Why Your Marketing Tactics May Be Out-of-Sync with How Your Customers Actually Buy

The “buyability” research by LinkedIn and Bain & Company[1]

A 2022 survey by Bain & Company and Google

A 2021 survey by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International

Most of a company’s potential customers are not actively evaluating the kinds of products or services the company offers at any given time. A trigger of some kind is usually required to motivate a potential customer to begin an active buying process, and marketing programs alone are rarely sufficient to cause a potential customer to initiate a buying process.

At or near the beginning of a buying process, most buying groups create a list of potential vendors they believe are worth considering, i.e. an initial consideration set. The initial consideration set is created before most members of the buying group have conducted any research and is based on the mental impressions they’ve formed from a variety of touchpoints such as their prior first-hand experiences, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and peers.

When a buying process begins, most members of the buying group are likely to be familiar with the product or service category involved in the prospective purchase. Many will have already been involved in several buying processes involving the same category.

Many buying groups not only create an initial consideration set, they also rank the potential vendors in their consideration set in order of preference before they engage with any of the potential vendors.

Most buying groups make almost all of their purchases from vendors in their initial consideration set, and most buy from the vendor they ranked at the top of their shortlist.

B2B marketers frequently run marketing programs designed to persuade potential buyers to begin a buying process, but the research suggests that such programs are largely ineffective.

Most B2B marketers assume that most members of the buying group are not familiar with potential solutions when the buying process begins, and therefore they create a significant amount of “educational” content. However, the research suggests that most buyers are already familiar with most potential solutions at the beginning of the buying process.

Most B2B marketing efforts are focused on buyers who are engaged in an active buying process. But, the research suggests that most business buyers identify a shortlist of preferred vendors at the beginning of their buying process and almost always purchase from one of those vendors. Therefore, most B2B marketers are largely ignoring potential future buyers when they are forming their opinions about vendors.

None of the surveys described above claimed to use a representative sample of all B2B buyers. Therefore, the findings of these surveys cannot legitimately be “projected” to all business buyers. This explains why market research is vital for all B2B companies.

To develop effective marketing programs, a marketing leader must have an accurate view of how their company’s potential customers make purchase decisions, and primary research is usually the only way to obtain this critical information. While data on this issue is scarce, it appears that most B2B companies are not investing sufficiently in this type of research.

In a column for Marketing Week, Mark Ritson made a compelling argument that companies should invest 5% of their marketing budget on market research.

Ritson argued that spending 5% of the budget on research is essential to ensure that the remaining 95% of the budget is invested appropriately. He wrote, “If you cannot invest 5% of your marketing budget on research you do not know what you are doing and you will not be able to make the right moves.”

Image courtesy of Jeff via Flickr (CC).

[1]  The LinkedIn/Bain & Company research is described in two LinkedIn articles by Mimi Turner, the Head of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn. Those articles can be found here and here.