Map Your Buyer’s Journey to Maximize Revenue

In a recent Forrester survey, 74% of business buyers said they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase. What does this mean for marketers? Buyers are in control!

At Our recent Roojoom Meetup, co-hosted with Penguin Strategies, Marketo‘s David Myers discussed the challenges posed to today’s marketers — by virtue of the digital world we live in, customers are increasingly reliant on the internet for information for their buying decisions. This takes the power out of marketers hands, and forces us to work harder in order to nurture prospects during the buying journey.

How can you engage with buyers on different stages of the buyer’s journey to maximize revenue?

Engagement Marketing

With B2B marketing, marketers become much more responsible for the lead-to-revenue cycle. Essentially, our mantra is: “I am responsible for maximum engagement with customers during their buying journey!”. This form of marketing is referred to as engagement marketing, which, at its core, is designed to engage prospects and customers with the brand, via different channels in order to accompany their buyer journey.

This way, prospects learn to get to know and like the brand early on in the buying journey, and by the time they are ready to make a buying decision, they are more likely to prefer this brand upon others.

When your goal is to engage your prospects, you need to use the right set of tools to help you deliver branded content in a scalable, measurable way to all your prospects, at whatever stage they currently are in the buying journey. Using a combination of a marketing engagement platforms, such as Roojoom, to create engaging content, along with a marketing automation tool, such as Marketo, to help deliver that content, will get you a long way ahead.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

At the Meetup, David Myers explained to us how we fulfill our duties to the lead-to-revenue cycle — capturing the task into two sub-concepts: Engagement Marketing and Lead Nurturing.

Lead nurturing is a process: building effective relationships with potential customers throughout the buying cycle. Why do we need lead nurturing? The answer is found in these 3 statistical findings:

Based on these figures, we know where we stand, or at least, where we want to stand:

1. Inside the 21% of marketing leads that convert to sales — except we want this number to be larger than 21!
2. More sales! More sales! Don’t be mistaken, we want to be in the 50% of leads that are sales-ready, thanks to lead-nurturing.
3. Nurtured leads? yes please! 47% of the leads which are nurtured is where we’re headed.

The bottom line is: we want leads, and we want to accompany customers throughout their buying journey. Now, all we gotta do is engage and nurture (we did say we were simplifying.)

Buyer Journey Mapping

Before we delve into nurturing how-to’s, Forrester’s Lori Wizdo also addresses the buyer journey, assigning us B2B Marketers with responsibilities towards our customers: engage with the customer throughout his entire buying journey!

How?

With a cross-channel marketing strategy. Buyers, Lori explains, proactively seek the information they need to advance their decision-making process: via digital and social channels such as sales representatives, Facebook, YouTube, etc.    

THE BUYER’S JOURNEY: HOW TO MAP IT OUT

And B2B Marketers? we need to engage with the buyers: helping them with vendor research, creating their research, and getting answers about their goals and the products they seek.

Understanding the path to purchase is key, and allowing the customer to feel understood and informed — is golden!

Nurture and Engage

Bearing Lori Wizdo’s strategy insight in mind, we realize that our lead nurturing, essentially heightened lead engagement, needs to consider the reality of the buyer’s autonomy in his buyer journey. Marketing automation and e-mail marketing are traditional lead nurturing methods, but Hubspot ‘s marketing blog points out that 79% of marketers say their email open rates don’t exceed 20%! Don’t we want our marketing efforts to reach the buyer during the right stage of his buyer journey, let alone reach him at all?

Multi-channel Lead Nurturing

Beautifully consistent to the buyer’s multi-stage buyer journey, multi-channel lead nurturing targets the right channel at the right time, with the right content!

Web Engagement

Ok, so we’ve got why lead nurturing is so useful and important, but we still have engagement to resolve…how does engagement fit in with nurturing leads for the buyer’s journey?

Hint: revenue. The Marketo blog fills us in that 83% of the Acquity group’s online research survey answered that websites are the most popular channel for conducting online research, yet only 37% of B2B Buyers find websites to be the most helpful resource for information. What’s missing? targeted web content. The more you target your audience, the more of an audience they will be.

Targeted Web Content: Let’s Get Personal

How do we personalize content according to our users? We’ve never even met them!

The good news is, we actually have a lot of options!

• Visitor Relationship: adapt content based on whether your visitor is a first-timer or a repeat.
• Content Recommendation: based on the visitors’ content engagement, make recommendations that are consistent with his interests.
• Location: based on a visitor’s IP address, personalize the UX based on his physical location.
• Account or Industry: look up a user’s IP address and match it to their job’s company, so you can personalize content based on his professional industry.
• Persona: Integrating website personalization technology with a marketing automation tool lets you target your visitors with the most relevant content possible.
• Personalized CTA Buttons: HubSpot found that out of 93,000 CTAs in a 12 month period, those targeted to the user had a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than calls-to-action that were the same for all visitors

Final Remarks

If we want the buyer to accompany us to the bottom of the funnel, we need to get to know him first, and let him get to know us. What information does he seek? What are the challenges he is trying to overcome? How can our brand help? And how should we inform him?

With these questions in mind, we can create a solid engagement marketing strategy that will maximize conversion – and sales.

What experience do you have  with personalizing buyer journeys? Let us know in the comments below!