European company, Baseone Buyersphere, released their 2011 report on the new B2B Buyer Behavior.  I read it and you can, too.

Tony Ambrito with Customer Think provides a great recap of the report. I really enjoyed reading it and would like to conclude with my own pressure points for B2B marketing professionals:

Buyers Take their Appetite for Information Online

Supplier websites and web searches tested highest for most frequently used source of information overall. They’re searching, which means when your website pops up, whether from a direct, referring or organic hit, it needs to be immaculate.

Satisfy their Hunger with More Content

Not too far behind Supplier websites and Web searches were Industry press, Press Advertising and Online Events/Seminars. Which begs the question – are you pumping out valuable, relevant content in the right channels?

The report also detects that buyers are looking for issue-based content – solutions to issues they’re experiencing, not necessarily a new supplier. Some are even saying that intent and context is the future of e-mail marketing.  Content, content, and more content!

Offline Events Still Influence

Although offline events and seminars received a drop in use, it reported still as the most “influencial”. Meaning in-person experiences are just as important as online user experiences.

Tradeshows shall live on!

Bottom line: perfect your content marketing strategy and everything else will fall into place. Is your B2B content marketing strategy up to snuff?

image credit: Buyersphere

When asking “who visits your website?” the response typically falls in two categories:

1. Visitors are identified by their what – a C-level executive, VP of _________, Manager of such-and-such; or,
2. Visitors are identified by what they do on the site (how they arrived at the site, how many pages they visit, etc.)

Your poor site visitor! They probably thought they were more to you than a page view or a title.  And no wonder your website stinks – do you know how hard it is to write compelling copy for a title who visits 1.9 pages in 32.6 seconds?!

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the website whats.  You’d be hard pressed to find a bigger fan of Google Analytics at Canyon.

So I will ask again, do you know who your site visitors are?  Not who you want them to be; but who they are really.  Do a little digging, and I promise, sometimes the answers will surprise you.

If you’re in the majority of business-to-business marketers, you are likely in the early stages of moving from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.  And the reality is you may not know who your visitors are.  And without knowing the whos, how can you:

1. Know if you are reaching your target audience; or
2. Optimize your site for conversion?

But enough of my bad guy act.  The good news is discovering your website whos can be simple and quick thanks to Bizo – a business targeting platform of rich, anonymous business demographics of 85 million worldwide web users.

• Sign up to get your free Bizo Analyze site tags
• Put the Analyze tags on the pages of your site you want to track
• Within 24 hours, you’ll know the whos of your web audience- by industry, job function, company size, seniority and education.

Soon you too can be wowing your peers with your audience insights and pretty charts.

And even more importantly, you will be empowered to think of your website visitors as more than just another title.

Understanding the business demographics of your web site visitors empowers crucial next steps in optimizing your site for conversion.  Our discussions will quickly migrate to:

• Personas
• User Stories
• Information Architecture
• Content Strategy
• Micro and macro conversion paths

And most importantly, you begin to make strides transforming your marketing (from outbound to inbound) and dramatically increasing marketing ROI.

Aren’t you glad to be speaking to your whos and no longer just the whats?

I was recently introduced to a market research app called GigWalk, an app that gives businesses the ability to verify information, conduct market research and more by ‘hiring’ people with smartphones to complete tasks on the fly for varying costs. What’s more – anyone can post a ‘gig’ or project using the app—so within minutes you could have hundreds of people performing tasks or responding to a market research survey across multiple cities for anywhere from $7-25 a gig.

Market research can be incredibly valuable to your company whether you are dealing with consumers or the b2b world. While GigWalk is specific for consumers, there are numerous market research options for businesses that target other businesses.

Market research is often considered an unimportant step in product development. Yet, companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars investing in concepts, brands and identities that may not have failed if they had just asked their audience what they thought up front. Let me ask you this – how many readers out there purchase or believe in insurance? IMHO (In my humble opinion for you non-texters out there), market research is merely a form of insurance that protects your company’s investments.

While Gigwalk takes this approach with consumers via mobile devices, we at Canyon could help you conduct your market research in a multitude of ways:

• Online surveys
• Telephone surveys
• Focus Groups
• Social media surveys
• Mail-in questionnaires
• Product trials…and more

It’s also important not to limit market research to your physical brand or products when you can also use market research to perform gut-checks on your company’s employees, processes, programs and more. Recently, Canyon and our sister-company Loop Demand Gen conducted a market research survey with more than 400 of our clients’ ‘best,’ ‘existing’ and ‘dormant’ customers, and what they found both confirmed their concerns regarding one program but pleasantly surprised them on another. And yet, asking your customers what they want and are looking for is a step many of us forget.

Unfortunately for me Gigwalk is a startup and not yet available in Phoenix, but I plan to take advantage of this tool as soon as I can. Do you think an app like Gigwalk would work in the B2B space? Have I convinced you to engage in market research?

Image credit: GigWalk

B-E-E-F. This simple acronym was the mantra of the rec league basketball coach who taught me the fundamentals of shooting a free-throw. Balance. Eyes. Elbows. Follow-through. Each of these components is important to creating the fluid motion and focus needed to become a functional contributor to your team at the free throw line. While each component is important, none are more essential than the last one – follow-through.

In B2B marketing, follow-through is also paramount. A great idea is only as good as your ability to follow-through and execute. Ideas it seem, are easy to come by, but absent a clear plan of action, and a business’s ability to execute operationally, even the most attractive ideas become worthless.

How many times have you been in a meeting where a great idea is born? You see a lot of heads nodding yes. Everyone seems excited and on-board. You think the positive vibes swirling about the room will surly culminate into success for the company. But, inevitably, nothing happens. The good ideas become marker dust in the tray of the dry-erase board. Business as usual perseveres and the company continues to fall behind the marketing curve.

Companies that want to buck this trend, make sure they have the resources necessary to carry out those great ideas. They understand that if you take the effort to plan, and are looking to adopt new strategies and methodologies to engage prospects, that there is also a need execute on that plan. If you are like most other B2B organizations, you understand that it is easier said than done.

Too little time, too few resources and political turmoil make execution seem all but impossible. If these challenges sound familiar, then partner with a firm that is willing to spend the time learning about your complex products and services, that has a comprehension of leading marketing communications, sales support and customer engagement techniques, and who has an infrastructure with complementary resources you need to follow-through.

So is the take-away from this blog post really about something as trivial as execution of marketing plans and tactics? The simple answer is yes, but the challenge is to ask yourself how well you are really doing at executing on your best marketing ideas. Now that we’re almost half way through 2011, ask yourself whether you are just getting to the line, or if you are you actually finishing. While it seems like one of the simple ‘fundamentals’, the reality is that a lack of execution keeps a lot of B2B organizations standing idle. It is only by continuing to emphasize and master the fundamentals that you’ll be able to become a functional contributor to your company’s top line.

What great ideas are you lacking the resources to execute? Is it time to open up your file cabinet and start following-through on some of those plans and strategies you worked so hard at the end of last year to develop?