The disconnect between advertising and the buyers

Conversation marketing versus interruption marketing

The managers, influencers, decision makers and purchasers have adopted the Internet for searching products, collecting information and even asking questions on business forums or LinkedIn, ecademy, Xing, Viadeo and similar websites. Their use of the Internet has become common for them.
They use the Internet even as a conversation: hence conversation marketing.

On the other hand the advertisers went on with their interruption marketing and have even increased this by sending out ever more email campaigns.
Corporations are still using one-way communications causing lack of interest of the buyer.

The probable buyers stand no chance for a conversation or have no communications channel for addressing the corporations except by sending an inquiry email. Something most people avoid due to the fact that any email address given will likely generate a stream of emails and newsletters and cold calls from a sales rep.

There is apparently no dialog between the probable buyer and the company advertising and promoting their products and solutions.

Time to catch up

It is time for corporations to catch up with their buyers and give them a channel for communication and if possible a channel for conversation.
Companies could provide for a platform on their website or a company or product page on Facebook to ignite the conversation. However finding the Facebook page might require just too much effort.

A first step in the direction could be done by installing a feedback or suggestion button like UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, YouSuggest, Suggestionbox, Aleveo, CrowdSound or Grupthink.
Although these services are intended for consumer websites, they can be as effective on business websites.

An example of such an implementation on a B2B website can be found here collecting the input from visitors and potential customers in order to improve the service.

The era of interruption marketing is over, time for inbound marketing and conversation marketing in order to solve the disconnect between interested or probable buyers and corporations.

How is your company going to solve the disconnect with your customers?