Buyers Guide 2.0

Most organizations today have a website, a blog, and newsletter; they publish case studies and white-papers, and run webinars - telling the world why they are so successful and great to work with. To this, cutting-edge marketing organizations add a YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account, because they want to join the conversation and leverage the social networks.

What’s often missing though is context. And context is very important because it influences the meaning of the content you are sharing. You can write a great blog post, but when it’s shared with the wrong group it loses meaning. Same with Twitter: you can tweet great things, but when you’re not reaching your target audience it has limited value. Having a great video on YouTube is wonderful, but only if the right people watch it. These activities have little meaning when found by the wrong audience, but may have a lot of meaning to a community who keep themselves informed on a specific topic.

Adding context to your marketing and communication activities is the biggest value that a networked buyers guide brings to the table. Buyers guides are already organized around a topic or specific industry. Organizations listed in the buyers guide seek exposure to people interested in that topic or industry. So as a vendor, uniting your communication and marketing channels in your buyers guide presence makes a lot of sense. It is the right place for your blog posts, videos, and white-papers to have the most impact, and it saves the buyer a lot of time searching the web for relevant information.

At Webvent we work hard with our customers to build the next generation of buyers guides. The Buyers Guide 2.0 so to speak, which provides the right context for your communication and marketing activities.

Putting the Buyer back in Buyers Guide

In their widely-acclaimed book ‘Putting the Public Back in Public Relations’,  Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge describe how social media changes the rules of public relations; how blogs, social networks, and online forums have changed the dynamics of influence. Today, new information is readily shared among peers and monologue has changed to dialogue, bringing a new era of PR.

It is easy to draw a parallel with buyers guides. As with public relations, the old top-down ‘push’ model is becoming a thing of the past. Fewer people read generic messages and news releases because we have better sources of information: objective information from influencers and peers. The same counts for buyers guides. Buyers today are less interested in static listings, put together by which vendor pays the most. They want objectivity: to hear from their industry’s thought leaders and their customers. They want to hear success stories and learn from their peers. 

Solis and Breakenridge teach us in their book that social media is reinventing the aging business of PR. At Webvent we believe it is also reinventing the aging business of published buyers guides.