The Behaviors of Modern Buyers Call for a New Approach

Gone are the days when buyers tolerated a sales-driven funnel. Today's buyers conduct independent research long before ever engaging with your sales team. In fact, only 5% of buyers are actively looking to purchase at any given time. This means that old demand generation tactics like gated content, random email blasts, and lead scoring systems are becoming less and less effective.

To be successful in today's buyer-driven landscape, you need a strategy centered around demand creation and demand capture. This two-pronged approach meets buyers where they are and converts both passive and active demand into revenue.

Demand Creation: Building a Relationship Before the Sale

Demand creation focuses on the 95% of buyers not ready to purchase. The goal here is to build brand awareness and affinity by educating buyers on how your product or service can help them. Tactics include:

- Brand marketing content like newsletters, podcasts, and blogs that provide value and spark an emotional connection

- Product marketing assets like calculators, product tours, case studies, and testimonials that clearly demonstrate your product's value

The key is blending educational content that attracts and retains attention with compelling product messaging. This primes buyers so that when they are ready to purchase, they think of your brand first.

Measure demand creation through engagement metrics, brand search volume, referral traffic increases, and most importantly, self-reported attribution in your forms. This enables you to directly see when and where you first connected with buyers.

Demand Capture: Being There the Moment Buyers Are Ready

Demand capture focuses on attracting and converting that active 5% ready to purchase now. You need to ensure buyers can easily find you the moment intent goes from passive to active. Tactics include:

- Paid search and display ads to reach buyers actively searching

- High-intent website optimization with clear calls-to-action

- Review sites, intent data, and remarketing campaigns

- Retargeting campaigns to stay top of mind after initial touchpoints

Essentially, you need to be present in all the places your buyers go when they've identified a need and are evaluating vendors so you can capture and convert available demand.

Measure demand capture through metrics like search impression share, website traffic to high-intent pages, and lead-to-customer conversion rates. This enables you to analyze both the quantity and quality of demand captured across initiatives.

An Integrated Strategy for Modern Buyers

The outdated sales-driven funnel approach is no longer effective on its own in today's buyer-centric landscape. A best practice is integrating ongoing demand creation with tactical demand capture. This expanded approach aligns with how buyers actually make decisions today.

The brands that evolve to match buyer behavior will steal market share from those still clinging to outdated methods. Is your demand generation strategy centered around the modern buyer? If not, the time for change is now.