Friday, March 12, 2010

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Why Can't Marketers See the World Through Tech Buyers' Eyes?

By Shari Worthington
President

I ran across an interesting bit of survey data in MarketingSherpa's Business Technology Buyers Report, 2008-2009. Tech buyers were asked, "Which content types are you typically willing to register for?" Tech marketers were asked, "Which content types would you deem worthy of requiring registration?" There were some surprising disagreements.

Here are the rankings in terms of value assigned:

It's nice to see we all agree on white papers/technical articles. We are selling technology, after all, and it needs to be explained before it can be valued.

But let's clarify a few of the discrepancies. Take case studies, for instance. Buyers love them. Marketers rank them lower. This happens because buyers are expecting all case studies to be the unbiased, info-packed articles they find in industry magazines. Unfortunately, what most marketers write are poorly hidden sales pitches with little consideration given to the customer's whole story - problems faced and decisions made above and beyond the marketer's product that was purchased.

Webcasts, online video, and podcasts suffer from the same problem. Too much sales pitch and too little educational value. Tech buyers aren't going to start valuing this kind of content until we do as good a job with them as we do with white papers.

So before you throw your newly developing social media strategy out the window, stop and think about what kind of value you're really delivering with these new channels. Then rework it so it focuses on solid, educational content. Save the pitches for the product lit and demos. When customers are ready for them, they'll go for that stuff.

But first you have to prove yourself - who are you, what do you do well, why should a customer buy from you? See the blog post, "You Want to Sell Me What?!?"