Forget the funnel – show up for the customer journey

While the idea of the customer journey is not new, the growing complexity of the buying environment, ongoing digital transformation, and the intense competition for attention have triggered an evolution in recent years. We explore how we see the current marketing landscape, why we believe the traditional sales funnel is no longer relevant, how the customer journey can bring clarity to a complex environment and how a new customer journey approach can drive success.

Buying a B2B product or service is complex. Not only are there many choices for solutions that could resolve challenges, but there is also a clear shift in buyers' behavior and their environment.

Buyers are more savvy than ever. They want to independently research options and self-educate before deciding on their preferences. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to be guided, nor does it mean that they can’t be helped along the way. It does, however, add pressure on high-quality content and thought leadership to attract, engage, and retain these buyers.

Because they’re more savvy, they’re also more likely to have residual knowledge of possible solutions. This advanced knowledge base makes the modern buyer’s journey more chaotic and unpredictable. With the traditional funnel, it is much more difficult to assess how buyers begin their journey, how they progress, and whether they skip stages. This non-linear process adds extra complexity for the modern marketer to navigate.

The reason for the buyers being more savvy and informed is likely due to the excess of content and information available to them. And, worse still for marketers, most of the information available isn’t very good. They’ll pick up bits of information from here and there, but likely nothing that offers a complete view of their needs. While this information can empower the buyer, it also complicates their journey. What can they trust? Who’s right and who’s wrong?

The excess of information is a result of digital transformation and channel proliferation. Buyers can find what they need across social media, websites, video and podcasts. This abundance of information has led to a greater expectation about where they experience brands and how often they can interact with them over multiple channels.

Businesses are evolving as they try to navigate challenging economic times. According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to ten decision-makers, each armed with four or five pieces of information they have gathered independently and must ‘de-conflict’ with the group.

Those economic fluctuations, technological advancements, and changing market dynamics create further uncertainty and complexity when trying to communicate and market to these B2B buyer personas. These external factors complicate the decision-making process and add pressure to the group.

This leads to our final complexity: psychological factors. With all this information, additional challenges, and increasing pressures, buyers are impacted not just by rational considerations but also by emotional considerations. Emotional engagement is often dismissed in B2B marketing, but seeking reassurance and validation throughout the decision-making process is as much an emotional need as it is rational.

Given the complexity of the buyer’s journey, what must modern marketers consider to stand out and gain a competitive advantage?

Source: Gartner

In such a complex environment, brands must recognise the need to balance their long-term brand equity with short-term sales objectives. To do this, they should take a customer-centric approach, using the customer journey map as their guide, to complement a brand-to-demand strategy that helps them create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

In the maelstrom of information available to curious and savvy buyers, the importance of trust and credibility has never been greater. The pressure around pressing the button on a six-figure to multi-million dollar deal is huge, so when they’re deciding what to opt for, decision-makers need to feel confident.

To gain that confidence, we need to take a customer-centric approach that enables us to get under the skin of the target groups. We can identify their pain points, motivations, and behaviors to create super-relevant content and campaigns that resonate emotionally and rationally. By creating meaningful and action-oriented content, we can develop the buyers' trust, credibility, and confidence to take that crucial next step.

A holistic approach, one that considers the multiple stakeholders within the buying group, the multiple channels, and the various challenges buyers face, can do two jobs simultaneously. It can build brand awareness to create a bookmark in the minds of potential buyers for when they need you tomorrow, but we can also drive demand and generate leads for those who need you today.

How do you structure a holistic response to this complex challenge?

Source: Gartner

The sales funnel is often treated as a static model, while in reality, customer behaviors and market dynamics are constantly evolving. It does not adequately reflect the diverse touchpoints and channels through which customers engage with brands today. The rigid structure of the sales funnel does not accommodate for variations in the journey, leading to ineffective marketing strategies.

You don't use the traditional sales funnel to build a holistic marketing response to a complex customer challenge. It’s a mistake to assume today's complex audiences are captive to universal marketing motions determined by marketers or academics. To deliver to enterprise brands and help them show up in the moments that matter for multiple stakeholders in a complex environment, the sales funnel is too simplistic and has had its time.

Retiring the traditional funnel is necessary for several reasons, from the proliferation of consumer choices and the empowerment of customers through information to an increased emphasis on customer experience and the fragmentation of the media landscape. The influence and evolution of behavior of both social media users and Millennials/GenZ haven’t helped its cause either.

The greatest reason for moving beyond the traditional funnel is the non-linear nature of customers' engagement with campaigns and content. The traditional funnel simply doesn’t account for this shift in behavior.

However, we are aware of how deeply ingrained the traditional sales funnel is within our marketing world, so we will often need to refer back to it to help modern marketers understand and navigate their routes through a non-linear customer journey.

We believe in an empathy-led approach that recognizes and understands the emotions and motivations of customers at each stage of their buyer journey. We explore and examine the quantitative and qualitative pain points to address their needs and desires and tailor content to meet their needs. Our approach to the customer journey begins before a customer even knows they need help from the brand. A place where we work hard to develop brand awareness and recognition for the moment of “need.”

This passive period is reflected in our journey as much as the active period, such as self-search and education, across the multi-stage journey. The passivity and activity across the journey reflect, too, how different stakeholders can engage and dip out as they begin to build their understanding. To build a formidable picture of the process, we look to gain an understanding of the customer and stakeholders, which requires deep introspection of the business and brand as much as it does engagement with current customers.

By exploring and examining the customer journey, we can begin tailoring content solutions to the needs of stakeholders. By doing so, we can enhance engagement, build trust, grow confidence, and drive conversions. Most importantly, our approach to the customer journey enables us to create meaningful content that matters, understanding where and when to show up and have the greatest impact.

