Content Mapping the Buyer Experience

I recently presented on 'Content Mapping the Buyer Experience' at the 2011 Canadian Marketing Association's (cma.org) B2B Summit in Toronto. Gotta say, it was an impressive (oversold) event. The combination of a good agenda, great people and interesting content made for time well spent.

I'm an advocate of supporting the 'Buyer Experience' which goes beyond the traditional buying cycle. How so?
1. The Buyer Experience includes various stakeholders, such as influencers, partners, end users, procurement, executive sponsors, etc - all those involved in a purchase decision - and looks at their motivations and involvement along the buying stages.
2. I include the loyalty cycle after the deal closes as part of the Buyer Experience. This is a discipline that is often managed separately under a 'customer experience' or 'customer satisfaction' label. While this is all well and good, I prefer to include it with the Buyer Experience because customers are potential repeat buyers. Having a holistic view of your buyers - even after they become a customer - provides a better view into patterns, people and purchase characteristics.
3.The Buyer Experience also includes all the pre-buying cycle activities that are done before the vendor is ever contacted or even knows there's an opportunity in play. With the evolution of social media, word of mouth, and user generated content, the Buyer is exposed to a wealth of information - an incredibly powerful and influential force,  that impact the buyer's perspective, perception and purchase decision criteria. If vendors aren't including this in their content marketing strategy, it's a missed opportunity.

While I could have spent all day on the topic, here's what I covered in the thirty minute session. Enjoy.

Content Map the Buyer Experience-CMA B2B Event

View more presentations from Corinne Schmid

Check Out Cool Content About.... Content!

I've seen a lot of really cool content lately that was about.... content!

Digital media becoming mainstream opened up a world of possibilities to communicate and express ideas in radically new and interesting ways. Formats and delivery mechanisms continue to mash-up; evolving content into the intersection of both art and science. Check out my new favs:

Content about Content #1: Content Marketing versus Advertising Infographic
This infographic from Marketo looks at the face-off between advertising and content marketing. Marketo is a marketing automation company, positioning themselves as a revenue performance management company. I started following Marketo back when they had under 100 customers and within a few years their website claims to now have over 700. They have a lot of useful and informative research, reports and best practices - it's worth checking out their site at www.marketo.com.

From the website: The data for this rockin’ infographic came from Marketo’s Content Marketing Cheat Sheet and the 2010 B2B Content Marketing white paper on benchmarks, budgets, and trends from the amazing content marketers at MarketingProfs and Junta42!

Cool Content about Content #2: Push Pop Media's Digital e-Book: Our Choice by Al Gore
From an unlikely source - Al Gore. Yep, his follow up book to An Inconvenient Truth called Our Choice, that Push Pop Media took to a whole other level with a next generation digital e-Book. You know it has to be good when it's featured on Ted.com. As you'll read on the website, software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is "Our Choice," Al Gore's sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth." 



Cool Content about Content #3: Content in the Cloud - Cloud App (author Tom Jenkins)
This is a triple threat: content on content that provides an immersive content experience for iPad. Tom Jenkins' follow-up to the ECM Trilogy book series went mobile and interactive:  Content in the Cloud - Cloud App. Everything you ever wanted to know about Enterprise Content Management,16 chapters featuring innovator stories, case studies, videos, podcasts, and a bunch of other cool stuff. It's free and is available in English; and sadly NOT French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish as it suggest on iTunes. Here's a preview:


Full disclosure: yep, I work at OpenText and I 100% stand by listing the Content in the Cloud as one of my fav's - especially when it was the first iPad immersive book app (and one of the first iPad apps overall thanks to its super talented developer/designer/you won't believe what this guy can eat in a day Jonathon P).
 
If you've seen Cool Content about Content, I'd love to check it out - either list it in the comments below or message me.

Enjoy the Content about Content! 

User-Generated Content: The Game-Changer towards Enterprise 3.0

How have your behavior, actions - even beliefs, changed over the last year or two? I'm willing to bet your behavior and actions on making a purchase have changed and I'll go out on a limb to say that it's because of User-Generated content.

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Sidebar: "User" generated content...really? Why is it that only drug dealers and techies call their consumers "users"? I've seen some references to "consumer' generated content... well, I'd say that users are consumers (by any definition, not just techies and drug dealers). My point is that in this social, collaborative and connected world, we use a term that de-humanizes content created by people when we call it 'user' ... I digress....

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The world is a mash-up. And User Generated Content is at the heart of it. The impact of UGC on the B2C world - and increasingly B2B world is significant. You can read more about my POV on UGC and how it impacts the business world in the March edition of KM World Magazine at UGC KM World Magazine. 

What is more interesting is the 'mash-up'. UGC is the collision of the business and consumer world - no matter if you're a B2C, B2B or government organization. It's the new reality. Are you ready for it?

Consider:

1. People talk. The fancy new term for it is, "Word of Mouth". Whether you're a vet, a grocery store, restaurant or major brand - people are now empowered to share their experience, their POV, their recommendation - whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, the more they DON'T like it, the more likely they are to tell others about it. AKA: Misery loves company. The personal and consumer world has infiltrated the business/corporate/government operating environment - what's your plan to embrace it and use it as a source for change/improvement?

2. People talk ALL THE TIME - and increasingly (thanks to the social infrastructure) to people whom they've never met before. We're tweeting and status updating and LinkedIn'ing our opinions, interests and beliefs all the time to the masses in the Cloud. 

The business world needs to accept that when people have something to say - ready or not - there it is: tweeted, retweeted, Facebook status update, etc. It's for all to see. The sad irony is that when we we've had a great experience, we relish in our contentment and have a great day. When it goes sideways: we're on our iPhone, Blackberry or other device to tweet about it before the situation/incident has even concluded. In many instances, the world could be notified of it before you are - and before having the opportunity to correct it.

3. People have influence and impact on your business, brand: The champion of mind-controlling tapeworms (a great profile I came across on Twitter) could be as influential as CNN. We're all publishers and media outlets! This could mean that the person from high school who you can only recollect as being the recipient of wedgies, is now the person with significant influence over your brand.. .subsequently your company's brand equity... subsequently, the company's EPS. No joke, if you aren't paying attention to or embracing UGC, it could be too late when you do. You may think wedgie-tapeworming guy doesn't matter, but the reality is that you should care that much more!

Bottom line: hellooooo brand new world. The Madmen of the 60's no longer dictate. This is not a command and control Marketing 1.0 world. The upside of Marketing 2.0 (enter UGC): the inmates ARE running the asylum and calling out the perpetrators of bad business, bad practices, bad... well... just being bad. If that's not you - or your business - then you have nothing to worry about. Even then, drop your guard for good service, good business, good practice - let's just hope that Guy K or someone else who's listed 24,000 times on Twitter doesn't hear about it first.

We're evolving from the Enterprise/Web 2.0 world of Engagement to the new 3.0 world of Participation. Consumers are engaged and now participating far more frequently on Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog sites, Online communities, etc. And there are millions of them out there. It's an exciting time when your words - your voice - matter and have impact.  For the business and government world - I hope you're listening.