Before diving into Personas and the Buyer Journey, it is important to talk about how B2B and B2C customers are alike and different. Both share a common journey–starting with the Awareness Stage, then moving to the Consideration Stage and finally to everyone’s favorite stage–the Decision Stage. Surprisingly, B2B buyers also share a strong affinity for buying online. A survey from Statista showed that half of B2B buyers say eCommerce was their preferred buying channel. Being able to target effectively at the right points in the stages is crucial. User experience is equally important to B2B buyers as it is to B2C customers. Being able to find product information easily, specs and prices helps customers get the information they need to make buying decisions, and having a streamlined purchasing process helps close the deal.
While there are many similarities, where B2B buying process differs is its complexity. Purchases tend to be highly involved, with multiple stakeholders, resulting in a longer sales cycle. Additionally, B2B buyers have a higher propensity to be repeat purchasers. So, focusing on building relationships and creating trust by demonstrating value and support needs to be an important part of your marketing strategy.
Do you often find that your site gets a decent amount of traffic, but customers often leave after only viewing a few pages, don’t start the order process or worse yet abandon their cart? Are you unsure of how to improve your buyer’s journey and increase your conversions?
The first step is understanding who your ideal target market is, this is accomplished through creating detailed buyer personas. The next step is understanding the actions your customer takes a while on your site–this decision-making process is known as the customer or buyer journey. It is crucial for marketing leaders to understand how they can play a part in supporting the decision-making processes of their customers while they are on the site.
The key benefits of understanding buyer behavior through personas include:
Understanding the B2B buyer journey and developing accurate buyer personas are essential strategies for companies seeking to enhance their sales efficiency. By gaining deep insights into their target audience's needs, pain points, and decision-making processes, businesses can create more targeted marketing campaigns and tailored sales approaches. There are multiple things that the buyer looks at during the Awareness Stage, when they are beginning the purchasing process. If your brand doesn’t answer these questions, buyers won't make the choice to buy from your brand.
By developing a detailed buyer persona and understanding their buying process, you can:
This comprehensive understanding enables companies to align their marketing and sales efforts more closely, resulting in improved lead generation, higher conversion rates, and increased customer retention.
Studies show that companies using buyer personas experience significant benefits, including a 73% higher conversion rate from marketing qualified leads and a 19% increase in revenue growth.
Moreover, a well-mapped buyer journey allows businesses to anticipate and address potential roadblocks in the purchasing process, leading to shorter sales cycles and more satisfied customers. Ultimately, this approach empowers companies to position themselves as trusted partners rather than mere vendors, fostering long-term relationships and driving sustainable business growth.
Develop Detailed Buyer Personas: Understanding the target audience's pain points, preferences, and decision-making processes allows for personalized messaging and tailored solutions.
In order to generate your ideal persona for your eCommerce site, there are some important questions you need to answer:
Once you’ve established the above information regarding your personas, the next goal is to properly set up the appropriate outreach. It is important to understand who you are targeting through a persona, but how you target them through the buyer journey is just as important.
Once you have all the necessary information about your ideal persona, you can then start to map out a typical buyer's journey. This is just as crucial as understanding your target audience. Knowing what problems they experience, where they seek out necessary information, or even evaluating the data they have found, can give you leverage on exactly what needs to be said and done to bring them to the checkout.
There are specific questions you should be asking yourself when creating the map:
After you’ve established what’s driving the customers to your site, it's important to analyze all touchpoints. This is crucial to see where and when customers are interacting with your brand, this is anything from Google searches to social media content. It's also important to back this up with any data you might have to share where you get the most traffic from.
Congratulations, you’ve successfully created your personas and a customer journey map. It is always beneficial to continuously update these. By tracking data from Google Analytics and gathering information from the customers themselves.
As previously stated, it is important for marketers to have a good understanding of the buyer's journey so they can effectively market at the right times. By understanding your target market and taking the time to create a persona, it opens you up to developing a more effective marketing program because you are using data and information to craft your marketing strategy.
Such an approach provides insights into the brand, pricing and information gathering that the buyer is interested in and how the expectations customers have around the purchasing process. Targeting the customers effectively can lead to higher conversion rates and even repeat buyers, enhancing the customer's lifetime value.
The key is, when implementing all aspects of your marketing plan, don’t leave your persona sitting on the shelf. Integrate them in all aspects of your marketing strategy, including:
Leverage Multi-Channel Lead Generation: Use a mix of inbound strategies like content marketing, SEO, webinars, and outbound methods such as cold emailing or LinkedIn outreach to attract leads.
Use Technology for Personalization: Implement AI tools, chatbots, and automated email sequences to nurture leads efficiently while maintaining a human touch.
Create Content for Every Stage of the Buyer Journey: Produce educational materials for awareness, comparative content for consideration, and compelling case studies or ROI calculators for the decision stage.
By aligning your efforts with customer needs, you can create targeted campaigns, enhance engagement, and drive business growth. Continuous learning and adaptation are key to staying ahead in the competitive marketplace, allowing you to position your company as a trusted partner and foster long-term success.
Ready to put those personas to work but need a little help in creating your B2B persona?
Schedule a consultation with our experts today to discover how you can leverage buyer personas and the buyer journey for better results.
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