Who Do People Buy

December 12, 2014

In today’s Interesting Infographic, we focus on the buyer – who do B2B buyers purchase from and why? What resonates best with a B2B buyer? We can use this information to re-energize our B2B demand generation. The introduction to the Infographic summarizes it as follows:

Buyers are attracted to people that know their stuff, who generate trust and help them make informed decisions throughout the process. A recent study by LinkedIn revealed that 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy from someone known as a thought leader in their industry.

The following visual describes the underlying motivations behind today’s buyers, platforms that they prefer and specific content types that help move them down the sales funnel.

Becoming Thought Leaders

Putting in time, effort and resources to become a thought leader is worth the effort because as the research indicates, B2B purchasers are more likely to engage with someone who is known as a thought leader in their industry. Plus, with the wide variety of publishing platforms available, every member of your sales team can be seen as a thought leader. In addition, on average, decision makers consume 5 pieces of content before being ready to speak to someone about the product or service.

Choosing the Right Platform

This where B2B social media plays a role. Not surprisingly, the majority of B2B buyers used LinkedIn to support their purchase process.

Finally, it all comes down to producing the right content for your buyers in your B2B demand generation play. The infographic below uses a very useful illustration of a funnel with the most popular content types at each stage. I think this makes this infographic a terrific resource – remember to bookmark this page the next time you need to create content.