Digital Body Language by Steven Woods

These are the notes I took while reading Digital Body Language by Steven Woods. This isn’t meant to be a Cliff Notes version or a substitute for reading the book.

Additional notes I’ve taken while reading other books can be found here.

Introduction

The need to exchange information + the many ways of exchanging it over the internet has led to a fundamental rethinking of the role of marketing in many organizations.

Each message, its targeting, its timing, its content was though about in terms of who the buyer was and where in their buying cycle they might be. Who consumed the information and why?

A Transformed Buying Process

The two phases of new technology:

• The technology is adopted but used in a similar manner to the prior solution albeit with significant incremental improvements.
• The new capabilities are thought of in entirely novel ways and the original problem is framed in a fundamentally different manner leading to sweeping innovations in business practice. Examples include typewriters => word processors (changed the way we collaborate and share information, not just editing + spell check, printed encyclopedias => CD Rom versions (change the way we think about and share knowledge and led to innovations like Wikipedia), paper maps => online maps.

Think about where future buyers go to educate themselves, discover solutions, or make comparisons. That’s where you want to be.

Industry news sites and newsletters present specialized industry information, emerging trends to consider, best practices (both proven and proposed) and ideas - while striving to deliver content that is free from vendor bias.

Define your buyer personas: how would they use the product in his/her daily life (how should it be built, marketed and sold to best connect with him or her). These can be taken even deeper with listing hobbies, personality traits, etc.

What is Digital Body Language?

Digital body language is an art and science that revolves around detecting and understanding prospective buyers’ signals and intentions to better communicate with them.

At any moment, most prospective buyers are not actively engaged in a buying process with you.

First, the prospective buyer must recognize his company has a relevant and meaningful business pain. Next, he must understand the industry/sector well enough to seek a particular solution. There is often a key internal event that drives action and prioritizes that business pain as the most important one to solve at that moment in time.

Marketers need to profile the digital body language of the potential buyer(s) and translate that into objective scores that define where each buyer is in their buying process and then route buyers to the right interaction that makes the most sense for their unique position in the procurement cycle.

Just because someone isn’t ready to buy now doesn’t mean they won’t be ready to become actively engaged in a buying process later. It just means they’re not engaged right now. It’s critical to keep them engaged with the right level of communication so that when they have moved to a different phase in their buying process, they enter your funnel and progress through the sales cycle - you need to nurture them until they later blossom into full fledged prospects.

Sirius Research shows that of the 70% of leads who are disqualified by sales, 80% end up buying eventually (within 24 months), often from a competitor.

Marketing is taking responsibility for moving lower down the funnel than ever before.

The Profile of the New Buyer

• How ready to buy is this person?
• What role does this person play compared to his colleagues?
• How interested is this person?
• What type of message best resonates with this person?
• What information on this person would be useful to obtain?

Make sure to tag sections of your site like case studies or details product descriptions as meta, so 12 unique page views looks like five case study pages and seven product pages.

Awareness Stage

Hallmarks are research and education. It may not be possible to capture individual names and contact information of prospective buyers. Sample activities include - referral from marketingsherpa.com, acme.com/salesalignment, acme.com/casestudies, download form - case studies.

Discovery Stage

Prospective buyers move from self education about a market to active exploration and discovery of potential solutions. This is the point where the solution is either investigated further or eliminated from further consideration. The latent business pain has been escalated and those who are tasked with solving it are actively motivated to find a solution.

First step - look for signs that involve solution discovery and light research. These may be more general search terms like “demand generation” “marketing automation “campaign management” and “lead management.”

Validation Stage

Repeat visits from multiple people in the organization, the evolution of their search style, seek out significant literature. Sample activities may include a blog post comparing systems, webinar registration - demo, acme.com/productdetails, download form - free trial, acme.com/helpdocumentation.

Markets must understand the range of buyer roles and match them to individuals in the buyer organization. There are usually four buyer roles - economic, user, technical and coach.

