Study shows, how B2B decision-makers consume vendor content

/in , , /by

Some weeks ago, we spoke about a study that described what B2B decision makers expect to read on vendor websites. Now, a new study of 352 buyers (predominantly large businesses) from The CMO Council and NetLine shows that the majority of organizations (94%) favors to curate and circulate relevant content in their organization before finally deciding to purchase B2B solutions and services. For years, marketers thought B2B buyers and influencers alike are simply using vendor-related content from time to time.

The study makes clear that there is no real sharing structure to be made out from company to company. However, there are three main patterns that the study highlights in their results:
– From the Middle Out (35%): Execution-level executives search and find content about vendors/products and make the purchase. Senior management gets educated thorugh them why the decision was made.
– From the Bottom Up (30%): Junior or mid-level employees find vendor-related content and share their discoveries with senior management. Then they make the final decision.
– From the Top Down (29%): Senior managers find the content, then share it with lower-level managers for analysis and final purchase.

CMO Council Netline B2B content sharing

The same as with the sharing patterns, there are three key personas within the businesses who act according to their own behaviors, expectations and needs.
– Researchers: Primarily focused on new industry reports/research to inform them of advancements in solutions, trends affecting the markets, and opportunities for improvement.
– Influencers: Interested in both thought leadership found in trusted third-party channels and vendor-branded technology specifications, data sheets, and use cases. Their special interest is in summarized content, i.e. infographics, videos, and blog comments.
– Decision-Makers: Want to stay informed through broad research reports and analyst commentary. However, they expect to have access to detailed data to enable better decision-making at the tail end of the purchasing funnel.

Spot On!
The study reveals some further interesting insights. The vendor selection is major to moderate influenced by online content, find 88% of the B2B buyers and more than a third (38%) find that online content provides strategic insights and shapes the purchase decision. The content that is valued the most is research reports and studies (65%), technical spec and data sheets (50%), analyst reports (46%), whitepapers (35%) and posts on trade publishing sites (30%). The power of Google and the vendor website comes out as well: When more than two third state they start their vendor-related content sourcing with search engines and portals, it shows that the best training the marketers is to read the two B2B studies and draw some conclusion out of it for the future of your own content, PR and marketing acitivites. And if you cannot find a solution, we are happy to help…

What makes consumers share personal data with brands?

/in , , /by

Getting personal data is something most companies strive for. However, consumers are very careful with sharing their information with marketers. Most of them (62%) fear that marketers don’t obey the rules of data privacy. This is the main finding of a recent report from SDL, based The report was based on data from a survey of more than 4,000 consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Not surprisingly, younger consumers are not that frightened about the way marketers work with their data than older consumers. In the UK, just 48% of the 18-24 year old respondents worry about it versus 63% of the 45-54 year olds. The US is less open with data sharing in the younger generation. 59% of the respondents between 18-29 years worry about data privacy. This compares to 71% of the age group 45-60 years.

SDL Data Personalized Data 2014

There is also a big gap between what data people share and what not. Data about age, gender, and income is more openly shared with marketers. Respondents made clear that they are less open to share the name of their spouse, lists of family and friends, and obviously their Social Security number.

SDL Data Smartphone Shopping 2014It seems that loyalty programs are still a great hook for marketers. In order to being able to join a loyalty program 49% of respondents were willing to share personal information with brands. Furthermore, free products and services in exchange for data still gets 41% sharing personal data.

Still, the fear of being tracked gets people away from sharing their data online, especially when it comes to in-store tracking. Most respondents (76%) with smartphones replied they are not happy with retailers’ tracking their shopping tours as they do not understand what the intention of the tracking effort will be.

Spot On!
SDL Data Trusted Brands 2014Trusted brands are in a comfortable situation: 79% of respondents stated they are more likely to hand over personal data to those brands they have purchased from before. Obviously, this changes in percentage from country to country with the UK being most hesitant about sharing information Almost one third would not share any information with marketers. The report is a good indicator on what kind of structured data is easy to generate, but also shows the challenge of getting sensitive data from consumers.

Study: What B2B buyers expect to see on vendor websites

/in , , /by

Is it really still the phone number and the email address? Well, at least contact information should be easily accessible on B2B vendor websites. This is the main finding of a recent report from Dianna Huff and KoMarketing Associates.

