Effective communication all comes down to a well-prepared buyer journey.
When every step of the journey is not carefully considered, we find that many areas and opportunities are missed by companies doing what they have always done. We also find that many leads are lost when there isn’t a well organised structure to deal with them quickly and competently.
So, when we create Buyer Journeys, we hold a virtual or physical workshop with our clients. We ask them to come armed with funnel conversion rates from awareness to purchase.
We then start the journey using our collaborative online mapping tools to plot all the touchpoints. There are also some good tools out there for remote workshops - we currently use Google Jamboard and Miro.
There are some marketing teams who are very advanced in their customer experience and literally hand over a well mapped journey. However, many are surprised how quickly grey areas can appear through the funnel. And we believe these grey areas act as muggers, bashing the campaigns impact over the head and stealing ROI. If there’s a problem, there can be a collective effort to solve any experience issues before the campaign is live.
During the workshop, the target persona or account-based research we’ve previously gathered can prove invaluable. These quick interviews with existing and potential customers enable us to collect data about their pain points, media consumption, methods and habits, as well as and what sort of communication appeals to them and when.
It can inform the customer journey and massively influence the future media planning stage.
With this information we’re able to create the five stages to consider on a buyer journey:
Pre-awareness
We start at pre-awareness, where the audience may not even know they need this product or service. This usually reveals about a dozen opportunities for discussion ranging from colleague complaints to diminishing customer satisfaction. It’s a good time to focus more on education and awareness around a pain point and could be a perfect moment for your sales team to get in touch.
Solution awareness
Then we move onto solution awareness, where the audience is looking for something and wants to know where to find it. First, they’ll be researching features, benefits and budgets and we’ll analyse all the ways they can get that information. Usually there are at least 20 opportunities for communication - searches, events, trade shows, publications, social media channels and more. This can be particularly insightful once it comes to media strategy and planning.
Solution consideration
Solution consideration is where you need to be sales focussed, providing quick to access and easy to understand solutions to their needs. It’s crucial to have marketing material at hand that can be easily personalised and address each issue. This can be existing client testimonial videos, virtual demos, freemium offers and more.
Vendor evaluation
There are then a couple of stages left where most agencies offer no support having focussed on top of funnel leads. The vendor evaluation stage is where you really need to get the customer over the line with information that appeases every decision maker including procurement. It could just take one of these people to scupper the whole deal.
Implementation
The final stage is again often overlooked but crucial. Here is when you need relevant communication for roll outs, integrations, adjustments and any unexpected problems.
We work with a lot of tech brands and low user adoption can put a stop to any thoughts of up-selling, which is criminal when you’ve all invested so much time on the project.
Once you know who you are talking to, what appeals to them on a rational and emotional level, what their needs are and when and where to contact them, you’ll be in a very strong position to create your campaign.
Creating a buyer journey is just one of five stages of the Campaign Accelerator. You can read about them all in these short blogs. Or contact us and we can chat about how The Campaign Accelerator can help you get to market much, much more quickly.
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