Abstract
This article explains why B2B Marketers cannot rely solely on technological solutions like marketing automation for more effective marketing: Customers are being confronted with growing information overload. This leads to ever-increasing “banner blindness,” which affects not only advertising banners, but any kind of content (e-mails, etc.). This presents marketers with the challenge of how to guide potential customers through the decision to buy: more than half of the journey is already taking place without sales. To stand out from the flood of information, marketers have to create relevant content. B2C companies usually have a large budget available for market research (focus groups, surveys, etc.), while B2B companies usually have to manage without these possibilities. In this article you will learn about tools used within the framework of Design Thinking to create this empathy, to better understand your customers (or potential customers), to derive relevant communication ideas from there, and to understand which content is relevant in which buyer’s phase.
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Notes
- 1.
https://medium.com/@HeathEvans/content-is-king-essay-by-bill-gates-1996-df74552f80d9. Accessed: April 20, 2020.
- 2.
https://www.blog.google/products/search/how-we-keep-google-search-relevant-and-useful/. Accessed: April 20, 2020.
- 3.
https://www.advancedwebranking.com/ctrstudy/. Accessed: April 20, 2020.
- 4.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/b2b-digital-evolution/. Accessed: April 20, 2020.
- 5.
The AIDA funnel describes a model to explain the effect of marketing. According to the model the customer passes through four stages (that build the acronym): Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
- 6.
For better readability, the word product stands not only for hardware products, but also for software and services.
- 7.
Even YouTube itself, supposed to be the expert in video content (and video content is one of the most preferred formats nowadays) had to make this experience: Their 2019 rewind was the most downrated video that year, see https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/youtube-stats/. Accessed: April 21, 2020.
- 8.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703811604574533680037778184. Accessed: April 24, 2020.
- 9.
https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works. Accessed: April 21, 2020.
- 10.
https://theaccidentaldesignthinker.com/2017/09/16/40-design-thinking-success-stories/. Accessed: April 21, 2020.
- 11.
https://www.thesprintbook.com/how. Accessed: May 25, 2020.
- 12.
https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com. Accessed: May 5, 2020.
- 13.
https://sprintstories.com/23-facilitation-tips-for-design-sprints-34d876aa5317. Accessed: May 5, 2020.
- 14.
https://trello.com/b/Tvntem8Z/digital-telepathy-design-sprints-playbook-public. Accessed: May 5, 2020.
- 15.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/22/solve/. Accessed: April 23, 2020.
- 16.
A Persona is a customer avatar to support the target customer description with personal traits that help to relate to the customer, when the target customer description is a list of facts.
- 17.
According to a Microsoft study from 2013 it is 8 seconds http://dl.motamem.org/microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf. Accessed: May 17, 2020.
- 18.
https://fivesecondtest.com. Accessed: May 5, 2020.
- 19.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it. Accessed: May 18, 2020.
- 20.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/promotion-emotion-b2b/. Accessed: May 18, 2020.
- 21.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/promotion-emotion-b2b/. Accessed: May 18, 2020.
- 22.
A pragmatic approach could be a survey sent by e-mail to your database: no expenses, just investment of resources.
- 23.
Customer in this case means a person, not the customer as a company. Even if your customer is a company on paper, the decision is still made by a person (the persona or customer profile you have already defined).
- 24.
Here is research showing Henry Ford never said that (https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast. Accessed: April 25, 2020), nevertheless the underlying message stays valid: customers are often not able to tell what they want.
- 25.
- 26.
If you have been working with the offer for a while, you could take some steps to overcome the audit bias, tips can be found here: https://www.babson.edu/academics/executive-education/babson-insight/finance-and-accounting/auditors-pitfall-five-ways-to-overcome-confirmation-bias/#
- 27.
The funnel is a framework for grouping marketing content by travel phases. It is not a reflection of reality because customers have many points of contact and move back and forth within a funnel phase and within a funnel phase.
- 28.
You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vS_b7cJn2A
- 29.
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/04/takes-6-8-touches-generate-viablesales-lead-heres-whygp.html. Accessed: May 18, 2020.
- 30.
https://assets.strategyzer.com/assets/resources/the-test-card.pdf. Accessed: May 25, 2020.
- 31.
MVP = Minimum Viable Product, this describes a product that is just good enough to cover customer needs but does not yet contain all features.
- 32.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE. Accessed: May 25, 2020.
- 33.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-product/. Accessed: May 18, 2020.
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Ender, A. (2021). Buyer-Centric Content Approach: Design Thinking to Market to Humans in the B2B World. In: Seebacher, U.G. (eds) B2B Marketing. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54292-4_15
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