The study, based on a survey of 175 B2B buyers, states that the majority of B2B buyers (68%) find the vendor’s address and contact information is mission critical information. Thus, 55% make clear they’ll leave the website if it isn’t accessible. For most B2B buyers (81%) want to contact vendors via email in the first place, phone comes in second place (58%). Furthermore, it is not only about accessibility. Credibility of a vendor’s website establishes for 51% of the respondents when contact or about information is displayed.

Huff:koMarketing 2014 - Content Assets Credibility

From a content perspective, 43% of buyers see pricing as a “must have” content on vendor websites. Having worked with different b2b vendors in the last years, we know that the challenge for them is the indirect sales when partners have different levels of pricing models that often cannot be displayed public; however separate logins can handle that challenge.

90% of buyers expect to see product/services information on vendor websites. They also want to see about/company information (61%), marketing collateral (37%), and testimonials (36%). Although social media becomes more impact in our daily business, only 24% try to find social media add-ons (24%) or look for blogs (22%).

Huff:koMarketing 2014 - Website Info People want to see

Spot On!
Although the contact form is the most common way to get in touch with the vendor, only 39% like to use it. This is critical as buyers usually do not take too much time to stay on vendor websites.

Especially when getting bored or when they click out of a website, buyers tend to leave. Another mismatch that makes people leave is when video or audio plays automatically (93%). Animated ads, like crawling banners or pop-ups are also a NoGo for 88%, and a bad positioning about company offers makes 83% move to the competitor sites.

Study: Value of social media analytics tools still not understood

/in , , /by

The findings of a study by Demand Metric and Netbase sound positive – but not on a second glance. Although most marketers seem to have understood why they need to work with social media analytics tools, they still haven’t figured out how it helps them to find the social ROI. At least, 61% of responding marketers use social media analytics tools, and of those 53% started working with the tools in the last two years.

The study based on 125 marketers (70% B2B-focused, 13% B2C and 17% split) shows that marketers find social analytics tools most valuable for helping with campaign tracking, brand analysis, and competitive intelligence. 60% of the reponsing people use social media analytics tools for campaign tracking, brand analysis (48%), competitive intelligence (40%), customer care (36%), product launches (32%), and influencer ranking (27%).

Demand Metric SM Use Case Optimization

It still surprises me that the majority of respondents (66%) states that social media analytics tools are most valuable to help assess and quantify the degree of engagement. Is there more in it like understanding where engagement of the company is needed, leveraging content for production and curation, spoting the mentality and value of influencers, identifying engaged communities or platforms, or detecting features and traffic of personal brand advocacy? Obviously, most marketers are still far behind in understanding how to use and leverage social media analytics tools.

Demand Metric ROI SM EffortsSpot On!
Although most marketers see the opportunities to leverage the social ROI, most are still in their infancy in converting data in findings, and leveraging social media in their daily business. The findings show that most of those marketers (70%) still cannot quantify their social media ROI. The question is why they cannot do so? Do you have any ideas or experience where the main challenges are? Is it a problem of resources, of technology misunderstanding, or simply not clear which social KPIs make sense to meet the overall business targets? Let us know what you think…

Social Media Complainers… and how to deal with them (Infographic)

/in , , /by

Probably you have been one of those social media complainers in your career of tweets and status updates yourself already. If not, maybe you have heard of some of these types from your customer service unit or your sales team. Be aware: Complainers are everywhere, not only on your website or social hubs!

Some studies show that most big companies still do not take social media complains from the social web serious. Comments on brand’s blogs, Facebook or Twitter profiles stay uncommented, or are just a given option to calm the user down and then make them forget about their issue if it is not too complex. Most customers take this personal and just turn to competitors. The revenue of these customers gets lost.

But how can you differentiate between the types of complainers? How can you know who to take serious, and who not? Which typer of complainers should you respond, and how? The guys at ExactTarget have created a nice infographic that helps you structure complainers from

Social Customer Service Complainers Infographic

2014 Trends in Content Marketing [Infographic]

/in , , /by

The perspective of Uberflip “predicts” that there are some obvious trends coming up in content marketing.

Not surprisingly, a “director of content” might be the new team member in companies. This might be nothing new when compared with our job title predictions for web strategy at the beginning of 2013. Some other aspects of Uberflip include: higher quality of content, content curation, multiscreen marketing, and what every consultant will love: bigger budgets for hopefully better content.

“Brands will step up their game by integrating great journalism and storytelling into their strategies,” states Uberflip.

Let’s hope their predictions proof to become reality. Or maybe, you see some other development in the near future. Why not share it with us…?

