Steven Woods - Deciphering Customer Intentions

The fact is, Steven's ideas should be at the very forefront of every marketer's arsenal - no matter what the size of the company - no matter what the target market.

Steven's concepts are simple yet powerful. Don't try and figure out what your customers want, watch how they interact with your business and let them tell YOU what they want.

By watching a prospect or customer's digital body language, you can determine where they are in the buying stage and tailor your marketing messages accordingly. It's the age old principle of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Except, in this case, we now have the modern sophistication of digital tracking to help out.

Steven's groundbreaking book doesn't really rewrite the rules of BtoB and BtoC marketing, but it certainly modernizes the process and provides the tools and resources to automate what, by necessity, had to be done by hand not long ago.

If you're a business owner, do yourself a favor and pick up this book. I promise it will open your eyes to the power and sophistication of modern digital marketing techniques.

A Discussion With Steven Woods

Steven was kind enough to answer a few questions on the importance of deciphering customer intentions.

Corte Swearingen: Before we begin, let me just say I never thought there was a connection between physics and marketing, but you and I both have engineering physics degrees. In addition, I have two acquaintances that are marketing directors and they both have physics degrees. Is there an advantage to having a strong analytical mind when it comes to marketing?

Steven Woods: It's an interesting point - marketing is changing a lot, and is moving from a discipline oriented around creative and copywriting to a much more process and analysis oriented discipline. What's key to success now is being able to objectively understand buyer intentions based on their behavior, and delivering the right message to them according to exactly where they are in their buying process. This move from pushing out marketing messages to facilitating a buying process requires an understanding of data, process, and analysis, and I think that's why we're seeing a lot more analytical backgrounds in marketing these days.

Corte Swearingen: If you had to condense the definition of marketing into a single sentence, what would it be?

Steven Woods: Understanding what the market needs, not just in terms of the solution you provide, but also the education and consideration surrounding it, and providing that to each prospective buyer at the right time, and in the right way that you make a positive impact on that individual and guide them towards buying.

Corte Swearingen: Writing a book is not an easy process. What was the main motivating factor for writing your book Digital Body Language?

Steven Woods: The marketing world is really changing based on the significant changes in today's buyers. I had been talking with many marketers about this change, and how best to think about marketing in this new world. From those conversations, it became obvious that there was a need for a more comprehensive discussion around this change. The book was a great way to introduce that discussion.

Corte Swearingen: The book seems to focus mainly on BtoB marketing, but don't the same principles apply to BtoC? Why the strong focus on BtoB?

Steven Woods: Yes they do. In fact, in the book, there are a number of case studies on sports teams like the Flyers and the 76ers. What I've been focused on mainly are buying processes that have a lot of information being exchanged, are a bit longer, and more considered than a commodity purchase like soda or running shoes. These are often BtoB purchases, but you're right the same principles apply in larger BtoC purchase scenarios.

Corte Swearingen: Tell me about how you co-founded Eloqua and what the company has done to help business owners all over the world.

Steven Woods: We started Eloqua nearly a decade ago now as we realized that there was a significant change happening in buyers, and that we had an opportunity to help marketers adjust how they think about their marketing. Early on it was only very innovative marketers who were thinking of their buyers in a new way and looking to facilitate a buying process, rather than push messages out, but now we're seeing this philosophy becoming much more mainstream.

In recent years, we've seen a lot of organizations in financial services, sports marketing, and business information services re-orient themselves towards today's new buyers, and we're also working with a lot of smaller organizations than we did historically. This is not just because we've made the software much more accessible for the small business marketer, but we've also made our learnings and best practices from our overall client base instantly available to them.

Corte Swearingen: For a small business owner that can't afford a sophisticated software package to track every customer touch point, what do you recommend? Without a marketing automation package, is it possible to put the principles of your book into practice?

