Check out my small contribution to this Chief Marketer special report on B2B marketing [see page 3].
Forrester’s Customer Buying Journey
The first step in creating a marketing plan is to research your target buyers/influencers and the journey they take to buy your products. In the old days we started our marketing plans with a simple buying funnel [awareness, consideration, purchase, repeat] but now we’ve shifted to using a detailed buying journey that reflects the far more complex digital buying process.
Regardless of the visual model used, the buying process has changed dramatically in the digital age. The buyer is now in total control of the journey as they easily self-educate online instead of engaging with a sales person. They can get nearly all the information they need in seconds right from their mobile phone — including product details, technical specs, analyst ratings, user reviews and even prices others have paid.
Recent studies show that 60% to 70% of the buying journey is completed prior to the customer going to the store [B2C] or contacting the company [B2B]. Both my personal experience as a consumer and my professional experience as a B2B marketer tell me that this statistic is true, if not on the low side. So given this new reality, marketers must thoroughly map their customer buying journey in order determine all the channels customers use and then deploy the right tactics [pull vs. push], right messages [tailored vs. generic] and right content [demos, cost of ownership tools, testimonials, promotions, etc.] at each stage to drive customer action. When done well this not only improves the quantity of leads and purchases, but also enhances the quality of the entire customer experience which leads to greater loyalty and advocacy.
Here are my favorite articles and white papers that will get you up to speed on the modern digital buying journey and its impact on marketing strategy as well as articles on how to map the journey for your customers. While some of the articles deal with the consumer buying journey, they are instructive to the B2B journey as well.
McKinsey – The Consumer Decision Journey by David Court
Harvard Business Review – Competing on Customer Journeys by David Edelman
Sales & Marketing Management – Mapping the Buyers Journey
Google – Zero Moment of Truth – ZMOT by Jim Lecinski
Google – Measure What Matters Most
Google – B2B’s Digital Evolution
Google – The Changing Face of B2B Marketing
CEB & Google – The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing – Article, White Paper, Presentation
IBM Marketing Cloud – Customer Journey Maps and Buyer Personas
Aberdeen Group – Creating Content is a Waste of Time Until You’ve Mapped the Buyer Journey – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Forrester – How to Get Started with Customer Journey Mapping [summary only, full report requires subscription]
And here are a few buying journey resources I built myself.
How Consumers Buy Today Presentation
B2B Buying Journey for Mary the Marketing Director
I just created this poster for my office. I’m likely to drive my team crazy by pointing to it every time we review a new campaign or content marketing program. In an era where B2B buyers control the purchase journey, we modern marketers must give value to our prospects in order to get value in the form of their engagement. In the simplest form this could be providing a free educational ebook about how programmatic advertising works, or a targeting calculator tool. In return for this value given to the prospect, we get value in their permission to market to them.
I recently joined a great new company, MultiView, and have a clean slate to build a new marketing organization. After much thought I developed this view of what I think right looks like. I’m focused on building that brand/web/automation core first and then will add team/budget to build out the functions for Product Marketing, Sales Enablement, Brand/Reputation Building and Direct Marketing. I’d love your thoughts on this and how you structure your organization. Leave me a comment or shoot me a DM @ToddEbert.
Recently I’ve seen a slew of articles about “modern” marketing and the explosion of marketing technology and data-driven systems. These two images below show the sheer magnitude of the issue facing “modern” CMOs. And it seems to be accelerating as evidenced by the fact that every week someone on my team sends me PO for some new must-have software/system/tool. I did an inventory and found that we use well over 120 different things [by way of background we’re a $500M company with 20+ in marketing]. So on a regular basis my small team [mainly creative/content folks] has to install, configure, use, monitor, analyze and update over one hundred systems. And that’s just the table stakes since the real trick is to integrate these systems together and extract the insights we need to run our programs, measure our ROI and optimize our efforts.
So as a “modern” CMO you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- How many different systems do you have installed? How many do you use? What does right look like?
- How do you integrate the various systems across your channels and down your funnel?
- Do you have the right people on your team with the right skill sets? How/where can you find employees with these new skills?
- How do you get accurate, quality data and insights out of the systems in order to make good decisions?