Content-Marketing-2014-infographic

Report: How Mobile Apps Monetize

/in , , /by

One of the questions, we often get is… What kind of apps make money? Now, an interesting recent report by Distimo and Chartboost based on data from 300,000 apps worldwide with 3.8 billion downloads per quarter sheds some light here. In the Apple App Store free mobile applications with in-app purchases (IAP) get most revenue. The report shows that in-app purchases from free apps went up from 46% to 79% in the United States in only two years (Jan. 2012 to Jan. 2014). The leading countries in this app revenue context are China and Japan with the biggest revenue share (94%) generated from freemium business models.

Distimo Free InApps 2014

Not surprisingly, Germany is one of those different markets again. Here, just 70% of Germany’s revenue was generated from free apps with IAP. The report makes clear that in Germany a bigger revenue share comes from paid business models. However, this is based on the evolution of efficiency enabling tools such as education or navigation which seem to be tools that the German population uses predominantly.

Distimo RevSharePerDownload 2014

The APAC region shows the highest average revenue per download (ARPD). The leader being Japan with an average per download revenue of $5.32. Japan gets followed by Australia $3.60 and South Korea $3.40 places two and three. Canada, Germany, United States and United Kingdom almost generate the same amount per download of around $2.30. China came in last with an ARPD of just $0.92.

Distimo ARPD 2014

Still, this does not mean that the profit is as high as it sounds. In order to figure the profit out, Distimo and Chartboost compared the revenue per download (ARPD) to cost per install (CPI) for the leading 250 apps in the games category in 4Q13. Here, the winners were Japan before Australia, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Distimo APPD 2014

The report shows that there is still money to be made. However, the cost per promotion in the App store or outside the app store should be calculated in. And then, the figures could look massively different…

The Social Media Guard by Coca-Cola

/in , /by

Just in case you spend too much time in social media or network, we found the right thing to keep you away from tweeting, writing status updates or just chatting on one of the messengers that are still “alive” after Facebook nicked WhatsApp. And this is also for those people that forget the world around them by staring into their smartphone where-ever they go.

Obviously, you might need a bit more space around you, your kids might wonder a bit what happened with you, or your cat might challenge the remote control then (as it is also worthwhile for TV addicted).

Just as they say in the video… “The Social Media Guard takes the “social” out of media and puts it back into your life.” What an invention from Coca-Cola and Memac Ogilvy…

YouTube

By loading the video, you agree to YouTube's privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

Native Advertising: Will these brands turn the advertising industry around?

/in , , /by

Last year, I had the pleasure to announce this gentleman for one of the main dmexco stage panels. And I can tell you, it was not fun to complement him to go off stage when their speaking time was up. Terence Kawaja is a funny character and great speaker, and he doesn’t like being stopped talking. Now, the investment banker and founder of LUMA Partners introduced his latest chart of the Lumascapes which will define a new status quo in the advertising industry.

After their numerous Lumascapes on search, display, video, mobile, social commerce, and so on, this time we get to see their perception world of native advertising. Although the definition on native advertising is still evolving and may seem some kind of “rough in barriers” and not very much detailed, it is making it’s way through the brand campaigns of companies. Not even the IAB playbook on native advertising gives us a clear definition on what exactly native advertising is, and how it differs from content marketing, branded content, or even how it can be located against approaches like story advertising.

To the guys of Business Insider, Kawaja said about his latest version…

“Given how consumers ignore banner ads, these new consumer – friendly formats are proving to be the engine for how marketers can engage audiences, especially in social and mobile contexts.”

Let’s hope he his right with his perception. I realized some brands of emerging companies are missing in the chart, maybe as it is an American view, maybe because we are often getting invites to the latest new start-up in this field, maybe as we see the world a bit different. Still, Kawaja and his team have done a good job again. Let’s hope he is joining dmexco 2014 again.

Lumascape Native Advertising

How fast the leading social networks are growing…

/in , , /by

It is one of these questions, we always get asked in meetings and seminars. How much is social media growing, or is growth already declining? Search Engine Journal provides some good overview on the topic of growth and use in an infographic just recently released.

The most popular sites -in terms of how they are used by marketers- are still Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Same as in the study from Global Web Index in 2013, Twitter still shows the fastest growth in social networks from an active user perspective, especially in the 55-64 age group.

In the time period from June 2012 to March 2013, Google+ increased their active user base by 33%. The age group of 45-54 years showed the fastest adaption growth in Google+ with a 56% increase.

And Facebook? Although they showed a 23% increase, especially the age group of 45-54 years is adapting the fast moving “Likes and Hypes” network.

SEJ-Social-Media-Growth