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four b2b buying types

Are You Addressing the Four Buying Types in your B2B Inbound Marketing?

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Personas are a discipline and tool we use and create for our clients. They help define your audience and give you the “backstory” to help keep your content marketing on track. While attending a business conference, I heard a presentation from Ken Banks and Robyn Winters regarding their BrainBranding system. I think these are also a good set of additional guidelines, along with personas, to help build your messaging around, especially in presentations. Different people need different things to reach a decision, even within the same persona.

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b2b buyer persona interviews

5 Essential Questions to Include in B2B Buyer Persona Interviews

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In B2B Marketing, you have to know whom you are targeting in order to successfully develop messaging and imagery that motivates his/her buyer behavior. The industry standard for doing this is creating buyer personas. If you have ever created a buyer persona, you know how many questions and factors go into developing one; for a novice, it can be quite overwhelming. To aid you, below is a list of the top 5 questions to be sure and include in your B2B buyer persona interviews, and I would also recommend following Ardath Albee for additional insights into buyer personas.

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b2b buyer persona app

An App for Creating B2B Buyer Personas

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Creating buyer personas are integral to any B2B marketing plan, and the Up Close & Persona® app is essential to anyone who builds them. I use the app every time I develop B2B buyer personas for our clients, so I know it works.

And when I heard that a fellow marketer thought it was so effective that she wanted to interview me about it, I definitely jumped at the opportunity to not only gather feedback, but also talk about the tool that has made my life so much easier.

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Understanding the b2b buyer cycle

The Buying Cycle and Buyer Personas in B2B Marketing

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In developing B2B buyer personas you have to remember their connection to the buying cycle, as different stages in the buying cycle lead to different content. Demographic information is helpful in better tailoring your message (e.g. a millennial will want information delivered to him/her differently than a baby boomer), but a buyer persona doesn’’t do its job if it isn’’t related to buying.

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Up Close & Persona logo

Up Close & Persona™: Create Your B2B Buyer Persona Today!

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Whenever you tweet a story or update your status, chances are you are ‘picturing’ a person on the other end that will care what you have to say. Sometimes it may be an actual person, other times it may just be a type of person or a mixture of several people; but either way, you have some sort of recipient that you think will care.

The same is true with buyer personas; they are a picture of the type of customer you think cares about what you have to say. And by the time you have built out your buyer persona, you have actually thought about every factor involved in the buying decision and developed relevant content that speaks to those factors; so in fact, they do care what you have to say. Read more

hitting the b2b marketing target

B2B Buyer Personas and Buyer Behavior

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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.

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crash course in conversion optimization

A Crash Course in Conversion Optimization: The Four Personas

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Note: This is Part 4 of a series on the things I learned while taking “Conversion Optimization,” a training course on MarketMotive.com.

Another lesson from my “Conversion Optimization” training that applies to B2B marketing and buying behavior is called the “Four Personas.” As the course’s instructor, Bryan Eisenberg, explained, understanding the Four Personas is crucial to keeping prospects on your website and converting them to sales.

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crash course in conversion optimization

A Crash Course in Conversion Optimization, Part 2

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Improving the Online Experience

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently completed the MarketMotive.com training course Conversion Optimization. Another key take-away from that course that applies to B2B marketing is the concept of improving your customer’s online experience.

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crash course in conversion optimization

A Crash Course in Conversion Optimization, Part 1

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As a social and behavioral scientist in B2B marketing, I am constantly looking for ways scientific testing can help us understand human buying behavior. So when WhichTestWon.com (a site that experiments with various ways to present messages in online marketing) promoted a training series on MarketMotive.com, a website specializing in internet marketing certification courses, I knew I had to sign up.

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Simon Sinek

The “Why” in B2B Buying Behavior

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Billy Mitchell, our president here at MLT Creative, recently sent me a video of a Simon Sinek presentation called “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” Sinek was speaking at the TEDx Puget Sound conference, and though his talk wasn’’t intended exclusively for a B2B audience, it included some very relevant concepts for us all to remember.

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