Fundamentally, this means the marketing sales cycle is now both longer and more complex than ever before. It requires a more holistic view of how to take someone from cold prospect to active evangelist. And it demands that marketers must deploy a wider range of strategies and tactics – understanding what to use and when to use it to deliver the best results.

You can view the document below or download it here.

The phenomenal success of social networks can be transferred directly to mobile, enabling customers and prospects around the clock access to an array of social networking services.

Consumers and professionals alike can now engage with brands, collaborate in real time and stay informed from any location at any time using web-ready devices optimised for social interaction.

You can view the document below or download it here.

While many of us are well versed in the current rules around opt-in for emails and the management of PII data, there is now a new set of European regulations everyone in marketing needs to be aware of. These concern the use of cookies to identify, track and retarget customers. And they will change the way you run your campaigns.

In this new insight paper, we take a look at what the regulations require and what you will need to do to comply.

You can view the document below or download it here.

No one is denying that social media is a powerful new channel for communicating with customers and prospects. But just how powerful?

This white paper takes a look at a wide range of current research into B2B social media, it examines:

• Who’s using the various social media options
• What’s working, what’s not
• What customers are using to inform their buying decisions
• And what it all means for your marketing

You can view the white paper below or download it here.

In this white paper we explode the myth of the traditional sales funnel. We show how it is now time to move to a perpetual trigger-based approach. One recognising that different customers will need different information at different stages.

Today, this information can be triggered by easily observable customer behaviour using modern marketing automation systems such as Eloqua. The result is a more personal, more relevant and ultimately more effective way to generate and nurture demand.

The web plays a central role in everything we do in marketing today. But are you really getting the most you can out of it? In this video, we’ll take you through how you can deliver better results and greater ROI. We focus on where you should invest and where you should proceed with caution. And we highlight how important it is to think beyond the initial click.

As an approach, they can be pretty helpful. They provide a shorthand way of looking at an audience – one which enables us to form more targeted strategies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The problem, however, is that typically they are simply made up.

That’s unfair of course. These segments represent portraits of groupings of characteristics as seen by the researchers. We get a group of people that kinda, sorta look like X. But the point I’m making is that exactly what these groupings are is fundamentally down to the subjective view of the researcher.

Myers-Briggs – the ultimate segmentation?

A few years back, I decided to try to do better. I’d been on some leadership training course and taken a test to determine my Myers-Briggs personality. I found what it told me to be both accurate and intriguing.

Many of you will know of Myers-Briggs – it’s been around some 50+ years and is based on the work of Carl Jung. Essentially it breaks the world down into 16 personality types (which can be clustered into 4 groups). The individual types are given 4-letter codes. Mine is INTP which means I’m Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking and Perceiving. I won’t go into more detail here as you can find out all that on the hundred’s of sites already devoted to the topic.

The key thing for me is that over the years millions of people have taken Myers-Briggs tests (the most widely used is called the MBTI). This means that we have a huge body of evidence about what makes an individual personality type tick. I began wondering whether we could use these types as a kind of über–segmentation system.

Typing IT buyers

We decided that the only way to find out was to try an experiment. At Banner, we created a kind of Myers-Briggs-lite test that could be completed in a few minutes online. We then tested it to see that it broadly delivered the same results as other tests. And then we invited IT professionals in the US, UK, France and Germany to have a go. Everyone who completed the survey got a copy of their results and a little bit of analysis for their effort.

We got just under 1,000 responses. And the results were rather remarkable:

Focusing just on Europe for a moment, out of the 16 types, two alone accounted for 40% of the IT professionals we surveyed. One was my own type, INTP (which we termed Architects) with 22% and the other was ISTP (which we called Craftsmen).

We then compared Europe to the US – astonishingly the top personality type in Europe accounted for just 5% of US IT professionals.

And France and Germany were almost polar opposites.

A presentation of the top-line results is embedded below. You can download it from Slideshare.

The good and the bad

So is this really the panacea for segmentation? Well, not quite.

Where it appears to work well is in specialised job roles. As soon as it is extended to more general business roles (eg general management) the individual personality spikes vanish and the distribution returns to that of the general population.

There are those who are not convinced by Myers-Briggs as an approach to personality – Google ‘Criticisms of Myers-Briggs’ for a pretty comprehensive list. There are a whole bunch of other competing systems.

But, as a possible approach it at least removes some of the subjectivity from segmentation. The profiles we built up (by reviewing every piece of literature on the subject) gave us over 60 different personality attributes – from how people make decisions and how they like to be communicated with through to what kind of parents they make and how they react under stress.

See what you think.