Behind every news junkie or voracious reader is the know-it-all kid in school who always had his or her hand up to share the answer. You want to know the know-it-all’s biggest secret?  They spend less time searching for information and more time consuming it.

And that’s the coolest thing about information management in the digital age. We all have the same tools at our disposal to be equally knowledgeable and, hopefully, the good sense to be a lot less annoying.

Here are the 5 steps I take before embarking on a research project. Each helps me get smarter faster on desired topics, customer segments and any relevant discussions occurring online.

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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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A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog called “Who is Buyer 2.0?” This week I would like to discuss how to engage and sell to this new type of prospect.

Develop Buyer-centric Demand Generation Strategies

You are always competing for your buyer’s mindshare with several competitors and a list of other priorities. In order to successfully win their attention, your communication must demonstrate that your focus is specifically on them. This requires an understanding of their needs – a “buyer-centric” approach to demand generation marketing.

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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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Does your marketing organization have a thoughtful blueprint upon which to build pre-sales nurturing programs? A strategic plan will help you and your team understand the goals and objectives of upstream lead qualification and serve as a step-by-step framework for moving from initial buyer engagement to vetting the specific buyer as a lead that is ready to engage with a sales team member. It also helps diagnose opportunities and gaps that exist in many demand generation programs, by narrowing the objectives for lead qualification at each stage in the nurturing process.

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The central theme in my evangelism over the last few years has been stressing the importance of B2B marketers’ adopting a more ‘buyer-centric’ approach in their demand generation efforts – or as I often term it, ‘putting the buyer back at the center of B2B demand generation.’  It’s at the core of the approach we take with our clients at Left Brain DGA.  And it’s the central theme of my new book, Balancing the Demand Equation, which releases on Amazon on September 19 (this coming Monday).

The core of the issue is simple:  In a social, Web 2.0 world, sellers have little, direct control over the information consumed by a buyer during his/her buyer education process.  Instant online access to product information and reviews and to peer input via Web search and social media applications has more than ever shifted power from sellers to buyers.  Thus the ‘content consumption’ journey, as we term it at Left Brain DGA, that each B2B buyer goes through in making a purchase decision is very personal … very one-to-one.  This has led to the rise of a distinctly-new B2B buyer – one I term ‘Buyer 2.0’ in my upcoming book – for whom legacy, product-centric, one-size-fits-all, mass-marketing approaches to B2B demand generation don’t work like they used to.  Success with Buyer 2.0 requires that our demand generation be built bottoms-up – i.e., centered on the buyer, triggered by the buyer and one-to-one in the timing and scope of content delivered to that buyer – not top-down.

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On September 19, I am releasing my new book, Balancing the Demand Equation:  The Elements of a Successful, Modern B2B Demand Generation Model.  (As a note, it will be available in hardcover via Amazon, and also will be on iBook, Kindle and Nook.  Details to come.)

At the heart of the book is a sophisticated framework that is designed to help B2B marketers understand and succeed in the modern demand generation environment … and to help them move away from the persistent, legacy, top-of-funnel, mass-marketing approaches that are ill-suited to today’s B2B marketing challenges.

What are these challenges?

B2B marketers find themselves more challenged than ever in connecting with the modern buyer – i.e., Buyer 2.0 – at the right place and the right time in the buying cycle.  B2B marketers also find it challenging to scale marketing operations that drive perpetual, one-to-one engagement, acquisition and nurturing of prospective buyers.  Complicating things, technology is both problem and solution in this equation – i.e., technology is in part to blame for our challenges, as Web 2.0 has resulted in a more-empowered buyer, but it’s also a key piece of the new equation via marketing automation and customer relationship management technology.

Thus the B2B demand generation ‘formula’ has never been more out of alignment.

Sounds like a problem that needs solving, right?

Yet you might react to what I’ve written so far by saying, “Isn’t this really just an operational challenge for B2B marketers?  Why should the rest of the company care?”

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One of the things I find exciting about modern B2B marketing is that not a day goes by without rapid change and new thinking. It’s a great time to be a B2B marketer, but it’s also a quite challenging time. For example, over the past year, marketing automation vendors have shifted much of their messaging from a focus on automating marketing and powering demand generation to that of managing ‘revenue performance.’ Seems like a good thing–revenue is good; however, for some B2B marketers this is probably a bit confusing, and so the obvious question is whether we’re still talking about the same technology and capabilities. The answer is yes and no.

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This past week I spoke at and attended the annual Online Marketing Summit event (Twitter: #oms11, @OMSummit), which was held February 7-11 in San Diego, along with a number of others from the Left Brain team.  (Full disclosure:  Left Brain also was a sponsor of the event.)

Continuing a trend I saw at Dreamforce in December, I got a strong glimpse of a real maturation that is starting to occur in online marketing, and particularly in B2B demand generation. And I saw the next wave of marketers – beyond the early adopters – in attendance and starting to absorb new techniques and practices.  All good signs that B2B marketers are increasingly understanding and responding to the modern challenges of engaging with the an empowered B2B buyer in a Web 2.0 world.

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