How To Optimize Buyer Journeys with Nurture Programs
Casting a wide net, nurturing early leads and reacting to sales cues are three ways you can gain control over the customer journey, something many marketers fail to understand.
Casting a wide net, nurturing early leads and reacting to sales cues are three ways you can gain control over the customer journey, something many marketers fail to understand.
Buyer journeys and buyer personas garner a lot of attention and press today, from analysts and vendors jockeying for positions to be thought and technology leaders on topics focused on the buyer. But has the average user of marketing automation and/or CRM actually mapped out a buyer journey? Have they really sat down and mapped out a detailed buyer persona? Does the average Joe even know why these are important? I’ll save you the suspense and tell you: probably not.
But if these terms are so important to B2B marketing success, why are most users of marketing automation and CRM not doing enough to understand, define, map and leverage these important tools and metrics?
Most marketers are mired in getting their technology house in order. This includes getting the fundamentals of processes like lead scoring, nurture programs, and sales and marketing alignment defined and functioning that they have not yet graduated to some of the more esoteric processes and metrics such as buyer persona mapping and buyer journey mapping.
If you fall into this category, that’s OK. You’re going to be alright! You are not alone! Frankly, you need to get the A’s, B’s and C’s down before you move on to the T’s, U’s and V’s. But be aware, you do need to start thinking about this sooner rather than later. Here’s some practical tips to help you get started.
First, let’s define buyer journeys. Personas is a topic for another day and blog post.
A buyer journey is the steps someone goes through in evaluating your product or service. It can typically be classified as having three to five steps. Different people will use different words and amounts but most will agree on these as being universal.
Understand that today’s modern B2B buyer is a DIY specialist. They do lots of the things salespeople used to help them with, by themselves, online, with little or no expected or desired interaction from your sales team. It’s the nature of a populace that has grown to rely almost exclusively on search, social and web as a means of self education. Once you come to accept this immutable fact, you can now settle in on crafting campaigns with marketing automation that will bring buyers into the fold much quicker than if left to their own devices.
Here are three tips to help you gain more control and understanding over the buyer journey:
This simple process is enabled by marketing automation systems that are deeply integrated to CRM. It’s a relatively simple and straightforward program that will help you bring in a high amount of prospects, quickly qualify for buy stage and react to what sales tells you about the prospect from their calls. Done well and industrialized, this type of program/process will maximize qualified leads over the long haul.
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