The Buyer’s Journey

As a buyer, would you rather work with a company that focused on their sales cycle or on your buyer’s journey? That’s what I thought.

So why do so many experts and articles focus on aligning content with the sales cycle? See here, here and here.

These are respected experts and companies: Lee Odden of TopRank blog, HubSpot and Jay Bear’s Convince & Convert blog. But I think they’ve got it wrong, particularly when they focus on the overly simplistic awareness/consideration/purchase sales funnel approach. Most buyer’s journeys aren’t so simple, particularly in the B2B space.

I advise clients to align their content with their unique buyers and their buyer’s journey.

Eloqua and JESS3 come the closest to describing the right alignment when they describe the prospect goals in the image below. However, they also align along the sales cycle triad and they omit anything past the close.

Here are some of my suggestions for a typical B2B buyer’s journey. Your buyer’s  journey may be different; it’s important to understand the unique buying cycle for your market, and create content that maps to that cycle.

Unaware

In this stage, buyers are unaware that they have a problem. Note that this is much different than the typical “awareness” portion of the sales cycle, which refers to whether the prospect is aware of your company and your solution. The objective during this stage is to create and place content that makes people aware of the problem.

The guys who are the best at this (and the next step) are the anti-virus vendors. Think about how many articles you’ve read about one virus or another, each article quoting an “independent” expert from one of the anti-virus companies explaining the seriousness of the problem. Can you ever imagine one of them saying, “This is a relatively obscure virus, unlikely to do anything to your machine, so don’t worry about it.”  Of course not.

The key metrics here are not traffic/page views/time on site as suggested by Eloqua above, but rather mentions in the news about the problem you solve, the number of hits to articles about your problem, and perhaps the number of searches on key words related to your problem.  Your competitors can actually help you in this stage, although of course you want to make as many of the mentions as possible include your company as a spokesperson.

Some ways to approach creating content for this stage include:

• Sign up for alerts from HARO, Help A Reporter Out on your keywords
• Write articles and guest blogs about the problem
• Create downloadable content about the problem
• Give speeches at conferences about the problem

Aware but No Sense of Urgency

This is similar to the stage above, but the buyer is aware of the problem, but either think that it doesn’t apply to them, or they don’t think it is severe enough that they need to do anything about it at this time. Your job as a marketer is to increase their sense of urgency, convince them that this is a pressing problem that is either costing them money, causing them to lose customers, or compromising their information.

Some ways to approach creating content for this stage include:

• Articles and guest blogs
• Facts and figures for your sales force
• Promoting case studies of people suffering from the problem through social media and other means
• Pain calculators – how much is it costing them to continue ignoring the problem?

Convinced, but Need to Convince Others

It’s rare in a B2B sale that any one individual makes a decision without having to convince and bring along others within the organization. Even if you’re lucky enough to convince someone high enough in the organization who has the authority to make the final decision, they will almost certainly have to convince and bring along other people in their organization. The goal here is to provide your initial advocate with materials that they can use to convince others. In many cases, the materials that you provided to convince them can also be used to convince others (see above). But sometimes you may want to provide specific content for internal advocates.

Here are some ideas for content that is useful at this stage:

• Blog posts about how to sell your solution internally
• Case studies of companies who have implemented your solution successfully
• Examples of your prospect’s competitors or peers who have failed to address the problem
• Analyst reports

Initial List of Vendors

OK, your buyer has received approval to search for a solution. Perhaps they have a rough budget and a timeline for selecting a vendor (but don’t assume this is true). If you’ve been instrumental in leading them to this stage in the buyer’s journey, then you’re already on their list of vendors that they’re going to investigate. But if not, they have to find you in order to include you on their initial list. The key objective here is to be found using key phrases that a buyer is likely to use in looking for solutions to the problem you solve, and the key to being found is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and perhaps Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Content for this stage includes:

• Blog posts
• SEO optimized pages on your web site
• Link bait
• SEO-optimized video

Researching Vendors and Narrowing the Field

Once the buyer forms his initial list of vendors, he’ll want to research these vendors and attempt to narrow down the field.  This can be a very dangerous period unless you’re the clear number one or two player in your market. If the information that the buyer needs to compare you to other vendors is not readily available, or you don’t differentiate yourself in a way that matters to the buyer, you can be eliminated without ever having a chance to “sell” to the prospect.

Content for this stage includes:

• White papers
• Feature guides
• Demo videos
• Interactive demos
• Webinars

There are a number of other stages in the buyer’s journey, including Social Vetting, Building Internal Support for your specific solution, Negotiation & Commitment, Onboarding and Implementation, Community and Referral/Upsell.  But this post is already fairly long, so I’ll cover the remaining stages in a second blog post.