Name: Decision-Making Dynamics: Roles, Buying Teams and the 2024 Tech Purchase Process
Start: 2024-03-27T16:00:00Z
End: 2024-03-27T16:00:36.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 2

The BrightTALK Academy features the fundamentals of executing webinars and marketing best practices to develop channel owners into advanced hosts.

“Quality might not always be the right answer, but it’s always the right question.” As B2B buyers’ hunger for video content continues to grow, many marketing teams are looking for better ways to fuel their video content engine – and, often, the search for quality is a driving force. Yet there are other factors to consider in the quest to create video content that meets your objectives, whether you’re creating video in house or looking for a partner to fill the gaps.

Join Susan Smith and Jeff Kunken (TechTarget) and BrightTALK's Greg Johnson as they discuss how video quality and content goals intersect and what you need to know to choose the right video services. They’ll tap into decades of combined experience to share how to set the right objectives for your video content and set your team up for success. Plus, they’ll break down different types of video services and budgeting strategies, how a good vendor compares to a true partner, and when to engage them.

The Quality Question: Vendors, Partners and Understanding Your Video Objectives

Quick: you only have seconds to capture a buyer’s attention. What story do you tell? That’s the challenge facing marketers today. In a noisy marketplace, how can you create content that makes your brand stand out in less time than it takes to microwave a burrito? 

Join BrightTALK's production experts as they take you behind the scenes with The Studio, the webinar series pulling back the curtain on B2B production in the marketing world. In this episode, we’re sharing best practices for using video and animation to maximize your social media strategy. From managing the classic “thought leadership” vs. “sales-y” tightrope to developing modular content that can go the distance, our experts will share plenty of tips and tricks to help you stop the scroll.

Video that Clicks: Creating Content for B2B Social Media

Webinars have become an essential tool for B2B marketers to engage buyers and share valuable information. But when it comes to generating registrations, maximizing participation, and delivering an overall seamless experience, how do you make sure your webinars are truly user friendly?

In this episode of BrightTALK’s Build a Better Webinar series, we’ll walk you through how to remove friction from your webinars so your audience can focus on connecting with your business. From simplifying the registration process to maintaining consistent branding throughout, you’ll come away with a framework for the ideal webinar user journey.

Build a Better Webinar: Optimizing Audience Experience

When it comes to B2B video content production, design and marketing folks often throw around the saying, “perfection is the enemy of progress.” But when we think about visual content, great execution goes hand-in-hand with success. Creators must then find a way to balance quality with scale, amidst the pressures of limited time and budget.  

In this webinar, join Fiona O’Connor (Sr. Manager, TechTarget) and Ben Hillman (Executive Producer, Paddle) as they discuss the realities of B2B video production and what it takes to create great videos. Discover how Ben and his team at Paddle build high-quality content to attract and engage their target audience, so you can bring these tactics into your own video program to generate real ROI, no matter your budget.

Perfection vs. Scale: Achieving Balance in B2B Video Production

If you’re a content marketer, you can probably relate to that feeling of being on a hamster wheel – focused and working hard but knowing the pace is unsustainable – and needing to find an off ramp. You’re under pressure to keep your content fresh, generate content in different formats, personalize content for target buying teams, or just generate more and more assets. Or maybe you’re challenged to come up with new ideas and topics that will resonate with your audience. You (rather quickly) surmise that you don’t like being a hamster.

With all the hype around artificial intelligence, you’re probably wondering if generative AI (GenAI) can solve your content creation problems. However, many B2B tech buyers are wary of AI-generated content and, in response, are leaning into expert-authored content. So, if AI isn’t the panacea (and you don’t want to be a hamster), how do you get a sustainable stream of the right content to engage your target audience and move them swiftly to a decision to purchase your solution?

In this episode of our B2B Content Brilliance series, Lauren Whitehouse (Enterprise Strategy Group) and Susan Smith (TechTarget) talk about “classic” content – its characteristics, why you need it and how to create it for each stage of the buyer’s journey. They’ll look at the role of subject matter experts in creating this type of content and how it can make your content engine more efficient.

