Conjuring a true buyer connection: Moving beyond statistical illusions to spell-binding ideas

We’re in the midst of the martech revolution and we know more about our buyers now than ever before. By harnessing powerful CRM systems and sophisticated analytics we can track the buyer journey from beginning to end and create client personas that enable us to effectively personalise content to enhance engagement and, ultimately, sales.

These data-driven tools are no magic wand, but they can certainly add a touch of enchantment to your marketing outreach. So, we asked the B2B experts at Man Bites Dog’s recent Big Bite event to share their expertise and reveal how they’re using data in practice.

Bernard O’Brien, Director, Marketing Operations, Consulting at Deloitte, explained:“We’ve developed personas – working out the demographic for a style of person...what we’re trying to create is one campaign with two different journeys ...”.  

Tim Stone, VP Marketing EMEA at Polycom, reinforced the importance of understanding the buyer journey: “Often the [buyer] journey starts very high up in the organisation and during the evaluation stage ends up quite low... We’ve angled our marketing to educate those people who are doing the discovery for their bosses as they heavily influence decision-making.”

There’s no doubt that statistical insights like these are important for marketers, but our panelists also recognised that personalisation is about more than segmenting content by country, job role, or sector. We need to connect to our prospective buyers as individuals, and here’s three key steps to get you started:

• Be inquisitive. When developing a marketing campaign, it’s easy to forget that we are talking to a person, not a brand, or a department, or a selection of stakeholders. You need to reach out to your audience on an individual level, and develop campaigns that are truly relevant.

Think about who you are talking to at each stage of the buyer journey - who’s the person behind the job role? And how much do you know about them? Understanding your buyer as a human being is the only way to build a personal connection that will develop the cut through you need. If you can mind-read, all the better!

• Be emotive. As with any truly great magician, marketers need to amaze and astonish their audience. But, thankfully, there is no need to delve into magical spheres to capture the imagination of potential buyers - developing emotive marketing ideas can create the impact you need to ignite excitement and fuel a sale.

Ensure your campaign has a ‘feel’ angle. Whether you’re looking to play on fear, uncertainty and doubt, or hoping to get your audience laughing out loud, emotion is powerful. Once you’ve decided on an appropriate approach, identify the problem you can solve - this is your commercial call to action that connects emotions to sales.

• Be different. Understanding your buyer and adopting a powerful emotive approach are essential to ensure your ideas are memorable, but you also need to consider your execution - creating engaging content is the finale in developing a truly ‘feel’ fuelled campaign.

Here are two examples that truly tick all the ‘feel’ boxes:  

• Jean Claude Van Damme for Volvo Trucks - It’s been used time and time again, and let’s face it we never forget it (it's our turn-to example!)
• The Gnome Experiment by Kern - This comedy stunt plays to our childish emotions and fuels travelling aspirations - simple, yet extremely powerful.

For more on Big Bite, take a read of our summary blog 'Feel the love: Sales and marketing relationship advice from B2B brands'.