For Successful B2B Marketing, Follow THEIR Path, not Yours
By Paul Brunato & Bob Finlayson
“Your path you must decide.” – Yoda
It’s a cliché to say we are all on different paths, but it’s true. It’s true for each of us personally and professionally, and it’s also true for each and every one of our customers.
Image created by DALL-E with a little help from the authors
“Follow THEIR path, not yours!” – Bold Marketing & Communications
Many B2B organizations think about their customer's journey, but they don’t follow it. And they don't systematically implement marketing and sales strategies to understand and integrate into that journey. This is a big missed opportunity that leads to ineffective marketing campaigns and programs, inefficient use of resources, and discord between sales and marketing teams.
The key to effective B2B marketing – and especially Account-Based Marketing – is understanding your customer’s path on their journey of solution discovery.
I’m talking about developing an intimate understanding of your customer’s needs and motivations at every stage in their purchasing journey; a journey that often begins long before they even realize they are in the market for your products or services.
If you understand the needs and motivations that define the early stages of a potential customer’s journey, you can deliver content to them that captures their attention and establishes your brand as a source of trusted, relevant information. This allows you to form a connection with them – prior to them even realizing they have a need for your product or service – and continue leveraging that relationship as they move through the awareness, consideration, purchase, and advocacy stages of their journey.
So let’s dive in and break down YOUR path to achieving this ideal customer relationship.
6 Steps to Perfect Alignment with your Customer's Journey
Step 1: Create customer personas
Odds are, you have either already created customer personas or have access to them. These personas should comprise details that include:
Demographic & Psychographic Data
Motivational Drivers & Specific Pain Points
High-Engagement / Trending Topics
Personalized Content Examples
Customer persona built through online behavior tracking and analysis of thousands of representative individuals
This type of richly-detailed customer persona – based on data – becomes the North Star of your efforts to build out a Customer Journey Map that will guide marketing and sales activities. More on that in a moment.
Step 2: Determine the channels and industry topics that are most relevant to your personas
What do your customers care about? Where do they go online? What content do they consume for professional development and in their leisure time? What topics are they inspired to comment on and share with their colleagues, friends and even family? To truly engage your audience, you will need to answer these questions.
Developing such a deep understanding of your audience’s content consumption habits and online activities may seem like an overwhelming challenge but, over the past few years, a suite of sophisticated digital tools has become available, offering deep visibility into every aspect of online behavior. When used skillfully, and coupled with discerning analysis, these tools can provide highly nuanced insight into your customers’ interests, concerns, challenges, and passions.
Developing such insights will help your marketing and sales teams plan events and craft content, webinars and other touchpoints that are relevant to your customers’ interests and concerns. This is essential to creating an intellectual and emotional connection with your brand that will lead customers to your door as they search for solutions to their needs.
Step 3: Define the relevant stages of your customer’s journey
One view of a customer journey, courtesy of Bold Marketing & Communications
There are many different templates you can use to define the stages of your customer’s journey; above is an example of one we created for a recent project. The stages will be the same for most B2B enterprises, while the steps within each stage should be adapted to the specifics of the individual enterprise.
It’s important to note that while most traditional customer journey maps begin with the “awareness” stage, we include a “motivation” stage, prior to awareness. The importance of this stage can’t be overemphasized. It’s where customers begin to understand they have a need – a need that will drive them to seek out a solution, such as your product or service.
By familiarizing yourself with your persona’s motivation stage, you can ‘meet’ your future customer – through targeted content and other touch points – as they begin to understand their needs. You are joining them as a trusted source of valuable information, early on in their journey, establishing an influential position throughout the later stages of the journey that are critical to success.
Step 4: Identify each persona’s mindset and activities at each stage of the journey
The horizontal axis details the Stages and Steps of the Journey, while the vertical axis lists the personas; each cell includes insights into the particular persona’s perspective at every Step of each Stage of their Journey.
By identifying each stage and step of every persona’s journey, you build a roadmap for all your marketing activities.
To do this, you need to really get in your customer’s head. What is their perspective at each stage, relative to your product or service. Do they have a need? Are they aware of the need? What conditions will trigger – or have triggered – the need? What activities are they engaged in at each stage, and what are the opportunities and touchpoints for you to reach them with relevant messages?
Taking the time to build out the journey map across customer personas will ensure your marketing activities and campaigns help guide your customers along their journey – and ultimately to your door. This map will also help align resources, ensuring marketing and sales activities are in sync, thereby optimizing marketing spend and sales effectiveness.
Step 5: Match relevant content topics to each stage of your customer’s journey
Most sales, marketing, and communications programs tend to focus on the “consideration” and “purchase'' stages, well past the “motivation” and “awareness” stages. This is a mistake, because once they realize they have a need, your customers quickly turn their focus to their own solution discovery and research — 45% of their time, in fact, according to a recent survey. By contrast, they spend only 17% of their time meeting with potential vendors, according to that same survey.
Mindshare established early on will have a significant impact on your customers’ ultimate purchasing decisions. Most customers are 57% through their buying process before they ever meet with representatives of the vendors they are considering, according to Accenture. Or put another way, by the time customers reach the “consideration” and “purchase” stages of their journey, they are already nearly set on a solution. Establishing mindshare when they are in the “motivation” stage means you will spend less time and resources trying to alter their thinking when they finally do transition to a purchase mindset.
Step 6: Customize content to your customer’s needs for each stage of their journey.
As customers move through their journey of solution discovery, how your brand interacts with them will determine whether you are given serious consideration. This happens long before direct contact is ever established with your sales team. In fact, 88% of corporate decision makers say effective content can enhance their perceptions of an organization, while 60% say such content can convince them to pay a premium for services. This is according to the most recent annual report on B2B Thought Leadership.
Content done right addresses your customers’ interests and needs, speaking to them where and when they are most receptive and appreciative of the specific messages.
If you get the content right, when your prospects move into the “consideration” and “purchase” stages of their journey, they will already know and trust your brand.
Yet in our experience, most company-generated content is created from the point of view of the company, without consideration for the customer’s perspective. This company-centric approach often leaves potential customers less-than-impressed. Consider: 29% of corporate decision makers say the content they encounter is “mediocre to very poor,” while only 17% say it is “very good to excellent,” according to the B2B Thought Leadership report.
Don’t make this mistake. Content for the “motivation” and “awareness” stages of the customer journey should be customer-centric. This means focus on their issues, challenges and needs – not on your specific product solutions.That comes later. First describe the situation your customer is likely experiencing, and how to go about finding solutions. For example, what factors to consider, what metrics are important, etc. This is how you create a trusted relationship with sophisticated buyers.
Final Thoughts
So how do you bias potential customers in your favor – or even recruit them as evangelists for your brand – as they embark on their buying journey?
The key is to meet them where they are, understanding and addressing their perspectives – their concerns, challenges, and issues – at every stage of their journey.
So get out of your head, and into theirs!
In other words, “Follow THEIR Path, not yours.”
Image created by DALL-E with a little help from the authors
Do you need help syncing up with your customers' journey? Contact us at Bold Marketing & Communications for a free consultation!