Steven Woods: Absolutely - in fact we're both the largest and fastest growing provider in the marketing automation space, just because the platform is very accessible to the small business marketer. Obviously as a time strapped, and resource constrained marketer in a smaller organization, there are some things that deliver more value more quickly than others.

Putting in place some basic automation around your events, a generic nurturing program, and an event follow-up process that can be used across all your tradeshows, can in fact free up time for marketers who were following manual processes historically. Recently, Heather Foeh, the head of our small business customer success team recorded a quick video of some things that small business marketers can think about to add value quickly with marketing automation in a small business.

Corte Swearingen: What foundational steps need to be in place before a business can even think of using a marketing automation software package?

Steven Woods: A web site with good information, relevant to buyers, is a good first step. However, a lot of the evolution we see marketers go through is more along the lines of crawl, walk, then run. As you begin to engage with buyers and understand more about their buying processes and what they need, you can evolve your communications, how you score leads, and how you guide and facilitate their buying processes.

Any marketing organization focused on a longer buying process, with a reasonable amount of education involve in a buyers decision, should think seriously about marketing automation. Once you find that you have a good set of content, webinars, demos, and presentations, and your task increasingly becomes how to get buyers through a buying process, you need to think about a marketing automation system. There are many aspects of facilitating a buying process that it is virtually impossible to do manually.

Corte Swearingen: Give us a real-world example of how the principles in your book have transformed a business.

Steven Woods: There are many, in fact one of the things I was most happy about with the book was how willing the marketers we worked with were to share their stories. The book has over 20 examples from real-world marketers of what they are doing in their own businesses.

One example is the team at Terracotta - they mapped out the stages that their buyers go through to recognize, evaluate, sample, integrate, test, and deploy the Terracotta software for performance optimization. By using digital body language, they were able to understand where each individual buyer was in their buying process, and could cater their communication with them accordingly.

Corte Swearingen: One of the most frequent questions I get is how social media fits in to the BtoB world. It seems that social media outlets are better suited to BtoC companies. What are your thoughts on this?

Steven Woods: I think that social media is very relevant for BtoB marketing. It is a great way to educate buyers, engage with them in a low-intensity way, and provide them with the information they need to move themselves through their own discovery process. It also provides a great avenue for understanding your current customers' experience with your products and what you need to do in order to have more raving fans in the community at large.

I wrote a while back about how marketers can think about social media in BtoB by thinking about what the "periphery" of their web presence can tell them about buyer needs, and that concept has started a lot of interesting discussions.

I think that BtoB organizations who are not at least exploring social media are missing a lot of opportunity, and a lot of learning.

Corte Swearingen: One of things I really appreciated about your book is how you discussed all the concepts without pushing your own company, which is one of the leaders in marketing automation software. I think this is a great example of pure content marketing. How has the book affected your business?

Steven Woods: It has been great for business. As the space has succeeded, there have been a number of smaller entrants in the space who are clamoring for attention. We've had many clients upgrade to Eloqua after experimenting with one of the newer entrants, and they all tell a similar story; the demos may have been flashy, but the depth of experience and capability needed to get them successful just wasn't there at all.

The book has really helped us educate the market on what is needed to succeed with marketing automation; it's a lot more than just technology, there are many people and process transformations to take into account as well.

I would much rather let customer success speak through the stories in the book, and in the market, than any other way. If you want to know how successful you can be with Eloqua, don't ask us, ask our customers.

Corte Swearingen: What are you currently working on? Any plans for a follow-up to Digital Body Language?

Steven Woods: We're doing some very exciting things with the product right now, we're doing a lot of interesting work with some of our most advanced customers, and I'm very involved in our social media efforts. All the while, it's been a great year for us in terms of new customers and growth; we've grown more than anyone else in the space, so there's a lot keeping me busy.

That being said, there are a few ideas I'm working on that have the potential to be book-worthy. I find that plane flights are often my most productive time for writing, so I'll see if I can flesh those ideas out over the next while. Stay tuned!