INFLUENCING THE ENGAGED BUYER

BUYING ISN’TWHAT IT USED TO BE

10 MARKETING STRATEGIES TO ACTIVATE THE ENGAGED BUYER

THIS PRESENTATION IS FOR YOU IF:

You find yourself in front of a white board passionately discussing white papers, webinars or the “mid-funnel”

Your product takes more than an hour to learn to use and has more than 100 parts or costs more than $1,000

No one ever refers to your product as an impulse purchase

Your buyer is putting his or her professional reputation, social standing, business success or gobs of money at stake

CONTENTS:

Meet the engaged buyers

Clearing up misconceptions about the engaged buyer

Understanding what engaged buyers want and how to give it to them

Real-world examples of PJA influencing engaged buyers

BUYING IS CHANGING

WHEN GOOD PEOPLE GET THE WRONG IDEA

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE NEW BUYING

HEY, IT REALLY WORKS!

MEET THE ENGAGED BUYERS

PROFESSIONAL“I’m the champion driving a $5,000,000

enterprise IT investment that has to pay off big-time”

PROSUMER“I’ll never learn to be a pro, but I’m ready

to drop two grand on a new digital camera I’ll love spending time with.”

PRACTICAL“I can save time and effort for everybody in

my nine-person company if I choose the right multifunction printer.”

PASSIONATE“My $275 ‘available only in Japan’

sneakers are an integral expression of ‘me’—at work and after hours.”

THE FOUR KEY STYLES OF ENGAGED BUYING:

FOR EVERYTHING BUT SIMPLE PURCHASES,

WE’RE ALL ENGAGED BUYERS NOW.We’re all engaging more in the process of buying than we ever have before — seeking out content, tools and advice on the devices we choose, wherever we are, at multiple moments in the journey from need to purchase. We look for answers to our questions, but what we really want is to feel confident about our buying decisions.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONSABOUT ENGAGED BUYERS

Engaged buyers are really just the people buying big, complicated and expensive B2B solutions.

MISCONCEPTION:

REALITY:

Today “considered” vs. “unconsidered” is the distinction that matters most in understanding your buyer. If he or she cares enough to use search to research alternatives to the hybrid cloud platform, all-in-one printer, prosumer camera, high-end sneakers, robot vacuums or whatever else it is that you’re selling, you’re marketing to an engaged buyer.

Engaged buyers are just a tiny, highly-involved segment of my audience.

MISCONCEPTION:

REALITY:

You see those people in line at the store with smartphones in their hands? Technology has given us unlimited access to information about any possible purchase we could or should make — information from brands, retailers, celebrities and self-appointed experts. And we’re running with it — using search a dozen times for a single purchase, for example. We’re all engaged buyers now, and we get more and more engaged as the stakes for the purchase grow.

Engaged buyers are making rational decisions about considered purchases.

MISCONCEPTION:

REALITY:

Engaged buyers are influenced by the emotional appeal of your brand, even as they consciously incorporate rational considerations into their decisions. They’re buying with their heads and their hearts. Keep in mind, though, that even when they engage emotionally with your brand story, an engaged buyer is still in control of their own buying process.

THREE THINGSENGAGED BUYERS WANT

Engaged buyers actively seek the content and expert recommendations they rely on to help them. Without it they feel unprepared. On the one hand, too much content and advice leaves them overwhelmed and less likely to buy. On the other hand, engaged buyers will place a great deal of value on content that draws on your unique brand strengths to help them make good buying decisions.

1 ENGAGED BUYERS WANT TO GET IT RIGHT

1 ENGAGED BUYERS WANT TO GET IT RIGHT

WHAT SHOULD MARKETERS DO?

There are key points in buying when the brand is the best source of information. PJA helps brands define and respond to that essential role.

One key step is developing a unique brand role statement that identifies the unique ways your brand can guide buyers toward good decisions. Marketers can use this role to focus teams on making the right content and functionality, rather than struggling to make all the content they possibly could.

At its best, a brand position clarifies who you are and helps your best audience decide that yours is brand that is potentially “for them.”

Your brand role can take this a step further by defining how your brand will behave – including helping buyers make good decisions in ways that draw on the unique strengths of the connection built by your brand.

Brand position

Brand role

aligning identities

inspiring action

2 ENGAGED BUYERS WANT TO BE IN CONTROL

Engaged buyers apply mental frameworks to bring structure to their decision-making. “Professional” buyers usually document the specific steps of their approach, while “practical” or “passionate” buyers are often far more casual. Understanding the stakes involved in the purchase is key to determining how your buyer might structure their decision — and how you can best support them. Buyers may not want to make a decision solely on your content, but they are willing to let brands help them clarify their needs and establish criteria for their decision.

2 ENGAGED BUYERS WANT TO BE IN CONTROL

2WHAT SHOULD MARKETERS DO?

Based on our experience with engaged buyers, marketers win when they support engaged buyers’ craving for control.

Marketers can start by identifying your prospects’ “buying styles” and adjusting your view of the buyer’s journey to suit. And don’t stop at answering questions – also look for opportunities to show “buying process awareness” by helping buyers understand their needs with self-assessments, benchmarking tools or checklists that help them sort through alternatives.

