All companies need regular new orders to survive. If your business is to grow, you probably need new customers too.
You may have an online presence, you may employ salespeople or perhaps you advertise in trade publications, or attend trade shows and events?
If your salespeople cold-call, you may have noticed that results aren’t what they used to be. Advertising in traditional publications doesn’t work as it used to either.
Perhaps you rely on referrals? Referrals are great but are not a reliable, scalable source of regular business enquiries. You are dealing with intelligent people – specialists and experts who know what they want – and you are selling them complicated solutions with long sales/buying cycles.
Your buyers are empowered by 24/7 access to online information and these bright people now self-educate at the point of purchase – to the extent that they often no longer need or want to talk to salespeople.
Only 29% of people want to talk to a salesperson to learn more about a product, while 62% will consult a search engine.
68% of B2B Customers Prefer to Research Independently Online - Meaning the Battleground for reaching B2B clients is clearly online.
This is the Era of the Empowered Buyer
Most businesses still fail to recognise that the power has irrevocably shifted from the seller to the buyer. They are stuck in an outdated paradigm. Over time the switch from outbound to inbound marketing has been profound. We are now in a new era.
This is the era of the empowered buyer.
- 93% of all B2B purchases start with an Internet search.*
- 84% of buyers engage in online information consumption and education.*
- By a factor of 3:1, B2B buyers say that gathering information online on their own is superior to interacting with a sales representative.*
- 59% of Buyers explicitly indicate that they do not want to interact with a salesperson as their primary source of research.*
(*According to Dan Tyre and Todd Hockenberry's 2018 book Inbound Organisation)
The key is helping your customers rather than selling to them – understanding exactly how customers research their purchases and then investing in creating engaging, helpful, and educational content which is very easy for them to find when they need it.
Inbound marketing effectively eliminates the most time-consuming and low-value activity in the sales process (cold-calling and prospecting) and replaces it with an investment in content creation.
The medium-term result is warmer, more relevant, inbound enquiries from better-educated prospects.
This is not Magic.
This is a System.
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