What is Buyer Behavior and Why Does it Matter?

Buyer Behavior – the processes and actions that consumers take when they aim to purchase, use, and get rid of something that they need. These include all the behavioral, emotional, and mental responses that they have. This matters to B2B marketers as it allows them to understand buyer expectations and, perhaps more importantly, what makes them buy a particular product or service over any other.

Why Should You Care?

For as long as B2B companies have existed, their marketers and sales teams have always yearned for the ability to know which buyers would buy and which ones would be a waste of time and effort. It would certainly allow for a more efficient targeting in terms of nurturing and sales and will ultimately be more efficient. While there’s no way to determine with absolute certainty which leads you should focus on, studying buyer behavior can clue you into those most interested.

That’s the very basic benefit, really. But there are several more benefits that you need to consider if you haven’t invested much into understanding your buyers’ behaviors.

It will increase efficiencies in targeting.

While you likely already have a defined audience that you target with your marketing and nurturing efforts, you can expand through the study and analysis of buyer behavior. For example, you can add into your list of potential customers those that behave in the same way towards your products and services. Often, this is because you uncover a market segment that never crossed your mind. Naturally this opens your total addressable market and can gain net new prospects.

While there are many similarities among your target demographic, there are a great many variations within them. These variations can be along the lines of use cases or even specific pain points that plague them. Basically, they all might want what you offer but for very different reasons. This insight is important as it will allow you to customize your marketing, nurturing, and sales strategies accordingly.

It improves retention greatly.

Because buyer behavior includes post-sales considerations, it can aid greatly in retaining existing clients—converting them to a loyal customer base. That’s what a lot of B2B businesses get wrong. Things don’t end when you close the deal and make the sale. In a certain sense, there’s still a lot of work to be done. That’s particularly true if yours are products and services that work on a subscription model or those that will see updates through the years.

What you should look out for are the telltale signs of unhappiness with your after-sales approach. These include constant complaints, increased aloofness with your follow-up calls, and—of course—straight-up expression of the desire to find newer options. These, of course, will differ in specificity depending on your audience so you should be very mindful about how you respond. Your nurturing efforts should match what’s needed accordingly.

It guides your overall strategy.

Given that buyer behavior encompasses all activities from consideration to well beyond purchase, it stands to reason that it would be useful in guiding your long-term strategy. When you understand what your buyers are looking for along their buyers’ journeys, you can craft your content accordingly, plan its distribution timing and channels to be used.

The potential to create a well-informed strategy through the understanding of buyer behavior is too great not to invest time and effort. Just make sure that you’re looking at the right markers for behavior that’s relevant to your needs—be it online interactions and engagements, specific questions that they ask, and information that they’re looking out for. It’s equally important that your responses to these needs are timely and specific.

It guides your overall strategy.

It’s also worth noting that buyer behavior can also be tracked with regard to your competition. Take a look at the content or material that your competitors put out. You can readily see the kind of engagement that they are getting – both positive and negative. Sure, you won’t quite be able to peek behind the curtain to see what goes on there, but you can get a pretty good idea as to what’s working for them and what isn’t.

These insights can be valuable in adapting your own messaging and approach should yours not be as effective. Of course, you need to be aware that there might be differences that you need to consider insofar as audiences are concerned. That is, your competitors might not be exactly trying to reach the same people you are. Don’t get yourself trapped into thinking you can merely emulate what your competition is doing. Use this information as a guide and a clue towards what you need to do, and that’s that.

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