MarketStar Blog

Satisfying today’s customers is an uphill task, for they are spoilt for choice!

Creating a compelling product video is one of the most effective ways to communicate the benefits of your offerings. But even the most enthusiastic creator can stumble into pitfalls that render their video ineffective. Here’s a list of common mistakes to avoid, to ensure your videos deliver the desired impact. 

In today’s digital age, online videos have become the go-to medium for information sharing and consumption. According to comScore, 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content last year, averaging 23.2 hours per viewer. YouTube alone reached 4 billion daily global views, marking a 25% increase in just a few months. This rapid rise in online video consumption highlights its growing popularity among digital natives. 

In today's digital age, customers are more informed and connected than ever. They often have a wealth of information at their fingertips before they even consider making a purchase. This shift presents a unique challenge: businesses must anticipate and understand customer needs before they are explicitly stated. A profound understanding of your customers not only creates a competitive edge but also paves the way for outstanding customer service and loyalty.

While both the terms sound similar they are not. Online Shopping includes all activities starting from researching a product or brand, comparison with similar products using any device but not necessarily bought the product digitally; while online buying includes a purchase made digitally.  

B2B selling, in the digital world, has become an uphill battle. With easy access to information online, buyers are better informed than before. Purchase cycles have gotten longer compared to a year ago,1 and the number of people involved in a purchase decision has increased.2 Not surprisingly, a majority of buyers have rated their latest purchase experience as being extremely complex or difficult.3 

While selling has never been an easy job, the growth of digital has made sales a herculean task. Power has moved from the seller to the buyer. With the explosion of information online and the number of channels for peer interaction and crowdsourced research growing, buyers are better informed than ever before. In their sales conversations, buyers expect sellers to have an intimate understanding of their industry and their business needs, and demonstrate strong knowledge of the solutions that they have to offer. 

Sellers, on the other hand, haven’t been able to embrace this change fully. Much of their sales conversations continue to be on the product or technology that they are promoting. At the seller’s end, sales and marketing are often at loggerheads over what they need to communicate to the buyer. This has resulted in as much as 80% of the content created by marketing going unused by sales.1 It comes as no surprise, then, as revealed in a 2018 study2, that just over half (53%) of all sales organizations hit their target numbers, and this figure has been on a decline over the past five years. 

Sales enablement has evolved as a solution to this problem. It provides sales organizations with the tools that they need to enable their sales teams to perform more productively. But sales enablement isn’t just a productivity tool for sellers. It is an organization-wide shift in perspective that brings the buyer into focus.  

Organizations that have embraced sales enablement are more buyer-centric. They put the needs of their buyers at the center of everything they do. Here’s how. 

If there’s one aspect that defines the sales conversation in recent years, it is the rising level of buyer expectations. It’s not only what the vendors sell, but how they sell that marks the key difference between wins and losses. Buyers expect sales reps to have an intimate knowledge of their industry, understand their pain points, and guide them through the evaluation process with relevant and timely information. This is where sharing high value content at the right time plays a critical role. 

It’s a cliche to say “content is king” without putting it into proper context. However, it remains true that without content to engage your potential customers, you’re drifting down the marketing creek without a paddle. Your account-based marketing (ABM) content efforts are what propel people to consider your product or service from interest through to conversion. 

The digital generation practically lives online, so it’s natural it be educated online as well, well partially at least. Obviously, online learning is seeing great success and has fascinated both educators and students enrolled in higher education with its potential to engage students in context-based content and enabling them to personalize their learning process.