I can hardly believe we’re only a few days away from wrapping up the BuyerSphere webinar series. It has been quite a journey. Since the beginning of April, Enquiro has been building an amazing package of webinars and research papers which go to the very core of B2B marketing. Experts from Google, Business.com, Covario, Demandbase and Marketo have all contributed their unique experience and marketing advice. If you’ve missed them so far, you can still get the recordings and white papers at www.enquiro.com/b2bresearch.
The final webinar in the series will be - in my opinion - one of the most fascinating and thought provoking. We’re calling it The Rise of the Digital Native: B2B Buying in Flux. Gord Hotchkiss and his panel of experts are taking a look at a very basic but fundamental question: Does age play a role in marketing? What does Enquiro’s latest research show us about B2B buying behavior as it relates to the buyer’s demographic, and more specifically, how and when the buyer grew up?
For the first time ever in an Enquiro webinar, we’re also joined by Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin, two very big hitters in the Search Marketing industry. They will be part of the panel along with our own Gord Hotchkiss, Ben Hanna (Business.com), Chris Golec (Demandbase), Matthias Blume (Covario) and Mark McMaster (Google).
As an attendee of the live event, you will get to hear the discussion as it happens, plus be able to send the panel your marketing-related questions. We will also be touching upon the highlights of the rest of the series, so if you’ve missed previous webinars, don’t miss out on this one. To top it off, one lucky attendee will win a BuyerSphere hard copy white paper package, plus a 15-minute search marketing audit with an Enquiro account manager.
The Rise of the Digital Native
Live Webinar
Wednesday, June 24 2:00pm Pacific Register now –>
The webinar explores:
* The differences between a Digital Native and a Digital Immigrant
* Why the brain gets wired differently in Digital Natives
* How this impacts interactions with technology and the web
* What are the implications for B2B buying
* How the landscape might shift in the next decade
Panelists:
Gord Hotchkiss - President and CEO, Enquiro
Rand Fishkin – CEO and Co-Founder, SEOmoz
Danny Sullivan - Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Ben Hanna - VP Marketing, Business.com
Mark McMaster - Senior Planner of Technology/B2B Markets, Google
Chris Golec - Founder and CEO, Demandbase
Moderated by Bill Barnes, EVP Business Development, Enquiro
Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of SEOmoz, and Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land will be special guests at the wrap-up to the BuyerSphere webinar series, June 24.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a full blog post, while looking down at my last couple of posts which have simply embedded videos. And when this latest idea came to me, I felt guilty for once again taking the “easy” route of just republishing information. But this one is too good to pass up.
At Enquiro, we have something called TED Tuesdays. We take our bagged lunches and sit down in our boardroom while watching the latest and greatest from …TED. This past week we watched David Pogue’s rant and rave on mobile phone technology. Pogue, a technology columnist for the New York Times, gives us a presentation that resonates with anyone who has ever owned a cell phone, and he delivers it his way, with humor and musical style.
In my Marketing class this evening, we took up the topic of re-branding. Here is a look at how some of the world’s best known brands have morphed over the last few decades.
I had the pleasure of producing Enquiro’s recent webinar titled Beyond the B2B Buying Funnel. Being a B2B marketer myself, I’m quite fond of the funnel concept and use it to map things like lead volume vs. position in the sales/marketing cycle. An interview I conducted with Jim Sterne takes a look at funnels of different shapes and how they reveal demand generation ailments and successes.
But where does the funnel fall short? One of the main messages I’ve taken from the material is that we shouldn’t look to the funnel model to imply a clear top-to-bottom progression in the sales process. Gord Hotchkiss refers to new research which shows that buyers are prone to experiencing a “risk gap” which, if not addressed by the marketer, acts as a plug in the funnel.
Risk is a fascinating concept in the field of B2B buying. One of the webinar presenters, Jon Miller, pointed out that a bad purchase decision can cost you your reputation or even your job, while good decisions will often benefit the company more than the individual.
So how does an individual mitigate risk? In-depth interviews with buyers, which were a part of the research methodology, show that buyers gravitate to six ways of dealing with it:
Rely on own past experience and drawing upon company-approved vendors
Listening to word of mouth and experience of others
Asking their existing vendors for advice
Assessing the credibility of the potential vendor
Checking out the vendor online, including on search engines
Weighing price options
Keep in mind that there is the risk to the individual, other individuals involved in the purchase decision, and risk to the organization as a whole. It becomes complex very quickly when risks to the different buyers aren’t the same – and they rarely are. And while companies have ways of giving structure to buying, e.g. through RFQ processes, findings show that the important decisions on a personal level aren’t always necessarily rational. We depend on our own library of heuristic shortcuts to come to decisions which can be irrational. Gord Hotchkiss also talked about these shortcuts, and how they are based on existing belief structures in this post on Herbert Simon’s concept of bounded rationality.
While it may be difficult to market against irrational buying decisions, there is hope, especially if we understand how irrational behavior is linked to risk. Part of eliminating the risk gap includes going back to basic sales and marketing principles, identifying and developing a market before we sell to them. As marketers, it is vital that we understand the specific risk gaps associated with buying from our company, in our industry, and help the buyer bridge those more effectively.
