Are we out of touch with our buyers? New Buyersphere Research reveals all

As B2B marketers, we are understandably keen to know all about business buyers' behaviour when they are researching purchases online. What information sources do they use? What influences them?
 
This is what we analysed in the Buyersphere Report, published earlier this year. But now we have added to this research by asking the same questions of the marketer community - revealing two very interesting points: do we share their attitudes when it comes to using online information sources and, perhaps more importantly, do we know what our buyers' attitudes are? If not, we shouldn't wonder why our marketing efforts fail to bring the results we hope for. Read the findings here...
[All page numbers below refer to the full report, which can be downloaded from the B2B Marketing Download Centre here.]

Earlier this year, B2B Marketing and Base One published the Buyersphere Report, a survey into changing buyer behaviour that analysed the various information channels users by B2B buyers when researching their purchases. A footnote has now been added to the Buyersphere story with the publication of figures that compare those figures with similar research conducted amongst marketers. These recent figures paint a fascinating picture of how our view of the changing marketing landscape differs from that of our target audiences - and shows how much [or how little] we know about how they work.

Blogs, Twitter and Facebook more influential than we thought...
A key finding of the research is that we, as marketers, are underestimating the influence of newer information channels, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook [see page 19]. Note that this does not mean that buyers are universally enthusiastic about social media. In fact, while the proportion of buyers using such channels is growing, it remains lower than traditional channels.

But the point is that those who do use them, consider them far more influential than we believe as marketers. For example, in the early stages of the buying process, when buyers are looking for issue-related information rather than product- or brand-related content, 45% of buyers who used blogs rated them as "very influential". Only 9% of marketers gave them the same rating. Add this to the knowledge that buyers in the under-30s age group use social media channels far more frequently than their older counterparts, and we see that usage is without doubt growing. Are we, as marketers, in danger of failing to connect because we don't make information available through the right channels?

How do buyers use our websites?
The report is not all about social media, however. Another interesting discovery was supplier websites are a more important part of the mix at early stages of the buying process than we might think [see page 20]. Company websites typically carry all the information a buyer might need once they have identified a product/solution; they carry product details, 'how to' guides, and they have plenty of corporate information that might convince a buyer to choose them over the competition. But this research shows that we do not appreciate the extent to which buyers expect supplier websites to be an information source at the 'needs identification' stage. The figures showed that 52% of buyers considered supplier websites to be "very influential" at this stage; only 27% of marketers agreed. Are we missing a trick? Looks like it.

The word of mouth conundrum
Another interesting revelation from the research is how marketers consistently assumed that "word of mouth" was more influential than the buyers themselves said it was [see page 20]. Perhaps this is because buyers have separated physical word of mouth recommendation from online recommendation - after all, more buyers rated Facebook and Twitter as "very influential" than marketers expected. Or maybe it's because it has been drummed into us over the years that word of mouth as the ultimate marketing tool and we find it hard to accept it might just be one of many, albeit a pretty powerful one. Either way, it shows that we cannot leap to conclusions.

Marketers spend more time marketing...
As well as asking marketers to second-guess buyer attitudes to information gathering, the survey also compared the amount of time marketers and buyers spent using certain channels when sourcing information for their own work [see page 11]. It was interesting to note that marketers appeared to be generally more hungry for information, spending over 8 hours longer a month sourcing information.

However, this trend was not uniformly spread across all the information channels mentioned. Marketers spent on average 2.3 hours longer on LinkedIn alone - a trend possibly justified by the fact that it can be used as a business generation tool - yet 0.7 hours less on Facebook when compared to buyers. Again, the reason could be that Facebook might help buyers select possible suppliers, whilst proving less useful in identifying new business. Marketers are more likely to go to places that help them market themselves; buyers go where it is easier to buy.

What do marketers and buyers think of social media?
It is interesting to compare respective responses from the buyer and marketer community when it comes to strengths and weaknesses of social media as a business information channel [see page 12]. Whereas marketers found the most compelling benefit of social media to be its low cost, buyers mostly appreciated the way it gave access to other people's experiences.

Similarly, buyers were less concerned about weaknesses over the time-consuming nature of social media; for them, the biggest failing was the fact that information could not always be verified because the original source was not always known.  Perhaps the takeout here is that marketers are concerned with how things work, buyers with what they get out of it.   

Is ignorance bliss?
A final interesting observation is the extent to which marketers confessed ignorance, especially about newer information channels such as social media [see page 7].

For example, 42% of marketers said they simply didn't know what use their customers made of Facebook when it came to researching buying decisions. True, it is very difficult to quantify, being such a new arrival on the marcomms scne, but then given the acknowledged shift in buyer behaviour over the last few years, few things are certain and you could argue that it would be equally hard to guess current buyer attitude to even the more traditional channels, such as press advertising, although marketers were quite happy to commit themselves to estimating usage patterns in that area.

What conclusion can we draw? Perhaps this uncertainty is one of the reasons that so few marketers are willing to commit wholeheartedly to investing in new marketing channels - and probably with good reason until the picture becomes clearer.

So - are we out of touch?
Overall, marketers appear to have a pretty good idea of which channels buyers are using to source information. It is clear to anyone that things are changing and that the traditional outbound messaging techniques of press advertising, for example, need to be complemented by an ever more complex web of content and information provision via social peer networks.

But the research has highlighted that we are perhaps underestimating how quickly this is changing. But the message is not to leap in with both feet; every market is different, and we need to be carefully experimenting and testing, so we are in a position, as soon as possible, to use each channel for maximum effectiveness.

[This blog has also been published in the UK in the December edition of B2B Marketing Magazine - add it to your list as a great resource for B2B marketing articles and research. Check it out here.]