I recently did a webinar with consumer engagement expert, Laura Patterson, of Vision Edge Marketing, a company that improves and proves the value of marketing (online and offline) through data, analytics, metrics and marketing processes.
Laura speaks at shows like the Online Marketing Summit, where we met early last year, and I was immediately captured by her passion and knowledge of sales processes and marketing measurement for B2B and B2C consultative type buyer behaviour.
She took the sales funnel model and turned it into a sales pipeline model that others would soon follow. From it, she teaches us that buyers are basically at different stages of the sales process but can jump back and forth between the state they are at quickly and linearly.
This pipeline and process can be used online and offline and through multiple channels and touch points at the same time. We created this webinar together to showcase what this buyer pipeline meant, and showcase how it works with different marketing channels such as search, social, mobile, affiliates, within shopping comparison engines and more.
Further, it gives specific examples of the types of touch points within each of those channels that engage with customers when they are at different stages of their buying cycle.
The first few minutes, presented by Laura, outline what you need to know about customer buying behaviours, what drives leads and what the six stages in the buying cycle are. I take the lead in the middle of the presentation to showcase the different marketing channels and tactics and how they work based on different buying behaviours and needs of the customers, and Laura finishes it off with some information about measurements, optimization and tracking.
It's interesting to see this process in action and is especially obvious in larger ticket items such as cars, houses, boats, vacations and any other "consultative" type of sale.
I encourage you to watch the video all the way through as there are some great tid-bits that might spark some new ideas about how to understand your buyers, and how to engage with them at different touch points in different channels at different times in their sales process.
Live blog post from the Online Marketing Summit - Day 1 #OMSummit. Presented by Laura Patterson, VisionEdge Marketing. Author of Marketing Metrics in Action - Creating a Performance Driven Marketing Organization.