The IT purchase path is a winding one, for both IT buyers and marketers; there are new ways to purchase, new places to purchase from, and a wide variety of marketers and sellers all trying to vie for the attention of IT executives. With so many choices, IT buyers are being inundated with calls, email, and other communiques from marketers, creating a ‘noise cycle’ of product and solution information.
Research from the UK company Proband showed that these buyers are frustrated with the sheer number of calls they receive – 50% of respondents stated they receive more than 6 calls per day from resellers.
CIOs, in particular, receive more than 200 unsolicited communications from vendors per week.
Many of these aren’t even relevant to their business challenges or pain points – in Proband’s study, 54% of participants also stated that these calls weren’t helpful.
How Buyers Want to be Contacted
The traditional marketing methods have changed and continue to do so, not just in terms of how to present resources, but in how to reach prospective buyers. As mentioned above, buyers are growing extremely frustrated by the number of calls they receive, especially those that aren’t relevant to them or their organization. So, if buyers don’t want to be called, then how do they want to be contacted?
Research conducted by our survey platform Change3 Tech Targeting discovered that overwhelmingly, IT buyers want to be emailed about new solutions or products – 76% of survey participants stated they would rather be contacted via email, especially if the information shared was helpful to them.
According to the research from Proband, 41% of marketers and sellers weren’t aware that their buyers received so many calls. But if buyers don’t want to be called, how do they want to be contacted? How are marketers and sellers supposed to market to them?
The Content Buyers Want
As stated in the previous section, the way marketers are engaging with buyers has changed and is continually changing, as the digital landscape focuses on more innovative technology. We’ve written a few blogs on how content is an incredible tool for marketers to get their story across, but reinventing the way those stories are told and how content is improving customer relations.
It’s not surprising then, that Change3 Tech Targeting also discovered that many buyers find blog content to be the most useful and effective means when it comes to gathering information.
From the above, you can see that free trials and case studies were the next types of content that resonated with B2B buyers. This corresponds with the rise in content as being a major form of marketing materials; according to the 2017 Social Marketing Industry Report, 43% of marketers said that blogging was their most important type of content. Blogs, along with case studies, are a great way for marketers to educate their potential and current buyers.
Businesses have uncovered the power of blogs – companies who blog receive 97% more inbound links, as well as upwards of 3.5X the amount of traffic and 4.5X the number of leads compared to those businesses without a blog. Marketers should be leveraging their insights and thought leadership to showcase their knowledge, more importantly how that knowledge is able to help or even solve a company’s pain point.
Take the Opportunity to Learn about the Buyer
Coupled with the preferred way buyers want to be contacted, including blogs or other resource material through email, marketers should be looking to leverage the method that buyers want, not the methods that may have worked in the past. Buyers aren’t keen to speak to someone they don’t know, about products or solutions they’ve never heard before.
To get the conversation started, marketers should start with an email first. Not only is this the preferred way for marketers and sellers to begin the first initial interaction with a prospective buyer, but it can also open the door to a phone call if requested. This is also a great way of learning what a buyer’s pain points are when it comes to their business and providing helpful resources on how your solution can solve those challenges.
IT buyers might seem like they’re unreachable, but that’s not the case. They can be reached, it just depends on how marketers are able to reach them. As digital marketers, we’re interested in knowing what goes on in the mind of the IT buyer and we’re hosting an event, BOOM!2018 to discover what IT buyers, both current and future, are looking for and what they’d like when being marketed to.
This is an invite-only event, however, if you’d like to request an invitation or would like to learn more about the event, please contact us at events@change3e.com
