In the last few years, buyers have adjusted their behavior.
Customers no longer respond to content marketing. Instead, you have to give them a content experience, says Randy Frisch, co-founder of Uberflip.
And that means marketers have to support the buyer at every stage of their journey.
Watch a clip from Randy’s B2B Forum 2023 presentation or read the transcript below.
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This is Zurg from Toy Story. He’s like the guy who just creates conflict for all good things.
And that’s really what I want to talk about today, is this idea of, how can we guide someone in a more natural way?
Last consumer example, just for a moment. I actually love the Walmart greeters. I’ll tell you why I love them. And this idea actually came in the 1980.
Sam Walton was in a Walmart. It was one of his stores, and someone just greeted him and he’s like, “this is perfect. They showed me where to go.”
Otherwise, I walk into this big store. I don’t know which alleyway to go to first.
I think we need more of these greeters throughout stores [and] throughout our buying/purchase experience to greet us and show us where we need to go next to get the information that we need.
And this is the mentality that I think we need to inject. Yes, there’s some other problems with the greeters. I get it.
But the mindset of what they’re there to do, and how they’re there to help, is what we need to start to embrace.
So as I said, I just wrapped up 10 years in MarTech, and we’re going to get more into the B2B mindset…
To be honest, very often when I was working with a lot of our customers, they were trying to get people through this same maze that I’ve been describing.
And they almost embraced that they were creating a maze and that there were obvious ways as long as they guided someone. Because, if they could guide someone, they could get to that growth.
Now, at the end of the day, their mindset was, “how do I engage the buyer? At every stage, how do I engage the buyer?”
Now, there’s been some evolution when we say engage and what we mean when we talk about a go-to-market strategy.
When I got started about 10 years ago in this space and speaking and researching, a lot of the trends of where we were headed to was to go beyond leads, into pipeline and into revenue. And that was a new mindset.
And for some of us, that’s still something we’re trying to become experts in.
But in the last number of years, let’s call it the 2020s, I think it’s actually evolved even further. It’s no longer just, “how do we go beyond brand-building-to-pipeline” mindset.
It’s, “how do we support [the customer journey] at every stage?” Every stage, from the first time they hear about us, they’re thinking about buying, they’re ready to buy, and they’ve even bought. That’s now the role of marketing, at every single stage of this journey.
And what it means for us is that, we have to get comfortable with running multiple campaigns. A rinse-and-repeat mindset.
Now, a lot of you have probably heard of the “rule of seven.” Anyone heard the rule of seven? There we go. Okay.
So the rule of seven is very simple. It’s the idea that it’s going to take seven times of getting in front of your buyer before they’re even ready to consider you as a purchase.
Now, believe it or not, this idea also went way back. This goes back to the 1930s. And the first group to really embrace this was movies.
The movies learned that, to get someone out to the theater, they had to tell them about this movie at least seven times.
And over the years, we’ve seen this in so many different ways. This rule of seven—in terms of onboarding, in terms of selling—continues to be applicable.
Now, a lot of you will say, “I’ve heard numbers that are much bigger than this. 18 is a number I’ve heard from Gartner in terms of the number of times we have to pick up the phone and call the buyer before they’re ready.”
But at the same time, so many marketers I speak to, they take pride in the one campaign. “We did this one amazing thing, yet no one’s converting. We rocked it. We put so much money into it, it was a great execution.”
And I think that’s often because we’re not even getting close to seven.
So the approach I want to talk about today is, how do we get to seven? What is a scalable way that we can actually do this? Because engagement always matters no matter what’s going on out there in the world.
We saw this in the high growth days. I mean, companies like HubSpot taught us the importance of engagement. They taught us how to sell swimming pools through guys like Marcus Sheridan, if you’ve ever heard him speak, in terms of using content in ways to engage buyers in a growth environment.
And then the last number of years that were terrible for all of us, we also had to learn how to engage. We had to engage in different ways. Our buyers were no longer going to buy in the ways that they were used to buying. So we had to learn to engage in different and new ways, and they wanted to be engaged in those new and different ways.
I got to work with this urgent care healthcare provider who had to do this in very interesting ways.
What they had to deal with at the time of the pandemic was that they had to give different guidance to different states because the pandemic was affecting different states—California versus New York versus Texas—not just in different ways based on people’s mindset, but just different ways based on when it was hitting those markets.
So we have to be ready to engage buyers in ways that matter to them.
And now here we are. Now, I have used this slide before and people are like, “this is not a recession.”
Well, me writing, “it’s a very tricky time in the world,” is not as sexy [as writing “recession”]. So I’m going to call it a recession for today, and we will continue to talk about it that way.
A lot of us have had to adjust our go-to-market and adjust the way we engage, given what’s going on right now in the world.
Now I use this framework—we’re going to come back, but I wanted to tease this right now. This is a framework that is really simple and we’re going to walk through it in detail. And it’s so simple that I barely take credit for coming up with it. But it came through a lot of conversations I had with marketers of how do they run these plays over, and over, and over, in a rinse-and-repeat manner… without burning themselves out?
Published 01/24/24
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