Think about how customers think and feel at different stages of the buyer journey, from the first “I don’t think I have a problem” stage to well beyond the point of sale when they are finally a paying customer.
Creating a strong customer experience is a team effort that includes marketing, sales, customer care, and even finance. However, marketing plays a leading role in convincing buyers that they need something long before a prospect has spoken to someone in your company. It’s marketing available for each and every stage of the buyer journey, and these five points will help you make them easier on their way.
1. Make sure you are on the right track
Focus on identifying the specific segments you are playing in and work on really understanding what the buying journey is like for each segment.
This includes taking into account the thoughts and feelings of buyers at different stages of the buyer’s journey, from the first “I don’t think I have a problem” stage to well beyond the point of sale when they are eventually paying customers.
You also need a solid understanding of who is involved in determining, influencing, and approving the purchase. In B2B sales, you may need to convince everyone from administrative assistants to CFOs (and many more in between).
You shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone, just make sure that you maximize your reach in the segments you choose.
2. Create an ideal customer profile
To help us build a profile, we can use the marketing theory of “To Do” as attributed to Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, who wrote in the Harvard Business Review:
“When we buy a product, we are essentially hiring it to do our job. If it does the job well, we tend to discontinue the product the next time we are faced with the same job. And if it does a bad job, we “fire” it and look for an alternative. “
So a good place to start is with a list of your customer’s must-do things: the top things that every buyer wants to progress on. That way, you can make sure your approach covers the things that are actually important to the customer, rather than what you wanted them to do (an all-too-common marketing mistake).
3. Eliminate chasing and friction
From the time you close the sale and after working back, look for anything that can slow down or derail the sale.
The things closest to buying are often the easiest, fastest, and cheapest to fix because the closer you are to selling, the more things are known: who the buyers are, what they are interested in, maybe their objections (plus there are fewer of them). This means you can act more specifically to remove friction and improve results.
There is a method in this approach. To increase sales, we can either spend more money to get more reach, or we can try to convert more opportunities into sales. It is usually easier and cheaper to concentrate on the much smaller group of interested parties near the bottom of the funnel and deal with their objections, reduce friction losses and create targeted communication than reaching out to the universe of potential customers to expand at the top of the funnel.
4. Focus on your content creation
You don’t have to do everything across every channel; you have to do less, but better. Make sure that every piece of content “sells” the next action that you want your buyers to see.
Your goal as a marketer is to get potential customers on the journey as quickly as possible. Therefore, your content should be active, not passive. Start by structuring your content around the top three topics or challenges that are or should be most important to customers.
While your aim should be to get a good diffusion of content on the buyer’s journey, with limited time and money, you should focus on content in the middle of the funnel that will educate them How solve their main challenges.
5. Don’t sell too early
Filling out a form does not make a qualified lead. Prospects are far less engaged than you think. There is a risk of someone interacting with some piece of content thinking their pen is over the line “sign here”. Accelerate a “Marketing Skilled Edge” to sale and no one benefits, least of all, the business.