Novartec

It’s too easy to think of a smartphone, a tablet or a phablet as an extension of the internet. They have fundamentally changed customer buying behaviours. Here’s three reasons why:-

1. MOBILE LINKS OFF AND ON-LINE RELATIONSHIPS IN A WAY THAT THE DESKTOP COULDN’T

The smartphone is linking off and on-line in a way that the desktop didn’t. That is both a huge opportunity and a massive threat for marketing people.

It’s a threat, because if your real world initiatives aren’t perfectly aligned to your digital marketing, then all your hard-earned sales and marketing efforts could be directing your customers to your competitors. All in the time that it takes to buy a cappuccino!

But it has huge potential because good marketing people are now using mobile-driven consumption preferences to take customers onto the next stage of their buying journey.

Putting event presentations up on a microsite before an event is the least of this. Advanced marketers are extending beyond the static presentations using web technologies that will flag up customer interaction and point them to content aligned to their specific interests. So by the time your customer has finished that coffee, you can have direct feedback on your marketing initiative and you’re lining up a much more compelling follow-up sales call.

2. MOBILE HAS CREATED A PREFERENCE FOR SELF-EDUCATION (and that changes how your story is told)!

A 20-page white paper used to be an expression of your technical prowess. Now, it’s 19 wasted marketing opportunities!

Maybe the most significant change that is being driven by the mobile age is a preference for self-education. In a world of 4.7″ screens, customers don’t want to wade through reams of content until they find the paragraph that’s relevant. They want to go straight there and if they can’t, then they’re going to go straight to (you’ve guessed it) Google again (or some other friendly Search Engine).

Mobile (and Search) have changed the way people want to source and consume information. It’s not that they don’t like your sales reps, they’ve just been empowered. They can now choose how and when interactions takes place, so they do! Mobile has created a penchant for self-service because it’s now the easiest and least pervasive way to get the information that they need.

But that means that you have to tell the story in a different way, because you’ve lost control over how that story now unfolds. Which is why businesses have to embrace the concept of content atomisation. That is: the process of breaking content into more digestible, searchable formats so that it can be more closely mapped to a customer’s decision-making process and accessed across screens.

That’s a problem for most modern businesses because:

• Around 80% of online content is focused on only about 40% of the customer’s buying journey (mostly around the Solution stage);
• About 15% is usually focused on customer Education;
• Less than 5% is focused on Vendor selection (sometimes 0% is focused On-boarding);
• 20-30% of highly impactful content is lost in other content (usually because it’s written as part of bigger pieces targeting other area parts of the buyer journey);

Nudge marketing survey 2016

What that means is:

• There’s a huge reliance on the customer in the first instance to figure out what it is you do;
• Customer have to wade through reams of content outlining what you want them to hear;
• And when they finally sign up, the marketing effort ends and they are left to sink or swim;

It doesn’t take a marketing guru to figure out that this doesn’t augur for a good customer experience. The good news however, is that between 40-60% of online content can usually be easily repurposed to address other or multiple stages of the buying journey.

The key is to ensure that each piece of individual content links intuitively to another, thus enabling your prospect to move along their intelligence gathering process based on their own information worldview. And that allows Marketing to measure the impact of individual content more effectively and test new content more readily. All of which dramatically changes what agile marketers are now squeezing out of their marketing budgets.

3. MOBILE HAS MOVED SALES FURTHER DOWN THE SALES CYCLE (and that changes the relationship with marketing)

Mobile has created a 24×7, always-on business culture. Customers don’t wait until you turn your out-of-office off; they self-serve, they share, they collaborate and this is moving Sales further down the buying cycle. Market analysts IDC now estimates that between 50%-70% of your average enterprise deal has now been completed by the time Sales teams are engaged. That means that the majority of pipeline management, in the majority of industries is now digital and therefore, a marketing function.

This fundamentally changes the relationship Sales has to have with marketing. There’s now too much influence from all sides for average marketing not to have a perverse impact on conversion rates.

IDC also report that LOB’s are now involved in 90% of IT decisions. So marketing teams have to be concerned about a myriad of influencers and not just the IT manager. This adds another dimension to your sales and marketing activity as you have to create mechanics that enable customers to also share and sell on. But how many marketing departments have a database of finance directors, and how many marketing people know how to start a conversation with one?

By Gavin

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