The Follow Your Buyer Philosophy Explained
Life Science Connect, the parent company of Follow Your Buyer, has had a front row seat for the past several decades for the evolutionary transformation of the buyer's journey. Here is what we learned!
In 1994, the first clickable banner ad went live, the rest of that decade saw the development of digital marketing, and it has been evolving at a rapid pace ever since.
Digital marketing has enabled B2B solution providers to communicate their value to target audiences everywhere, all the time, with great precision, in a variety of engaging formats, and measure the results.
It also has enabled buyers to be much better informed as they navigate their complex journeys to make purchasing decisions. This made a traditional style of B2B marketing and sales obsolete, one in which buyers relied heavily on salespeople to inform them and influence their decision-making.
At Life Science Connect, the parent company of Follow Your Buyer, we’ve had a front row seat for this evolutionary, and even revolutionary, transformation of the buyer’s journey. In our effort to best serve our publications’ subscribers using our Follow the Reader approach, we discovered something.
We learned that buyers were spending much more time in the early stages of their journey than we thought. They were reading articles to better understand the issues they face and studying examples of how others solved similar problems. And they were doing this without revealing themselves to sellers. Since then, Gartner has done extensive research that confirmed our findings.
With an understanding of the real B2B buyer’s journey, we began advising our advertiser clients on ways to influence buyers with customer-centered content marketing strategies. We showed them how to use content that helped buyers throughout their entire journey, especially the early stages when prospects are understanding issues, establishing objectives, and setting strategies.
The advertisers who adopted a strategy based on the real buyer’s journey significantly outperformed those who depended only on features and benefits content or product and service descriptions. And again, Gartner research confirmed this.
We felt so strongly about what we learned over the course of more than two decades that we formalized this winning approach, and the result is the Follow Your Buyer methodology!
Our hope is that you visit us often, add us to your list of favorites, sign -up to receive our newsletter, and experience the same level of success as others who adopted the Follow Your Buyer methodology.