We’re Now “Casual Learners.” How Does This Affect Your Marketing Strategy?
The traditional sales funnel has been fundamentally disrupted by the wealth of information about products and services available to us on the Internet.
Sirius Decisions famously found that 67 percent of a buyer’s journey is now done digitally. Many took this to mean sales doesn’t get involved until more than halfway through the buying cycle, but that’s not strictly true.
47 percent of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson according to a DemandGen Report – 2016 Content Preferences Survey.
David Dodd at Business 2 Community argues this information abundance has led to a dramatic increase in what he terms “casual learning,” meaning learning and information gathering activities that occur before an intentional buying process has begun.
Most B2B marketing tactics and programs are designed to identify business people who are ready to begin a buying process… At any given time, however, most of your potential customers aren’t likely to be “in-market”… Creating relationships with casual learners is important because the impressions they form during casual learning remain influential when they become involved in a buying process.
The best content marketing is based on developing a positive, constructive relationship with customers—and potential customers—a.k.a. casual learners. Achieving this requires a documented strategy, such as the Content Marketing Pyramid, that lays out exactly how you intend to interact with your audience even before they enter the sales funnel.
Click on the link below for more on why you can’t afford to ignore these “embryonic buyers.”
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