This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of How to Market and Sell to the Modern Buyer. This webinar was sponsored by Act-on Software and featured Amber Armstrong (@ambarmstrong) Program Director of Commerce, Social and Mobile Amplification at IBM, Jeff Soriano (@sorianojeff) Senior Director of Demand Generation at Offerpop and Rachel Rosin (@rosin_rachel) Marketing Programs Manager at Act-On Software. We discussed the changes marketing departments need to make or address in order to keep up with today’s buying habits.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Customer is driving not the marketer – Rachel laid out a 4 step content marketing plan (LINK) that really gets to the heart of the modern marketing department they include: creating buyer personas, developing a persona matrix, mapping the buyer journey and mapping your content to the buyer journey.
2. Break with Brand Boredom – Amber discussed new ways to tell your story that are more engaging – more like a conversation than a brand talking. A great example was startup competition for millennials and entreprenuers which you can learn more about here: www.ibm.com/newwaytostartup
3. Be Relevant – Jeff talked about the challenges associated with marketing the modern buyer and how to move your “suspects to prospects” with relevant content.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Social Data Made Simple: Getting Started with a Strategy; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.