Taking a journey-driven approach to a campaign and content enables brands to maximize the potential of buyers’ non-linear experiences. By using data and insight to better understand where a target audience wants a brand to show up, we can begin to influence decisions along their journey. With 80% of organizations expecting to compete on customer experiences, it is imperative that brands get the customer journey—and the content within it—right.

Staying on your toes

A customer journey map is a living and breathing document that reflects the complex and dynamic nature of how modern B2B consumers interact with brands. It accommodates the evolving complexities of modern consumer behavior and enables marketers to be more proactive and reactive to cultural, environmental, and economic shifts or changes. With 46% of businesses suggesting that understanding and acting on changing customer behavior is one of their top three challenges, a customer journey map enables marketers to flex as customers oscillate between stages while remaining consistent in message and outcome.

Keeping consistency

To succeed, brands must remain fresh and consistent throughout the buying cycle. With the average length being 6.1 months, modern marketers can use the customer journey map to sustain their message across the many different touch points in that time. This is an expectation as much as a need. According to Adobe’s Digital Trends Report, 80% of consumers consider consistent experiences across different online channels “important” or “critical” to meeting their CX expectations.

The non-linear model also empowers marketers to influence the perception of their brand and decision-making through consistent and relevant content across all platforms in an omnichannel approach. A highly informed model, based on insight and data, helps marketers position content on the most appropriate channels at the right time so it shows up in the most meaningful and actionable way possible.

Brands that deliver that consistency tend to experience up to 20% greater overall growth and 33% higher revenue compared to those that struggle with ‘off-brand’ content.

Making it personal

A customer journey-driven approach to campaigns and content also accommodates personalization and tailored experiences that address specific needs and preferences within a buying group: what the CFO prioritizes will not be what the CIO or the CMO prioritizes. Since 70% of those asked by Adobe said personalization was important to a brand meeting customer experience expectations, this is important to get right.

A customer journey map can help deliver better B2B content personalization while meeting the needs of various organizational roles, such as decision-makers, influencers, and end-users. Achieving this level of personalization and detail puts brands that use it at an advantage. McKinsey suggests that this can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5-15%, and increase marketing ROI by 10-30%.

Emotional engagement

Over twenty years ago, Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman said that 95% of a buyer’s decision-making occurs in the subconscious mind. And yet, all these years later, marketers seem to focus on the remaining 5%. A customer journey-driven approach to campaigns and content enables the modern marketer to think about the 95% inspired by emotional resonances. It helps them understand where and why a customer’s journey may fluctuate and shift between rational and emotional ‘moments’.

Finding that balance between the emotional and rational content is important. Kantar, a leading marketing data and analytics business, analysed marketing content and suggested traditional B2B campaigns tend to have just as rational of a tone as consumer-focused advertising. Although compared to B2C content, the power of persuasion and message relevance tends to be stronger, they invoke less of an intuitive response regarding attention and engagement. Like Kantar, we believe traditional approaches may deliver short-term action but do little to build brand equity. A customer-centric, journey-driven approach, aligned with brand-to-demand thinking, can deliver so much more for B2B.

Customer journey mapping empowers marketers to create more empathetic and relevant content that can resonate with their target audiences, whether satisfying the discovery of knowledge to inform the decision (rational) or recognizing the stress of the decision-making moment (emotion) by providing content that supports and instils confidence in the buyer.

Source: Kantor

Creating more with less

All these factors suggest the creation of vast amounts of content. There have been suggestions that buyers need 7.1 pieces of information to confirm a purchase at the evaluation stage alone. However, the customer journey-driven approach enables us to examine the most effective and efficient way of creating consistent and actionable content.

It enables brands to economically cater to stakeholders' differing needs through modular content creation and content atomization for B2B campaigns. Using the customer journey map, they can identify where and how to maximize the use of atomized content across multiple stakeholders. With minor amends and personalization tweaks, a brand can drive engagement and meet the needs of our target groups.

Content creation for B2B tech: creating content at scale

One key challenge of developing a customer journey is creating the content required to meet the demands of the target audience. We have fine-tuned a modular content creation process that enables us to develop and create content at volume while keeping costs down, workloads light, and timelines short.

The customer journey work enables our strategists to identify key editorial themes to apply across the journey. These can stand alone across one persona or be thematically linked across several. With these themes established, we can create core content that can then be assembled, like building blocks where needed, to satisfy the needs of the CFO, CMO, and CIO. Top and tailed with more relevant and personalized introductions and conclusions, this enables us to drive for creative excellence while creating content at scale.

The customer journey work enables our strategists to identify key editorial themes to apply across the journey. These can stand alone across one persona or be thematically linked across several. With these themes established, we can create core content that can then be assembled, like building blocks where needed, to satisfy the needs of the CFO, CMO, and CIO. Top and tailed with more relevant and personalized introductions and conclusions, this enables us to drive for creative excellence while creating content at scale.

The experience a customer has through a campaign and content is as important as the product and solution itself. A recent report by Salesforce suggests that 80% of customers agree. Our brand-to-demand approach goes a long way toward delivering a B2B content strategy that gives customers a meaningful experience that drives action.

We know that to deliver incredible experiences, we must tell wonderful stories, create incredible B2B journey-driven campaigns, and create engaging content. We also know that incredible campaigns and content will deliver fantastic results. Our approach to customer journey and creative excellence combine to produce powerful marketing that achieves game-changing outcomes.

We are an integrated marketing agency driving the evolution of the customer journey and how brands can maximise their opportunity within the ever-changing and remorsefully volatile environment. Mark Schaefer said, “In today’s world, the customer journey is more complex than ever. Brands that understand this complexity will thrive in the marketplace.” We help you do that: we work with brands that are ready to show up.

Do you want to show up for your customers?

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