Mapping the purchase “stakes” for the buyer, from self-satisfaction to highly-visible success against

“buying approach” (ranging from casual to rigorous) provides valuable insights into the buying styles of different audience segments.

ENGAGED BUYERS WANT TO BE IN CONTROL

SUCCESS

SATISFACTION

CASUAL RIGOROUS

Practical Buying Styles

Professional Buying Styles

Passionate Buying Styles

Prosumer Buying Styles

3 ENGAGED BUYERS WANT TO BELIEVE

While structure and rational decision criteria are important, engaged buyers are just human beings — and emotion still plays a powerful role in their decision-making. Building emotional affinity in the awareness stage won’t be enough, however, to influence the engaged buyer through the entire decision process. It’s important to understand how to leverage the emotions that can help move engaged buyers to action.

3

WHAT SHOULD MARKETERS DO?

PJA has been supporting considered buying for more than twenty years. We’ve learned a lot about emotion along the way.

For example, research (and experience) shows that when top of funnel creative leverages powerfully positive emotions, buyers tend to prefer your content as they move deeper into consideration. Used in the right way, positive emotions initiate powerful brand connections that help move buyers to action.

Humor is frequently used to create emotional appeal in advertising because of its ability to create brand likability. In considered purchase categories, however, it’s also important to use “high activation” emotions – the ones that build appeal while also inspiring action.

ENGAGED BUYERS WANT TO BELIEVE

High activation

Low activation

STIMULATED

TRANQUIL

SAD HAPPY

JITTERY EXCITED

BORED CALM

BUILDING CONNECTIONS WITHTHE ENGAGED ENTERPRISE IT BUYER

,

ENGAGING ENTERPRISE CIOs FOR RED HAT

Red Hat took a leadership position in the enterprise operating system market by making open-source Linux “safe” for enterprise IT — and today, it runs on servers in 90% of the Fortune 500. However, server administrators and CIOs don’t even sit on the same floor, and Red Hat was looking for a way to raise awareness with CIOs who would be likely to consider Red Hat’s new suite of open source enterprise infrastructure offerings. That’s where PJA came in.

PJA partnered with Red Hat to build a campaign tailored to appeal to the rational and emotional needs of the engaged enterprise CIOs. Our approach?

• Find a way to connect emotionally with “enterprisers” — a segment of CIOs with a powerful vision of themselves as transformative business leaders.

• Build partnerships that let us leverage the built-in C-suite credibility of CIO.com and the Harvard Business Review within a Red Hat-branded program.

• Launch the Enterpriser Project, an ongoing conversation with CIOs that takes place at live and virtual events, as well as on a site featuring a steady stream of original content.

CASE STUDY:

ENGAGING ENTERPRISE CIOs FOR RED HAT

Working with Red Hat and CIO.com, we recruited highly successful “expert” Enterprisers as role models for aspiring Enterprisers — and as sources for highly-credible content.

The Enteprisers Project site has become a reliable source of

insightful and inspiration content about the CIO’s emerging role in driving the business – and how CIOs can do it for themselves.

Visit EnterprisersProject.com

Editorial Board of TEP.com

CASE STUDY:

DRIVING RETAIL SALES WITHTHE ENGAGED WIRELESS BUYER

ENGAGING WIRELESS BUYERS IN THE AISLE

Our client virtually invented the no-contract wireless category, rapidly building massive share among early adopters. As no-contract became better known, more and more consumers are considering leaving contract carriers for no-contract plans, but they’ve got lots of questions. And competition has grown fierce, adding to the buyer’s confusion.

Many wireless buyers research online before buying, but most still purchase phones and plans at bricks and mortar locations. PJA worked with our client to target engaged buyers at retail.

• We developed geo-fenced search campaigns around our client’s retail locations, so that shoppers were served up a unique mobile site dedicated to the in-store experience when they searched for our brand, competitive brands or wireless category terms.

• The site uses a simplified navigational experience and easily digestible content to help shoppers evaluate wireless options and make good no-contract purchase decisions.

CASE STUDY:

ENGAGING WIRELESS BUYERS AT RETAIL

We can’t ensure that shoppers will find a well-trained employee in the

wireless aisle, but we have made sure expert advice is

never further away than your phone.

While many buyers research online and then buy in store, so our in-aisle mobile experience is a great way to answer last minute questions. For buyers who do all their research in the aisle, we also can explain the whole story — great coverage, great plans, and great phones, all for a lot less money.

CASE STUDY:

Search geo-targeting helped concentrate media spend on driving engaged in-aisle buyers to purchase.

WHAT NEXT?

DOWNLOAD PJA’s BUYING STYLES TOOLBased on our 20+ years of experience reaching and influencing engaged buyers, we’ve developed a quick tool you can use to map key elements of your audiences’ buying style, including:

• The “stakes” Public vs. private outcomes

• The approach Casual to formal application of buying process

GET THE BUYING STYLES TOOL

OR JUST GET IN TOUCH

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert DavisEVP, Strategy

Robert leads PJA’s strategy function, coaching our strategy, media, analytics and technology teams as we develop strategies to influence and activate engaged buyers across B2B and B2C markets.

PJA Advertising + MarketingGreg Straface

VP, Business Development

gstraface@agencypja.com

(617) 234-7371

@agencypja

Across the complete range of buying styles, we’re ready to put our experience with engaged buyers to work for you. Just give us a shout.