The Economic Buyer

Gatekeeper of the budget and evaluates projects from an ROI perspective. Most relevant information includes case studies, client examples and financial models. Sample actions include - search for “acme pricing”, acme.com/productlevelcomparisons, download form - ROI calculator, email click through - MegaCorp case study, acme.com/casestudy_financeco, download form - analyst review. They may also examine total cost of ownership (TCO) which includes the vendor’s viability, the makeup of the management team and the liklihood that a solution vendor may be acquired.

The User Buyer

Evaluate the operational impact of the proposed solution - how will it be used on a daily basis and who will it affect? The user buyer generally explores the hands-on aspects of the vendor’s website - trials, demos, user documentation, downloads. They also like to consult with peers through user groups and community sites to learn about the experiences and gain the perspectives of others who have implemented the proposed solution. Sample activities include: download form - free trial, acme.com/productdocumentation, customer community - sign up, email click through - tips & tricks, blog - acme aficionados.

The Technical Buyer

Analyzes the proposed solution from the perspective of feasibility. He focused his time on understanding specifications, technical details, implementation and integration challenges, and expected project challenges in any transition to the new solution.

The Coach

Palpable eagerness to see your solution implemented. The clearest indicator is internal propagation of your messages (forwarding emails to peers within the organization, downloading marketing material targeted at facilitating this type of internal promotion).

Determining buyer’s interest level: recency, frequency, depth.

• Recency: The timing of events in a buying cycle is as important as the events themselves
• Frequency: How often does the prospective buyer engage with your marketing message? For example, a sudden spike in activity tells a very different story than a steady pattern of low level interest
• Depth: In most sales cycles, the depth of engagement by the prospect is the most accurate and actionable metric of a prospect’s interest. How deeply does the prospect interact with your assets and resources? This depth can mean the difference between tire kicker and committed buyer. Naturally the more deeply a prospect engages by acquiring more of your content, the more interested the prospect is and the more open he is to engagement with your sales organization.

Failing to understand communication preferences (how the prospective buyer prefers to receive information) makes it unnecessarily difficult to have messages reach prospects and ensure they are received and read at the right times. Media type, style, and frequency.

The Media Type

Marketers must pay attention to what vehicles and media types that buyers prefer (RSS, email, direct mail, podcasts, trade shows, industry reports, etc.)

• Style: Some prefer rich graphical communications, others prefer text-only style, some like a writing voice that is more educational while others respond better to sales oriented messages
• Frequency: As the prospect becomes more familiar with and engaged with the vendor organization, their comfort increases. A more frequent communication style is more likely to be welcomed without leading the prospect to abruptly disengage. Monitor this by profiling communication frequent and the associated response.

Scoring the Imperative

The most common dimensions are: the stage in the buying process, the buyer’s role, the demonstrated or expressed level of interest, communication preferences.

Time is an exceedingly relevant component of a scoring algorithm. For motivated buyers, factors like a prospect’s level of interest or stage in the buying cycle can move quickly - even in the span of a few weeks. Conversely, a prospect’s role in the process or communication preference are far less likely to change quickly (or at all) over time.

Marketing Asset Evaluation

In what ways can a prospect interact with this marketing asset? For example, an email can be opened, forwarded, and clicked through (each of those interactions can also happen multiple times).

What does each interaction (likely) reveal about the prospect? Does it provide insight into their area of interest? Does it declare how they like to be communicated with? Can it show what CTA’s catch their eye? Can the marketing asset provide different insights if aggregated into a larger group (e.g. One individual response to a monthly newsletter vs a sustained level of activity over time)? Can the marketing asset provide different insight if broken down into smaller units(e.g. 10 page views vs 10 page views that were technical specifications for product X)?

How does time factor into lead scoring?

• Historical all time: The prospect’s full history is used to calculate a score (whether this spans weeks, months or years). Data collected years ago is considered equal to data collected as recently as yesterday. Communication preference is a dimension where historical all time scoring is very relevant.
• Single point of interest: This approach captures one defined and recent point of interest, excluding all prior data points to clearly highlight the key point of interest. This approach can be useful in identifying specific buying events or interest upticks using scoring.
• Recency and Relevance: Leverages the entire data history but applies a positive weighting to events that are most recent. All historical events and interactions are captured but over time are subject to different “half lives” that reduce their value over time (sometimes to a fraction of their original value and sometimes even to zero). Scores for recent events are added without aging/decrease. This approach is ideal for prospecting models where a buyer’s interests may change over time.

