In 2013, Forrester Research conducted a survey on website habits and found that 96 percent of all visitors to a website moved on without taking whatever action the marketer wanted them to take. If you are a B2B marketer, that bounce rate can cause you more than a few moments of anxiety, particularly if you rely on inbound traffic for sales or leads. You may have looked at the statistics and wished that you had a second chance to engage the customer — and that is exactly what you can get with remarketing.

Social media marketing has become an integral part of B2B marketing strategy. And all us B2B marketers have had our fair share of struggles to get it off the ground.

When IBM pioneered a method of qualifying sales leads based on Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline — commonly known as BANT qualification — the world was a very different place. These were the days before the Internet and before potential customers could conduct extensive research on their own. Any customer wanting information on your goods or services had to work through your sales department. Either your sales staff made rounds and called on likely candidates or your telemarketing department did a bit of pre-screening before handing leads off to sales. Occasionally, a potential client would call in response to a print ad or flyer. In short, virtually all sales leads were generated by outbound sales methods that involved your company pushing its message to possible buyers.

Outbound marketing still has its place, but the digital age has shifted the "balance of power." Today, the emphasis is on inbound marketing, which is essentially getting the customer to contact you. Sales funnels are no longer straight, logical progressions that can be managed in a linear manner, so you might have little information regarding just where a buyer is in his journey when he calls you for the first time.

This makes BANT qualification process unwieldy when used as it was originally designed. 

In the past, the AIDA marketing model of attract, interest, desire and action was what most businesses used to acquire customers. While this strategy worked well for years, the Internet age has brought about significant changes. With online marketing being an integral part of most business’s campaigns, the AIDA model has become outdated and making proper adjustments is important for sustaining success.  

On more than one occasion, I have asked clients what the main purpose of their homepage is and their response has been “to get the visitor interested in my site” which usually elicits a shudder from me. While generating interest is important, it shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all goal of a homepage. After all, while grabbing the visitor’s interest is fine, you still need to do something with it. The function of a homepage shouldn’t be just to provide a jazzy table of content for your site, nor is it to be a media explosion; the purpose of your homepage should be to appeal to your target personas and then to guide them to the appropriate path through your website.  

Navigating the Forest of Your Website

One of the key elements of inbound marketing are personas, which are fictional representations of your target demographics. Your personas are the ones that you really want to help through your website, which means that the site itself needs to be constructed with them in mind. Now imagine that your website is a forest and each one of your personas needs to end up in a different spot on the other side of it. Without a proper path, those personas will wander around and have a much harder time getting to where they need to be. With the paths in place, it becomes pretty easy. The problem then becomes, how do the personas know which path to take?