B2B Buyer Personas & Buyer Behavior
B2B Magazine and Silverpop’s recent webinar, How to Monitor Behavior and Give Buyers What They Want, presented some great tidbits on how to motivate B2B buyer behavior by combining behavior-based messages with psychographic variables.
Behavior-Based Messages
The webinar described marketing outreach using a “broadcast to behavior” continuum:
Mass mailing: a mailing targeted toward everyone in the database.
Targeted mailing: a mailing targeted based on segmentation of some type, such as geography, title, etc.
Time-based messages: making a mailing more automated, such as designing different mailings to go out at different times.
Behavior-based messages: designing multi-track messages targeted to people based on their behavior (i.e., sending one individual who has downloaded a white paper a different message than another individual who has not yet downloaded the white paper.)
By watching the behavior of your target audience, and developing behavior-based messages, you can send them more relevant content — and better understand who they are — by knowing which tools they’re using and which they aren’t. It must also be noted that Silverpop concluded behavioral-triggered campaigns in B2B performed 325% better than simple blast campaigns!
Psychographic Variables
The webinar also discussed psychographic variables, which are any attributes related to your target audience’s personalities, values, interests, etc. If you can include questions related to these in your forms, you can find out little tidbits you can use in the future. The webinar used a great example of asking the audience their favorite baseball team, then sending out an email (perhaps even a personal email) that corresponds with how their team is doing.
Buyer Personas
By including both what the audience is doing (by monitoring their behavior), and who they are (by finding out their psychographic variables), you are creating a more accurate buyer persona of your target audience and may better motivate their buying behavior.
Vann Morris is the Director of Buying Behavior Studies with the Atlanta B2B advertising agency, MLT Creative. She is a Social and Behavioral Scientist who is currently working on her PhD in Communications, and uses her strong theoretical background in order to show how scientific theory should be used to develop strategy and effective B2B marketing campaigns.