You’re a marketer and just put together some beautiful content, a webinar, a blog article, and a white paper. You see that a certain individual interacts with all three of your marketing materials. You notice this same person has attended every webinar you ever had.
This person must be really interested in buying your product or service right? Think again!
A Marketing Leader, B2B Strategist, and the VP of Marketing at TOPO Inc., Kevin O’Malley, cautions marketers to beware of the “fake Gucci buyers” and to reconsider who you are marketing to as the buyer and who you are marketing to as the influencer. Check it out!
 
Takeaways:
“Fake Gucci buyers” are people that will engage with all your marketing materials, they love your brand, they love all your content, but they do not have the purchasing power, so they will never buy.
ABM is a great marketing strategy, but marketers need to remember to market to the correct people on the purchasing committee. The lower tier roles may be your influencers where their boss is the decision maker, go after the boss.
Separate out the fake buyers from the real buyers by looking at the actions the person is taking after they interact with your marketing materials. If there is no action, but they are consuming all this content, you guessed it, fake.
Marketers need to work closely with sales development. This will bring them closer to revenue, allow them to monitor the messaging, and learn faster from the SDR conversations about what their buyers are saying.
Marketers should not only focus on the top of the funnel but the customer experience as well. Both customer experience and marketing are thinking of optimizing messaging and building a relationship with the brand.
Marketing from customer experience needs to be careful that they are not just taking from the customer, for example, customer referrals and case studies. They also need to be adding to the customer’s experience with the brand through useful content.
SDR phone conversations are a great resource for marketers to be able to draw conclusions of common pain points and questions that buyers are having. Then they can personalize their website and their content towards those pain points and questions.
In your career, don’t just think of your position’s responsibilities but think of the top role at the company. If you were the top person, what would you do? How do you help this role where you are at currently and how can you continue to think big picture?

 
Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omalley/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/b2bkevin
TOPO website: https://topohq.com/
TOPO LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/topo-inc/
TOPO Summit: https://summit.topohq.com/

 
Busted Myths:
People that are engaging with all your marketing materials are your ideal buyers. - Not so, there are plenty of people that are interested in the content that you are marketing, but they will never buy. Similar to “fake Gucci buyers”, these buyers will buy all the fake Gucci products in the world, but there’s no way they will spend the money to acquire a real Gucci product. You may have a business analyst that is highly interested in your webinars and blog articles, but they are not the ones at the company that will make the decision to purchase your product. You should be marketing to the higher tier decision makers above them as the buyer and look at people like the business buyers as influencers.

 
Shout Outs
29:21-Sydney Sloan, CMO of SalesLoft
40:00-Pardot
42:29-Qualified.com