue to publish useful, high quality content of their own.

Bottom-line, content isn’t transactional. It adds lifetime value, and brands need to start viewing it as such.

Image: Steven Goodwin

Giving Guidance – Alternatives

guidance
In the past two posts, I’ve examined the investor relations minefield commonly known as guidance – the practice of telling investors what you think future earnings may be.

It is a practice fraught with difficulties, not least of which is that companies often get it wrong. The business of forecasting is, by its very nature, an uncertain one, and the opportunities to go astray are numerous.

However, because the market is focused on future cash flows as a means of valuing a company, investors will make an estimate of upcoming earnings whether the company helps them or not. And if they don’t help in some fashion, the dispersion of estimates will be wider than if investors had received some input from the company. Companies don’t like widely dispersed estimates and therefore often wind up issuing guidance. But the input companies give to lower estimate dispersion doesn’t have to be guidance.

Guidance is merely the result of a series of inputs and estimates the company has made. Rather than give the market the estimated answer, companies can just as easily give investors the estimates for some of the inputs to the equation. If the company supplies its estimated ranges for the major components of the income statement; revenues, expenses and anticipated changes to the tax rate, investors will be able to draw their own conclusions as to earnings.

Alternatively, a company can increase the amount of interim information it makes available as a way of avoiding guidance. Many companies tend to be “black boxes” in between reporting periods.  This is unfortunate, because the ideal of a good corporate disclosure program should be to dispense enough information, and update the information frequently enough, so that investors are able to reasonably reach informed decisions about how you are performing. For example, many retailers put out monthly sales numbers. By the time quarterly earnings come around, everyone knows the sales number for the quarter. For many companies, this eliminates guessing around one of the more uncertain numbers on the quarterly income statement and reduces the need for guidance.

If company management really means it when they say they are running the company for the long-term, then consider telling the market what your long-term goals are, and how you’ve performed against them. An example here might be, “We expect that on a three year rolling average our sales growth will be between 8% – 10%. With sales at this level, we believe that we should be able to lower our expense ratio by about 1% – 1.5% per year. This should give our earnings growth a trend line in the high single digit to low double-digit range. This may not occur every year, but we expect things to average out in that range.”

Finally, at the far end of the spectrum, consider reporting unaudited earnings more frequently. Progressive Insurance, an American automobile insurer, reports its income statement and balance sheet monthly. Since it began doing so, its stock volatility has declined noticeably, as it has eliminated uncertainty by increasing information flow.

Connecting Brands and the Mobile-Only Audience

iphone mobile consumerMarketers are quick to ask each other if they have a mobile-first strategy in place. Although we’re getting closer to widespread adoption of mobile-first strategies, most companies are still trying to catch up with a mobile-always strategy (comScore reported that we had a multi-platform majority last year). Now, there is data from comScore that suggests brand marketers also need a mobile-only strategy for a growing segment of the consumer population.

Using the comScore MMX Multi-Platform tool, comScore analyzed the mobile-only audiences of the top media properties and found that brands which only advertise through traditional display advertising are missing tens of millions of consumers each month. These are people who never visit websites so they never see ads displayed via desktop. For example, comScore found that each month 73% of Pandora’s audience, 54% of Buzzfeed’s audience, and 49% of Apple’s audience are mobile-only.

The demographic profile of the mobile-only consumer audience might not be what you expect. According to comScore, an analysis of Amazon.com mobile-only visitors revealed that more than 25 million of those visitors are between the ages of 35-64. If you thought only young audiences of tech-savvy millenials are mobile-only consumers, you’re missing a very large number of people across all age groups. However, it’s important to point out that the majority of Amazon.com mobile-only visitors are actually between the ages of 18-44. Here is the breakdown:

  • 18-24 = 10.8%
  • 25-34 = 14.4%
  • 35-44 = 12.1%
  • 45-54 = 7.8%
  • 55-64 = 6.1%
  • 65+ = 1.6%

Statistics support the development of a mobile-first strategy. For example, did you know that global mobile data will increase 11-fold by 2018? In the United States, one out of two online consumers made mobile purchases in 2013, and in the United Kingdom, nearly one in five smartphone users have made mobile purchases. These are trends that are not going to change. Once a consumer goes mobile-only (or mobile-dominant), it’s unlikely that they’ll go back to being desktop-only (or desktop-dominant) ever again.

Are you measuring your mobile-only audience correctly? If not, you might be allocating your digital advertising budget ineffectively. It’s no longer a matter of if you need a mobile-only strategy for a segment of the consumer audience. Today, it’s a matter of when you can develop it and roll it out, because every day that you don’t prioritize mobile marketing is a missed opportunity.

Image: Karola Rieger

Happiest Brands Understand How to Build Emotional Connections

happy-brands-2014-infographic
Click image to view at full size

A new study by Isobel and Cog Research, Happy Brands, reveals that the happiest brands build emotional connections with consumers. The study defined happy brands as having four core characteristics: playfulness, happiness, trustworthiness, generosity, and optimism. A total of 1,250 U.K. consumers ranked one hundred of the largest brands from the biggest market categories on those five characteristics as part of this study, and you can see the winners and losers in the infographic to the left.

