Commentary

Quantifying Marketing: Q&A With eMarketing Strategy's Ruth Stevens

After stints at IBM and Time Warner, Ruth Stevens launched eMarketing Strategy, successful in B2B marketing. In my interview with her, topics include how to measurably enact B2B protocols to help retain customers, and ways to quantify marketing and press efforts.

Below is an excerpt from the interview. Click here to view the videos.

CW: Let’s say that I am a company that owns a form of Big Data I want to sell to the media industry. Where do I start?

RS: We are talking about a marketing plan. Typically we want to understand how these media companies buy. That is the first step in developing a marketing strategy.

We need to understand which media companies are in our sweet spot: Are they defined by size, for example? Are they defined by geography? Maybe we are talking about North America, because our data happens to be limited to that region.

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And then we want to understand who in the media company is important for us to connect to and develop a relationship with. In the B2B world there is something known as the “buyer circle” or the “buying group” who are the team of people involved in the purchase decision.

Usually the buying circle involves several important roles. There is the decision-maker (that is the key position that we want to reach, but there are also nfluencers (these are people who might have an informed opinion about the various vendors that are competing for the business).

There will be a so-called specifier, or several specifiers. Those are usually the technical buyers, who evaluate the quality and the ability to integrate that product with current internal projects and goals. And then there is a purchasing department, depending on the size of the company.

So those four buying roles tend to all need to be addressed and each of them has a different point of view. There may be multiple parties. In fact, a marketing study done a couple of years ago suggested that in large enterprises there are as much as 20 people involved in a sizable $10,000+ purchase decision. So that means that we as marketers must understand who these people are, what is their role in the buying process, how we are going to contact them, how we are going to speak to them in a language that is of interest to them, and how to get them to think of us when they are ready to buy in that category. It’s complicated. 

CW: How have buying signals changed in today’s marketplace?

RS: Thanks to the Internet, the complexity of multiple parties evaluating products over long periods and eventually getting to a purchase decision has migrated from the salesperson (who used to be the main source of buying leads) to analytics.

Before, sales leads might come from a discussion on a golf course. Now we may be able to discern sales interest if someone has downloaded a whitepaper from a website or a research report on a particular subject, or has visited your site for an extended period of time. These can be loosely interpreted as early interest in a product or category. This is why the IP address identification business has sprung up in the last couple of years, focusing 100% on B2B.

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