In addition to persona-based content, you also want to match content with the phase in the buying process to ensure that buyers receive the right content at the right time. The 5 Stages of the Buying Process. There are many different ways to define the buying stages, many of them rooted in consumer behavior research. The image to the right shows one example, but I personally like the buying decision process as described by Kotler and Armstrong in their textbook Principles of Marketing : need recognition. information search. evaluation of alternatives. Conclusion. MORE >>

Oracle does have an existing B2B marketing automation product, based on the technology it acquired from Market2Lead in 2010. Oracle may also be gaining a more sophisticated “cloud native” platform, since other Oracle products grew largely from on-premise roots.** Working marketers care more about how this affects the products and services they’ll get as current or potential Eloqua customers. Eloqua’s press release promises that Oracle will “significantly increase engineering investments in Eloqua products” and “make Eloqua the centerpiece of its Oracle Marketing Cloud”. MORE >>

Crossing the chasm is exactly the wrong strategy for many of the newest and most innovative technology products today, especially many cloud services and SaaS products. If you haven’t read  Crossing the Chasm yet, here’s a 1-paragraph primer:  Moore contends that innovative technology products sell first to a market of innovators and early adopters. Later, products can be marketed to a more lucrative mainstream (“majority”) market. If you’re managing such a product and wondering how you should be crossing the chasm, you may be asking the wrong question. MORE >>

Sometimes that is what you're doing, but often writing for the web—and SEO—involves less glamorous pages like product or service descriptions. Of course, such pages are critical: no one will buy anything from you if they don't understand what you offer. So how do you add life, and SEO value, to a product page? It doesn't matter if your product is technically more of a thingamabob than a whatchamacallit, if your prospects are searching for whatchamacallits, and that's the competitive set they place your product in, that had better be the term you're using. MORE >>

The buying process has shifted in recent years. According to Enquiro, 95% of corporate purchase agents use the web to research products and services before selecting a short list. Customers coming to them, in our Google-driven buying world, with their general questions answered, now needing information that the salesperson doesn’t have. Thanks to research on Google, your customer comes to your sales people, often knowing more about the product than they do! You need to think about and document the questions asked at each stage in their buying process. MORE >>