The happiest brands according to this study are Cadbury, Andrex, and Google while the least happy brands (excluding political parties) are The Royal Bank of Scotland, Ryanair, and The Daily Express. The most trustworthy brands are Nivea, Andrex, and Fairy, but the least trustworthy brands (excluding political parties) are Daily Star, The Sun, and Ryanair.

Isobel found that there is a clear connection between emotions of happiness, perceptions of trust, honesty, and generosity, and brand affinity which grows proportionally with consistency of brand messages and brand experiences. In other words, an ad campaign that tries to position a brand as happy, trustworthy, and honest won’t get the desired results if the ad is inconsistent with the audience’s existing experiences with and perceptions of the brand.

The results of this study aren’t surprising. In 2008, I wrote here on the Corporate Eye blog, “Perhaps the single most important aspect of developing customer loyalty is emotional involvement in your brand. Customers who feel an emotional connection and response to your brand are inherently loyal to it.” I also shared the three steps to build emotional involvement in your brand: stability, sustainability, and security. These are not new concepts. However, what is surprising is that brand marketers still have to fight to get executive buy-in on the importance of investing time, resources, and budget dollars to building emotional connections between brands and consumers.

It’s not just conceptual, visionary marketers calling for the strategic prioritization of emotional branding. Analytical, data-driven marketers understand its value, too. In 2011, I shared results of a study that showed emotional brand advertising is more impactful than logical brand advertising.

In 2012, I wrote an article about the critical importance of consumer emotional involvement in brands. I wrote, “Who says emotions don’t matter? Not brand managers. When consumers are emotionally involved in a brand, that brand has reached an important point of success. Emotional involvement in a brand leads to brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and brand guardianship that money can’t buy. Word-of-mouth marketing by consumers who are emotionally connected to a brand is extremely powerful. Don’t believe me? Ask the marketing team at Harley Davidson or Apple. They’ll tell you how important emotional involvement in a brand is.”

Brands that rank as the happiest understand the importance of consumer emotional involvement in brands. Google uses storytelling to build emotional connections between consumers and its tech brand—a type of brand that is not typically viewed as being inherently emotional. Google started its push to build emotional connections in 2011 with the launch of the first Google Chrome offline ad campaign. AT&T was a brand to benchmark for building emotional connections with consumers when its “Reach out and Touch Someone” ad campaign was a television staple. Today, AT&T is trying to regain that emotional connection through a new “It’s Complicated” ad campaign. Red Bull builds emotional connections with consumers in all of its marketing initiatives and brand experiences. Remember the Red Bull Stratos event? That was a perfect (and successful) example of emotional branding.

Consumers are innately emotional human beings. Trying to work against those emotions is useless, yet marketers still have to fight for the resources and money they need to build emotional connections between their brands and their target audiences. I started writing for Corporate Eye about branding and the importance of building emotional connections between brands and consumers in 2008. That’s seven years ago. I wonder if we’ll still be having this conversation seven years from now in 2020. What do you think?

Do Video Applications Work?

interview

The video application has been a stalwart in some industries for some time. Media, marketing and creative  industries depend upon employing those with a flair for film-making and artistic talent, and in the 2013 graduate run we saw giants M&C Saatchi switch to a video application system. While it’s a quirky and interesting way of seeing whether a candidate’s face fits, do video applications really do the business for online recruiters?

Splitting the Market

The great problem with a video application is that it will turn away some candidates without question. Some won’t have access to the requisite video hardware, some will fear being outdone by those graduates with degrees in editing or film-making and others just won’t want to appear on camera.

Having said this, if you’re in creative media then perhaps a video interview is exactly the right way to reduce the pile of applications on your desk. However, unless your grads are going to be producing videos or adverts on a regular basis, it’s going to turn away plenty of very good candidates.

Seeking out Skills

In many ways a video application works just like an interview, except the candidate has some time to script and construct their answers and determine how they come across in advance. It’s fantastic for finding the face that fits, but you’ll need to test those other skills – business writing, numerical competency and verbal reasoning – elsewhere.

You also need to make sure your application page is extremely specific about what you’re looking for. Your corporate web capital needs to state whether you’ll be ranking candidates on their production abilities, their creativity or their general mannerisms. Different candidates will be attracted by different challenges.

Equal Opportunities and Discrimination

It’s very easy to standardise an application form and to ensure that all of your interviewees are given a fair opportunity and it’s unlikely you’ll be challenged on grounds of discrimination. With a video application, however, this is a serious concern and you need to be explicit about your criteria.

You also need to ensure there is adequate space on your website dedicated to your equal opportunities policy. In particular, you may want to formulate an alternative application for disabled candidates. Whatever your policy is, you need to make sure it’s not compromised by requiring graduates to send in a video.

Video applications are something which we’re sure to see more of in the coming years, even if now the old-fashioned application form still makes up the bulk of graduate applications. The video is a powerful tool, but don’t overestimate your candidates’ abilities and remember that it’s essential to give extra dedication to equal opportunities. It’s just not as simple as calling for tapes!