Nurture to Win

Historically, with complex products and services, most marketers have aspired to lead a prospective buyer through a progression of steps and phases, ultimately resulting in a purchase. However, today buyers are driven more by internal events inside their own organizations that compel them to initiate and undertake the purchasing process - they’re the ones with control (and they have no use for the historical marketer defined sales cycle).

Lead nurturing is intended to keep the conversation with the prospect going and continue to deliver a soft sell, low key message to a prospect at early stages of the buying process. This gives the prospect a chance to engage with the vendor and for the marketer to identify any changes in buying status (due to their digital body language fingerprint).

Lead nurturing must be directed to retain the prospect’s permission to stay in front of them. That permission is secured only if the message or communication contains sufficient value to the recipient (and encourages him to remain engaged with the vendor). If you abuse this permission, you can quickly move from “potential partner” to “spammer.”

High open rates, good forwarding rates, repeated opens and strong CTR’s are all strong indicators of permission.

The only reason to remove a prospect from the funnel is due to them being the wrong target or a fundamental loss of interest.

One of the most common (and successful) approached to re-engage fallen away prospects is to use a media type that is very different from the primary media type that the prospect is accustomed to receiving from the vendor. In many instances, the prospect’s disengagement is inherently tied to the media type on which they typically see your messages. For example, a weekly email could be reflexively be deleted sight unseen. Voice or direct mail can be effective in these purposes.

It might be wise to acknowledge the disengagement upfront (e.g. “we haven’t heard from you recently”) before proceeding.

The Emerging New Discipline

The easiest way to get started with leveraging your marketing data and getting to know your prospects better is to place a brief web form in front of your marketing assets.

Ensure you can pre-populate your web forms based on the visitor’s cookie and use pre-sent fields in that form based on what information has already been requested.

Even typical offline media, such as direct mail, can provide significant insights into interest levels of individual prospects if they use a personal URL (acme.com/johnsmith) for each recipient as their unique call to action.

Which fields in the data model are essential? How complete is the data in those fields?

Data consistency: VP Marketing, V.P. Marketing, VP of Marketing, Marketing VP, Vice Pres Marketing, Vice President Marketing.

Philadelphia Flyers - Sample Case Study

• Created personal URL’s for season ticket holders (myflyerstickets.com/john smith)
• Invited each customer to his/her site to complete the renewal process
• Each personal page had personalized content and offers enticing the ticket holder to renew. This also started a direct relationship with each fan.
• The site contains rich info (including video) on players, stats, schedules, and the draft.
• By observing each customer’s digital body language, as they look at stats, read up on players and watch highlights, the Flyers can identify things such as favorite players and whether they prefer stats or highlight reel footage
• Future plans include personalized video and audio message from each fan’s favorite players and RSS feeds of stats and highlights tailored to each specific fan.

A new collaborative model

Ensure everyone in your organization is using the same definitions for everything. For example:

• Inquiry: The prospect takes explicit action such as submitting a form, downloading a trial, or registering for an event.
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Using a broader set of carefully pre-defined criteria (ideally including a scoring algorithm agreed by sales), marketing deems the lead to be sufficient quality to warrant sales engagement
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL): Sales accepts the lead based on preliminary review of the data on the lead and agrees to engage with the prospect
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Based on further conversations and interactions with the prospect, sales concurs that the lead is truly a revenue opportunity
• Closed business: Sales completes a transaction

In marketing organizations, it’s historically been tricky to define the right metrics because the measurable elements (e.g. the raw number of inquiries) doesn’t neatly align with actual business goals.

MQL:SAL ratio helps determine the quality of leads marketing is sending to sales.

Don’t allow sales to cherry pick leads that aren’t ready for sales yet (based on their lead scoring).