5 Strategies to Help You Master the Nonlinear Buyer's Journey

Ah, the bygone days when a customer saw an ad, went to your store, and purchased your product. In today's world, you might have searched for a product online or saw an influencer hawking it. It interested you enough to look into it and the next thing you know, Facebook is showing you ads for the selfsame product. Is Facebook reading your mind? Nope. It's just reading your data.

The marketing funnel is still relatively unchanged: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. The customer journey that is taken along that funnel is a mess. To make things even more challenging, the customer journey goes beyond social media, making its way onto televisions, radios, streaming and more. 60% of buyers don't want to speak with a sales rep and 50% have made their decision before they reach out to the sales rep. The customer journey to purchase now looks more like this:

Attribution is Key

So, how do you go about measuring the effectiveness of content and collateral that played a part in a sale? You tag it. Ok...it's not that simple. There are multiple tools out there for tagging such as Google Tag Manager, LinkedIn Insight Tag, Facebook Pixel, cookies, or any number of platforms. The point is, you need to track the behavior of your target audience in order to analyze the data around what content had what impact in their decision. Without that info, you'll be building your campaigns and content in the dark.  

Marketing Automation

One way to identify a user's messy click journey is through a marketing automation platform. There are dozens out there: Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot. Take your pick. Only you will know which one is best for your business. With the right journey orchestration platform in place, you can unlock customer intent, understand the journey, and provide the right information at the right time. Personalization is key. Many buyers don't see the difference between vendors because they are receiving generic marketing content that isn't specifically geared to them.   

5 Strategies to Help You Succeed

The overarching sentiment from buyers is that the journey needs to be personalized and streamlined. In other words, make the buyer's journey more relevant and more efficient.

1. Create content for goals and roles
• Learn who's involved in your customers' buyer groups
• Understand what each type of buyer wants at each stage of the journey
• Create a multi-dimensional content plan that maps content to the personas
• Audit your current content for accuracy
• Track the content type performance
2. Deliver the right content to the right people at the right time
• Serve up content based on demographics
• Let AI learn and display the highest performing content for different personas
• Build campaigns based on content types being downloaded
• Test and optimize the content marketing strategy
3. Personalize your marketing programs
• Design integrated marketing programs with behavior-based triggers
• Integrate marketing data with intelligent content
• Customize the journey for different users
4. Nurture leads with automation
• Treat interactions as conversations
• Shift the conversation based on behavioral cues
• Respond dynamically to customer's changing behaviors
• Collaborate with sales to ensure seamless customer experience
5. Create a self-service online experience.
• Connect your digital properties
• Create easily digestible content
• Make sure buyers can find what they need when they need it
• Create a guided or interactive experience