The 60-minute webinar was recorded and is available on demand. In it, you’ll hear Gord Hotchkiss present the new research along with Mark McMaster (Google), Ben Hanna (Business.com), Jon Miller (Marketo), Matthias Blume (Covario) and Chris Golec (Demandbase). The B2B Expert Series of webinars is moderated by Bill Barnes.
It’s that time of year again when offices around the world brace for the worst, the most creative, and most daring ideas to surface in what is known as April Fools.
Search engine company Google hasn’t shied away from the fun over the past few years, and has even used the April 1 date to launch new products, for example, Gmail in 2004. As it turned out, the story of a free email provider providing a whole Gigabyte of storage was unheard of in the day, and spread like an April Fools joke.
Here I’d like to share my five favorite Google April Fools Jokes:
1. Project Virgle
The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, inviting participants to enter and qualify for an epic journey to Mars. This actually was a collaboration between Sir Richard Branson (Virgin) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, hence the name Virgle. I came across this by accident several months after April Fools, and seeing Richard Brandson talk about out-of-this-world plans for Virgin seemed quite plausible. They had me going for a while.
2. AdSense for Conversations AdSense for Conversations promises to be a new type of monetization solution that “puts the ‘context’ in contextual advertising”. An interface attaches to the head of a speaker and lists ads related to what is being spoken about. As a recommendation for untargeted ads, it recommends rambling.
3. Gmail Custom Time
Be on Time, Every Time.
This innovative Gmail feature allows users to back-date the send time and date on an email, ultimately eliminating the concept of being late. It utilizes an e-flux capacitor to luckily work around the issues of causality. Unfortunately the use of this tool is limited to 10 per user per year.
4. Google Romance
Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.
If you choose the Contextual Dating option, be prepared to deal with thematically appropriate multimedia advertising throughout the entirety of your free date. www.google.com/romance
5. Rick Roll’d
Rick Astley’s video of his 80’s hit single Never Gonna Give You UP was the unintentional destination for many YouTube visitors on April Fools 2008. When clicking on any Featured Video on the YouTube homepage, users were taken to the music video in a practice which has since become widely known as being Rick Rolled or Rick Roll’d.
I’d like to give special mention to Google Gravity from the Chrome Experiments Group. Although this wasn’t an April Fools joke, it is a whole lot of fun. You can try the page for yourself, and it is best viewed in - you guessed it - Google Chrome. It actually is an impressive display of Chrome’s ability to process Javascript at speeds way above other browsers.
For your further amusement, here is a complete listing of Google hoaxes over the years on Wikipedia.
It looks like the folks at the City of Kelowna have read up on their marketing literature. Or at least had a stroke of creative genius while trying to tailor a message for their intended audience.
An observant colleague of mine, Ian Everdell, came across this sign at a local bus station the other day.
I’d like to send out this call for b2b survey participants. Enquiro Research works tirelessly to put out excellent B2B focused research. Now is your chance to be a part of it.
We would like your input in an online survey, in order to understand more about your experiences when making business purchase decisions, and/or going through the process of short-listing vendors and business solutions. By completing the survey you’ll be adding valuable insight into an area of business that is undergoing tremendous change.
The survey will take you 15 - 20 minutes to complete and you could win a $25 Starbucks card to thank you for your valuable time.
Also, you’ll be able to register to be invited to Enquiro’s 2009 B2B webinar series, consisting of six high-powered free webinars delivering cutting edge insight into what’s happening in the world of online business-to-business marketing.
Click here to go directly to the survey and thank you for helping us to create world class research.
In this interview with Eric Schmidt, Charlie Rose asks the Google CEO a range of questions, from the origins of Google’s advertising model, to the monetization of YouTube, to whether the search giant would consider buying Twitter.
The interviewer turned to the concept of the digital divide, and the role technology companies have played to bridge the gap. Schmidt pointed out that, “In our lifetimes, we’re going from almost no one being able to communicate, to almost everyone being able to communicate. We’re also going from almost no one having information and any kind of access to libraries, to virtually everyone having access to every piece of information in the world. That is an enormous accomplishment for humanity. ”
Schmidt describes the future of mobile search, giving an example of how someone interested in history, walking down a street in New York could be delivered a “narrative stream that’s highly personal and highly entertaining.” He added, “Why can’t my phone generate the searches I should have been asking [based on my interests]?”
It wasn’t easy but he did it. Here’s a shout out to a fellow blogger, Mike Volpe, for sticking with his pledge to write a blog post a day for February. From his Marketing with Mike blog, here are my three favorite posts from his one-month string of posts just completed:
Andrew Spoeth is Enquiro's director of marketing, with interests in B2B marketing, social media, the psychology of leadership, and just about everything else you can point a finger at.
Twitter Feed
retweet @ev There are basically two types of businesspeople: Those who see money as the ends and those who see money as the means 20 hours ago
checking out Amazon's podcast interview with Chris Anderson on his new book - http://tinyurl.com/l6ytkh20 hours ago
@unmarketing kind of like striking up a conversation at a cocktail party and talking about the party itself 20 hours ago