Classic is Cool: Lessons in Content Marketing

In today’s highly cluttered and competitive vendor landscape, marketing leaders need thoughtful strategies for customer engagement and retention. Without strong brand recognition and clear differentiation from your competitors, your customer relationships are likely at risk. 
 
Join us as Senior Director of Market Research, Corey DeFreese, and VP of Product Innovation, Research and Insights, Katie Graybeal, tap into TechTarget’s Media Consumption survey data to unravel the intricate tapestry of vendor loyalty, customer satisfaction and differentiation in 2024. In this episode we’ll cover:  

-The realities of vendor loyalty today and the top reasons buyers switch vendors.  
-Understanding the real-time topics and trends that your buyers are engaging with, and how you can use these clues to shape your retention strategy.  
-Top purchase disruptors to be aware of and how to keep buyers satisfied.  
-Ways to use vendor loyalty insights to create a more effective content strategy.

Switch or Stay: Understanding Tech Vendor Loyalty and Customer Retention

A great presenter can elevate a brand faster than almost anything else, but identifying the right speakers can be difficult for even the most experienced program planners. Plus, once you've identified your perfect presenter, how do you even get them on board?

In this episode of BrightTALK’s Build a Better Webinar series, we’ll dive into all things speaker recruitment. From identifying and cultivating both internal and external presenters to templates for making and tracking your requests, we’ll cover everything you need to build and maintain a bench of expert talent.

Build a Better Webinar: Recruiting Speakers

The webinar. It’s the bread and butter of any marketing campaign that educates prospects effectively and moves them down the sales funnel. But in a world where B2B professionals consume and participate in video experiences daily, “talking heads” won’t make your content stand out. How can marketers create webinars that grab—and keep—the attention of the people they need to engage?  

Join BrightTALK's production experts as they take you behind the scenes with The Studio, the webinar series pulling back the curtain on B2B production in the marketing world. In this episode, we’ll talk about strategies big and small that marketers can use to differentiate their webinar content. From speaker coaching and up-leveling production quality to smarter storytelling and distribution tactics, our experts will share plenty of tips to help you create webinars worth watching.

How Can I Make My Webinars...Not Boring?

In B2B, the real function of marketing isn’t to directly deliver more deals, it’s to increase the probability of sales closing more deals. Provocative? We don’t think so. As B2B marketers, our methodologies and toolsets have been developed to create the perfect conditions for healthier pipelines, not to manage the pipelines themselves. In nerdy analytics terms, we’re collaborating with others in the GTM in an end-to-end process that connects probabilistic and deterministic methodologies together. Given where buyers are today, we believe that by internalizing this understanding of what marketing does best, it will help empower us to deliver better marketing. But first and foremost, it’s only by understanding buyers better that we can best drive the B2B marketing changes necessary. 

Beginning with a look at the very latest research, in this session, Kerry Cunningham (6sense’s renowned thought leader), and John Steinert (TechTarget CMO) will take advantage of their companies’ new partnership to discuss the very real opportunities marketers have today to be more effective. They will further explain probabilistic and deterministic concepts and then provide specific guidance on how the latest data and tools can help drive useful changes for better GTM results. 

Viewers will come away with valuable insights, including: 
- An understanding of the deterministic/probabilistic dichotomy in B2B marketing. 
- Practical knowledge on how to incorporate these concepts into effective tools and tactics. 
- Strategies for understanding buying groups and how to engage with them early in their journey to influence decisions effectively.

Picking Up What They’re Putting Down: Get the Most Out of Your Buyers’ Signals

In this edition of B2B Content Brilliance, TechTarget CMO John Steinert is joined by Chief Creative Officer Victoria Azarian (Cannes Lions, Effie, One Show). One look at her work and you’ll understand why it’s accelerated millions of dollars (and likely billions) in value for clients and for their customers.  

