Why B2B buyer journeys must reflect true motivators and barriers.
You’re under pressure to transform campaign performance. (When haven’t you been?) Your budgets are likely tight. (Aren’t they always?) Yet sales keeps demanding a deeper, higher-value pipeline. (So, what else is new?)
Buyer journeys that visualize the true motivators and barriers in today’s more complicated buying cycles are an excellent foundation to create high-performance B2B campaigns.
Here’s a three-step approach that will accelerate the performance of your buyer journeys.
Step 1: Get your budgets and ROI done before you start.
As marketers become more accountable for booking results, greater collaboration is needed. The place to start is with campaign budgeting.
Rather than working with prior budgets plus a percent or the sum of desired tactic costs, we suggest starting a disciplined approach that builds agreement on the business and marketing assumptions that can be pursued together to achieve joint objectives. We call this Market Math™.
Through a more systematic process linked to business objectives, marketers gain a clearer understanding, bottom up, of how to set campaign budgets to deliver your targeted results. With your campaign budgets set, you’re prepared to create superior experiences that produce results.
Step 2: Bring moments to life through tactics that connect.
In each moment, a topic (motivator or barrier) and a tactic come together to create moments for the buyer.
For example, one StudioNorth client used Twitter (a specific tactic) to address only the specific motivators and barriers customers searched that channel for. In another case, testimonials, sometimes a bottom-of-funnel tactic, needed to be one of the first assets in a promotional sequence. These kinds of insights allow us to focus our messages and tactics to better use channels and not to assume when a tactic is used in the traditional funnel.
Since tactics line up with critical motivators and barriers, you’re not merely retelling your story each time at different levels of detail. You’re addressing their needs, at the level they consume them, and now, in the place they consume the content.
Step 3: Feature a few peak moments.
Remember, there is no real sequence. Buyers move in and out of moments to show greater interest and, ultimately, buy. You can’t control the sequence. You can only measure interest and drive interactions.
To create killer campaigns, create a few peak moments that raise the level of experience and create highly memorable experiences, like the jokes at the beginning of a Southwest Airlines flight. A peak moment might be a unique in-person event or a humorous video. You can create peak moments that amplify a peak (or strength) or address barriers. To maximize your campaign performance, your campaigns may need both.
Capture the moments that matter to win in the marketplace.
Transforming campaign performance starts with a buyer’s journey and builds a story of moments, amplifying peaks and overcoming barriers. Building the campaign from the objectives and a budget keeps us from picking tactics, then trying to force things into a budget. Finally, add a few peak moments and you’ll create killer campaigns that produce killer results.