Working 95-5
It is a fact that, for many B2B manufacturing and service companies, especially those with fairly high-value products, most of their potential customers are not actively looking to make a purchase at any given time. According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, the figure they have come up with is about 5%.
How does that work?
If the average member of your target audience makes a purchase once every two years, in a single year, only about 50% of your audience will be actively looking to make a purchase. So, in a quarter, there would be roughly 13% and then about 4% monthly. So you can see the 95% not looking as opposed to the 5% looking is about that. 95-5 is a nice round number to make the point.
Take getting a new mobile phone contract as an example. The average length of a phone contract is 24 months, so with that logic, the average person will shop around for a new contract once every two years. (Unless you’re our copywriter who has finally ditched his nearly 6-year-old phone for a new one after the screen’s pixels started dying!)
From a website update/refresh/restructure point of view, the figure would be about 2.7 years between projects (for marketing sites) so that is about right for us. For people changing agencies entirely the interval is generally much longer. You can probably work out the inter-purchase time for your own product and see how it works out for you.
That’s a pretty small target audience
Looking at that 5% figure the obvious question is “how do I target those people?”. Switching on your ‘Buy Now’ ads at exactly the right time and getting them in the right place must involve some serious marketing science or wizardry. It is possible to know who your audience is, where they are geographically (which can be very useful for some businesses) and also where they are likely to visit online so we can make your ad spend very effective.
But what about the 5%?
This is the good bit: your really don’t need to worry about targeting the 5%. Your main focus should be on being present all the time. Every time your brand appears in a relevant context it is reinforced. You are building memory links to your brand.
“Advertising impressions, accumulated over time, affect our memories. So, your advertising has to be designed to create distinct impressions about your brand in people’s minds – to be activated later.” JOHN DAWES – E-BIMS
People like to buy from the familiar and the job of your advertising, whether it is a banner, video, social post or email newsletter, is to create that familiarity so that when the time comes for the purchasing decision to be made, your ad or link is the one to get the crucial click.