Our latest strategic session in this series examines the importance (and challenges) of using graphic design to help successfully communicate promises of value. The goal is to aid marketing and business leaders like you in identifying substantive design gaps and the impediments standing between where you are and where you want to be. We look to help you better recognize these, consider them, and articulate them to other leaders towards successful implementation of business-critical improvements.

Good Design is Good for Business

Webinars are incredibly powerful tools for B2B marketers, but sometimes a single webinar isn’t enough to sufficiently cover your chosen topic. And, if you want to be seen as an expert on the subject, you’ll want to make sure you’re providing a comprehensive overview.  

In this episode of BrightTALK’s Build a Better Webinar series, we’ll walk you through the value of developing a webinar series. From tips on topic selection to guidelines for branding your series, you’ll come away with actionable best practices for series development that will help you demonstrate your expertise and engage with your audience in a meaningful way.

Build a Better Webinar: Developing a Series

It’s amazing to realize that Forrester research shows Millennials and Gen Zers made up 71% of B2B buying teams in 2023. What’s more, their clear preference for video-based content means that in your content portfolio, video is absolutely critical as a source of information for B2B decision making and vendor selection. And our own research shows clearly that busy executives are also consuming more video: Across tech buyers, 48% say webinars and 31% say video are the most important media formats they use to build a vendor shortlist. Suffice to say that in the absence of a good video-based content strategy, marketers will struggle to capture these buyers’ attention, get on their short list and influence their purchasing decisions.  

In the next episode of B2B Content Brilliance in Action, join Jeff Kunken (Vice President Integrated Solutions, TechTarget) and Susan Smith (Senior Director, Product Marketing, TechTarget) as they discuss how to design effective video-based content and overcome common impediments to creating a successful video-based content strategy. Jeff will draw from his experience at the Sundance Channel and IconicTV and share examples of how BrightTALK’s Studios team develops compelling video, webinars and virtual events for our customers. You’ll walk away with practical tips on how to create a library of effective video content, within your budget and timeframe, that successfully engages buyers and communicates your solution’s value.

Drive Better Buyer Engagement with Video

95% of marketers believe in-person events are crucial to achieving their company’s primary business goals, yet nearly half are unsatisfied with the results of their current event strategy and its impact on their company’s bottom line. This is especially true when you win the budget to invest considerable time and resources into a booth sponsorship at a large-scale conference. The ROI on your events shouldn’t feel so unpredictable.

“The secret to better, more reliable ROI,” says Steve Madeja, Creative Director (BrightTALK), “is actually using your investment – and your time in the booth – wisely. You need your event content to have the longest tail possible and great video is how you get that done.”

Join BrightTALK's production experts as they take you behind the scenes with The Studio, the content series pulling back the curtain on B2B production in the marketing world. Together, they'll demonstrate how you can use conferences and tradeshows as an unparalleled opportunity to create product marketing collateral, capture content for demand generation, raise brand awareness on social media and collect customer or third-party validations.

Convention Wisdom: Using Video to Boost Event ROI

Rubrik, a leading cybersecurity company, leverages BrightTALK's Channels, Virtual Events and Lead Generation solutions to drive revenue growth by effectively engaging active audiences that are researching relevant solutions. Utilizing a comprehensive webinar strategy and storytelling tactics, Rubrik reached over 10,000 subscribers and has achieved 20% quarter-over-quarter growth in followers.

Hear from Louise Radoor Larsen, International Campaign Manager, Rubrik on how they tap into BrightTALK's active audiences to generate demand.

How Rubrik Finds Success in Leveraging BrightTALK’s Active Audiences

Most marketers agree that webinars are a key tool for facilitating deep and meaningful engagement with target accounts. Some marketing teams use webinars in an on-again-off-again, ad hoc fashion. However, the most successful application of webinars for ABM is a programmatic approach that offers a consistent theme and cadence. 

But, how do you actually plan a successful webinar series so it aligns to your revenue goals? And do you need a large budget and lots of marketing headcount to make these programs a success? 

In episode two, we’ll show you how, with the right preparation, you can build a webinar series that will drive target account engagement and make a case for why they should serve as a cornerstone for your ABM strategy.

Topics we’ll cover:
- How to build a webinar plan that meets your goals
- Why webinar series perform best (and aren’t more difficult!)
- Step-by-step guide for webinar planning success
- How to tie your revenue-centric KPIs to your webinar plan

Unlocking Deep Engagement: Creating an Always-On Webinar Series

Today’s IT buyers often conduct their research independently and shortlist vendors without ever talking to a sales rep. As such, great content combined with an excellent distribution strategy can be your ticket to converting IT audiences into paying customers. Yet for many, this is easier said than done. This session will answer your most pressing questions around not only content creation and distribution, but also content’s direct impact on your bottom line.

Presenters:
• Jon Mycroft, VP, Integrated Publisher, EMEA (TechTarget)
• Louise Radoor Larsen, International Campaign Manager (Rubrik)
• Daisy Zhang, Global Digital Growth Manager (Radware)

Hacking Content: Strategies to Captivate in a Fast-Moving Tech Space

Every time we communicate with prospective buyers, we’re making promises, consciously or unconsciously. Get them right, and you’ll grow buyer trust and brand affinity. Get them wrong, and you risk losing confidence and consideration. If your content isn’t delivering on your marketing goals, there’s a good chance that you’re either missing the mark on what your target audience is seeking or your content isn’t coming from a source that they trust.

In this webinar, Susan Smith (Sr. Director, Product Marketing, TechTarget) and Dave Gruber (Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group) will build on the research-proven “customer promise” concept (discussed in our Creating a Memorable Marketing Message that Lasts webinar), and provide actionable steps on how to improve your content and messaging. They’ll share proven near-term content options to bolster any tech marketing program, strategic approaches for developing promises that will resonate with target audiences, and a “good, better, best” framework you can put to work immediately to better understand and engage buyers, and build buyer trust in your customer promise.

Good, Better, Best: How to Deliver Great Content Marketing Outcomes

When it comes to your webinar series, branding isn't merely slapping a logo on a slide and calling it a day. It's about creating an experience that resonates with your audience from the get-go. The moment your audience lays eyes on your series, they should feel like they've stumbled upon something special—a carefully curated experience that speaks to their needs. 
 
In this episode of BrightTALK’s Build a Better Webinar series, we'll delve into the art and science of visual branding. Learn why it's crucial for your webinar's success and how to craft a cohesive visual identity that speaks to your brand and content. From your webinar registration page to your follow-up emails, consistency is key. Because in the world of webinars, it's not just about what you say—it's about how you look while saying it.

Build a Better Webinar: Branding a Series

As many marketing teams move away from MQL and lead-based demand gen models, the focus has shifted to understanding what drives an account and the unique buying teams within it. TechTarget’s latest Media Consumption survey data can serve as a helpful guide for marketing and sales leaders looking to better understand how role and function dynamics can affect content creation and outreach.  

Join us as Senior Director of Market Research, Corey DeFreese, and VP of Product Innovation, Research and Insights, Katie Graybeal, illuminate the path with actionable tips for marketing and sales leaders looking to break through in 2024. They’ll cover:  

-The latest insights on how job level, function and other factors should influence how you look to engage buyers throughout the buy cycle.  
-Ways Marketing can enrich content to better bridge the buyer-seller divide. 
-A behind-the-scenes look at how tech buyers actually conduct research and how you can leverage the resulting data and insights to reach your objectives.

Decision-Making Dynamics: Roles, Buying Teams and the 2024 Tech Purchase Process

B2B Marketing

B2B Content Marketing

Demand Generation

Buyer Personas

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Marketing

Data Analysis

Buyer Journey

Sales Acceleration

Sales

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Decision-Making Dynamics: Roles, Buying Teams and the 2024 Tech Purchase Process

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