In the last few years, the approach for marketing a business to its potential customers has shifted from being very one-sided to being a much more collaborative process. There was a time when promoting your organization meant selling leads on your company, its reputation, its products and its services. The main strategy was for the sales and marketers to highlight the company itself, along with its offerings.
Now, however, organizations are focusing much more on the buyer. What benefits will the buyer enjoy before, during and after their purchase? What kind of experience will the buyer have interacting with the company and its products? Marketing a product or service or company today is less about the offering and more about the tangible and intangible benefits for the buyer that come along with that offering.
In order to tailor sales and marketing to the different prospective buyers, more collaboration is needed between leads and companies. This “collaboration” may be in the form of listening on social media or watching individual visitors’ activities on your site, or it may be more straightforward, such as in the case of a sales rep discussing needs and pain points with a prospect.
Additionally, your potential clients are now more educated on their decisions when it comes to choosing which vendor to work with. Thanks to the internet and social media, the information they want to gather about your company is bountiful and easy to come across. Often, they can read reviews online, speak with other customers, browse your site or do their own social media listening (to you and to your customers).
Now that both the buyer and the seller have access to so much more information about each other, and buyers feel more educated and empowered before they even speak with a sales rep, companies must consider what will cause them to stand out as the “obvious” choice. Organizations must express through their content marketing and advertising efforts how someone will benefit by selecting them. These reasons must be displayed in their website and social media channels just to name a few places.
Marketers now have ability to make buyers feel like important individuals through customized content, and potential leads want to be catered to throughout their decision process–beginning with their first visit to your company’s site, all the way to the final purchase. It’s a nurtured, relationship-style marketing approach that is needed today if you want to be competitive and see those sales numbers climb.