Unfamiliar Territory

In the consumer world, billions of branding dollars are spent to create a sense of familiarity not just with a product but also with a brand. Even if we’ve never bought a product before, there’s a good chance that we have some idea of the competitive landscape within the product category. If we were looking to make a purchase for ourselves, I would venture to say there are very few things we would consider buying where we wouldn’t even know the name of the product. Yet, this is an every day occurrence in the B2B world. Often, we’re asked to make informed purchase decisions about products and services that we never even heard of yesterday.

When we strike into unfamiliar territory, we create a challenge for the B2B marketer. If we don’t even know the name of the product we’re looking to buy, how do we start looking for it? Where do we begin? It’s pretty hard to Google something when you don’t know what to call it. This makes keyword discovery one of the challenging and important parts of any B2B search campaign.

Often B2B purchases are not only a buying decision, they also come with a steep learning curve. The buyer has to identify a potential solution, learn about the product category, identify the potential vendors, determine decision criteria – and this all has to be done before they even start evaluating their alternatives. Imagine trying to buy a car or a flat screen TV if you had no idea what those things were or even if they existed at all.

Decision by Committee

Sometime ago in my life, as I hung out my advertising consultant shingle, I was introduced to the joys and tribulations of committee driven decision-making. I uncovered the sad truth behind the joke, “How do you determine the average IQ of committee? You take the lowest IQ in the group and divide it by the number of people in the committee.”

B2B purchases are often driven by committee. And, as we found in the BuyerSphere research, different members of the committee have different agendas. In high risk, long cycle purchases, the internal politics involved in a purchase can rival anything you’ll find on Wisteria Lane. These differing agendas mean that signals from the committee will seem to be a cross purposes, making life exceeding difficult for the vendor.

The challenges from a search marketing perspective lie in the fact that if different committee members are looking for different information (as determined by their own objectives) they will also expect distinctly different experiences. Your website and search campaign somehow has to be able to offer clear and compelling paths through this tangled knot of prospect behaviors. Clear segmentation options, relevant messaging and highly intuitive navigation are three ways to guide different buyers with different objectives to the right destination.

B2B is different from B2C. It’s more complex, more challenging and, in my opinion, much more interesting.


© 2010 Enquiro Search Solutions.