Understand needs early and avoid being let down

Understanding requirements early is the secret if you want to avoid feeling let down. It’s the secret to good school grades and happy customers in almost every field.

You got paid, but the customer does not use is bad news: You might feel good that you got paid and there are few customer support calls. But this could be a very costly strategy if many buyers are non-users. It turns the B2B buying center on its head. If many customers don’t experience the value of your offering, customer satisfaction, referrals, and market share can only go down.

Why Cleaning your direct mail list matters

In a digital marketing world of shiny new options in digital media, we underestimate the power of good old email. 60% small businesses do not use email marketing primarily because of all the glamorous talk of other forms of digital marketing. Compared to all other forms of digital marketing email marketing is most cost effective. One estimate puts $42 return on 1$ investment in email marketing.

AIDA sales funnel and the buyer’s journey to purchase

Businesses tend to wonder about the effectiveness of their advertising spend in terms of what they actually sold that could be attributed to advertising.To understand how advertising works its useful to look at the hierarchy of effects AIDA sales funnel credited to Advertising Hall of Fame member Elias St. Elmo Louis in 1898. No that was not a typo and check out the history of this kind of thinking called Hierarchy of Effects in the article by Barry (1987).

This post was originally published on April 22, 2014. We have many readers asking about the connection between the AIDA sales model and the Digital Customer Journey or Digital Buyer’s’ Journey. We are delighted to update the original post on March 5, 2021. We hope that this will help all businesses come back after COVID as customers go through their AIDA process online.

Content marketing for : User members of B2B buying centers

The Buying Center is an informal group of people in organizations who influence the decision to buy your product or service. Members of buying centers  have different degrees of influence and things can get pretty political and unpredictable. It is therefore important to tailor your marketing content for each role in the buying center. MarketingContinue reading “Content marketing for : User members of B2B buying centers”

Dealing with the power and politics of B2B buying centers

We get frequent questions from innovative solution sellers about how to deal with the power and politics of B2B Buying Centers. This is after you have started talking with people at a prospective customer organization. And yet a deal doesn’t seem to be coming through.Here is our take and we hope this makes our dear readers feel better:

How is B2B Marketing different from B2C marketing?

Need is very different in B2B and B2C. When a business buys in B2B they are primarily buying to feed their internal operations. The feeding may be an internal user – deep inside the buying organization. T

Understanding the Buying Center can help B2B Marketers and Supply Chain for innovation

[ Note: Thank you dear readers for your overwhelming interest in this post originally published on June 7, 2012.The image is updated March 9, 2021.If you are a business and want to get more success out of your B2B Digital Marketing budget, and would like to consult with Dr. Roy- please send an email to Serve@StratoServe.com to schedule a Zoom call.}
Understanding and talking about the Buying Center can help B2B Marketers and Supply Chain Managers for innovation. The Buying Center is a 40 year old concept attributed to Webster and Wind and can be hugely useful to both B2B Marketers and Supply Chain /Procurement managers today. The Buying Center is a part of the informal organization and involve a bunch of people who have varying influence on the B2B buy decision. The individuals in the Buying Center can have one or more of the following roles:

%d bloggers like this: