The B2B buyer’s journey is a vital aspect of every B2B marketing strategy. Marketers and sales reps often commit the mistake of focusing more on just the sale than the buyer’s whole journey leading up to it.
In this blog, we’ll understand the B2B buyer’s journey – what is it, and why is it important? And how you can help buyers to easily complete this itinerary.
What is B2B Buyer’s Journey?
“The buyer’s journey” is a marketing term that looks at buyers’ behavior as they proceed towards the purchase after going through a process made up of several stages.
Early in the buying journey, buyers might need to be made aware that they have a pain point. Later, the buyer will be looking to learn more about the pain point and looking for ways to solve it. That’s usually how the buying journey starts.
The marketer’s objective in this regard should be to come up with solutions to all the buyer’s pain points and showcase them via various types of marketing content.
A B2B buyer’s experience is distinctive, as a B2B customer is often more than a single customer. In B2B business model, there are more people involved in the buying process and the stakes are much higher compared to the B2C buyer’s journey. Hence, the decision-making process is longer and more complex.
A typical representation of B2B buyer’s journey involves four stages.
The B2B buyer’s journey is dynamic and some of its attributes change with each buyer. So, to identify each buyer persona and optimize your marketing strategy accordingly, every marketer must comprehend the buyer’s journey.
Why You Need to Focus on the B2B Buyer’s Journey?
Nowadays, most of the marketers focus on campaign management, lead generation, and sales conversion, all these things fall on their side of the spectrum. A successful marketer not only focuses on creating marketing tactics, but he also tries to get into the buyer’s shoes to understand the other side of the spectrum.
According to SiriusDecisions, 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to the sales team.
So, it becomes inescapable to understand the B2B buyer’s journey. As the buyer’s path towards B2B companies is non-linear and evolves continuously, you need to get acquainted with different buyer personas and understand what works for them and what does not.
If you succeed in accomplishing that objective, you will understand what exactly your buyers are doing and how can you help them move to the next stage of the B2B buyer’s journey.
How Can You Ease the B2B Buyer’s Journey?
“As hard as it has become to sell in today’s world, it has become that much more difficult to buy. The single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling, it is actually our customers’ struggle to buy.” Says Brent Adamson of Gartner.
Yes, selling has became harder and more complex. But that’s what we expect from it. What shouldn’t be challenging and tedious is the buying part. Every marketer needs to try as hard as he can to make the buying process as smooth as possible.
Let’s see how you can better align marketing with the B2B buyer’s journey.
1. Master the Communication
It is often observed that an average of 17 interactions are needed for the buyer to complete a purchase, and half of them are non-human. So, improve your human as well as digital interactions with the buyers to streamline their buying experience.
2. Address Groups as well as Individuals
In B2B business model, more often than not a group of decision makers take the final call. So, as a marketer, you must develop a marketing strategy where you can efficiently address a group and an individual, if needed.
3. Deliver Different Content for Each Buying Stage
Content is the driving factor behind every marketing tactic. To ease the buying process and minimize unnecessary interaction, you must offer helping content pieces to the buyers.
- Awareness – Email communications, social media content, articles, blog posts, press releases.
- Interest – Website, landing pages, videos, white papers, webinars.
- Consideration – Demos, case studies, quotations, presentations.
- Decision Making – Deliverables, testimonials, pitch.
4. Think Like a Buyer
Every marketer must develop a buyer thought process to find and analyze the shortcomings as well as strengths of their marketing strategy. Trying to experience what the buyer goes through at every stage of the B2B buyer’s journey takes your marketing efforts to a new height.
Final Words
As you might have understood by now that B2B buyer’s journey is extremely important and optimizing your marketing strategy according it is the need of the hour. Although successfully understanding and assisting the buyer’s experience is not a cake walk, if you put in the efforts to take the necessary steps required, you can definitely see the results in terms of quality leads and higher number of sales.
However, if you need assistance to achieve that goal, we are here to help you. Mindpool is a leading B2B digital marketing agency that helps organizations align their marketing and sales approach to streamline your B2B buyer’s journey.
