B2B Buying Stage 1: The Unaware Buyer

Does this prospect need a whack on the head? If he is an Unaware Buyer, he doesn’t care about your product, even if he does need it. And he certainly doesn’t care about your webinar or your trade show booth.

The challenge with the Unaware Buyer is that he goes out of his way to avoid any sales pitch, because he doesn’t think he needs to buy anything. He easily ignores banner ads and white papers with your product’s name in the heading.

Content for the Unaware Buyer must be interruptive. It has to light a new spark, and cause the would-be prospect to do a double-take and change his mind about what you have to say. It has to be about him, not about you.

How do you arrest attention from an Unaware Buyer?

• Speak loudly to the pain. If the traditional solution has a flaw that prospects are tolerating, turn that toleration into unbearable pain. High failure rates? Lost shipments? Excessive IT maintenance costs? Remind your buyers that their needs are too great, and their standards are too high, to live with that pain.

• Make it news. A new research finding is news; your product launch press release is not. A tie-in to current events or alarming statistic will stick in the buyer’s mind. To be interruptive, the information must be original from your company, and new, not rehashed.

• Make it emotional. There is an old saying in B2B marketing that “companies don’t buy things, people do.” The ads people talk about at the water cooler—for beer, sports gear, cigarettes, car, and sodas—are the ones designed to interrupt an Unaware Buyer with an emotional or entertaining theme.  Although not every campaign can have a breakthrough idea, the use of humor, fear, and storytelling are proven to work. Don’t be boring with the Unaware Buyer.

• Know your persona. Develop solid personas for the Unaware Buyers to be sure your content not only speaks to them, but gets distributed through the media he already uses, whether that’s a high-end webinar series or a Facebook page.