A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post called “Who is Buyer 2.0?” I followed up last week with “How to Engage Buyer 2.0,” stressing the importance of buyer persona research and analysis. Now that we know how to properly identify prospects, influencers, their content consumption patterns, and their sources of information, lets take it to the next level and talk about moving away from old school batch-and-blast techniques to thoughtful, well-designed nurture processes.

Is your marketing one-to-one or one-to-many? One-off email blasts to your house list offer a very low probability of your critical information making it through to your potential buyer. Even the greatest piece of marketing content does nothing to support the buying process if it is delivered to a prospect too early or too late in their journey. Marketing automation can be an effective tool for delivering content but it is often misused. Utilizing it without an integrated buyer-driven strategy that maps relevant content to your buyer will only add to your list fatigue challenges.

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Like many marketing professionals, I’m a big fan of the TV show “Mad Men,” which premiered its new season last weekend. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a drama centered on life in a 1960s New York advertising agency. Beyond the soapy storylines and retro styling and music, the show’s best moments for marketers are when the agency’s creative team meets with clients to discuss strategy.

The truth is, many of the “ah-ha” moments for clients could be applied to today’s brands, whether B2B or B2C. Content strategy in particular is all about telling a brand’s story to potential buyers. Even in B2B, many buyers ultimately make their decisions based not just on facts, but on how the company makes them feel.

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Greater access to information has provided B2B buyers with unprecedented power – resulting in “Buyer 2.0.” Marketing success in the Buyer 2.0 environment requires a new set of people, processes and content to better leverage new marketing technologies and to engage with buyers on their terms.

Buyer 2.0 rejects traditional, interruptive marketing tactics, preferring a buyer driven, Web-educated and peer communication approach. Why? Because it’s a process buyers can control and it helps them get the answers they need from the sources they trust, when and where they want.

This new buyer behavior requires marketers to focus on buyer-centric demand generation. Buyer-centricity in demand generation means tightly integrating inbound marketing efforts, such as search, Web and social, with elements of outbound marketing, such as email nurturing and offer landing pages.

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This afternoon I am speaking at the Boston-area Silverpop B2B Marketing University on the topic of “Succeeding with the Nurturing Dialogue.”  It’s a critical topic.  I truly believe that in the emerging era of Buyer 2.0 – i.e., in the era of a Web 2.0-empowered B2B buyer, who is now in the driver’s seat – it’s more important than ever for us to drive successful content-based dialogue at the core of our demand generation programs.  And lead nurturing is the holistic activity of managing this dialogue in a way that ties the buyer’s process to the marketing and sales organization’s ‘funnel’ – orchestrating our demand generation efforts.

How important is lead nurturing to B2B marketers?

If you polled a group of B2B marketers that have purchased marketing automation platforms, I’m sure 100% would say one of their top objectives is to drive email-based lead nurturing programs.  We know B2B marketers send out a lot of email.  In fact, approximately 89% of B2B marketers leverage email in their marketing efforts, according to Forrester at their Forrester Marketing Forum 2010.  And I’m sure an even higher percentage of this group is on the hook for supporting (at least) some portion of top-of-funnel lead generation via a combination of tactics that include email.

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I read the column on Seed Nurturing in DemandGen Report last week and was surprised by some of the recommendations it made.

Not only did the column’s suggestions seem to run counter to best practices, they seem to be diametrically opposed to what marketing automation is designed to do.

The article instructed BtoB marketers to, “Make valuable content freely available on social media sites.” It explained that, “By eliminating the need for registration in order to gain access to your whitepapers, eBooks, and other valuable content, you remove the initial barriers to building relationships with prospects. In doing so, you will strengthen your rapport, and these anonymous leads will likely surface as inbound leads once their interest level increases.”

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