I’ve been researching B2B buyer journeys and maps. In a recent article, I discussed why marketers can’t afford buyer journey blindness. It’s true — we need visibility and data with context to help us optimize the pipe.
Another issue I see is a lack of alignment with the reality of B2B buyers. They’ve changed. A lot.
But buyer journey maps are still our effort to visualize and try to control how buyers engage — and with what — on their path to purchase. If they’re even in-market. Research repeatedly shows that in-market B2B buyers are a very small percentage at each point in time.
I remember in the early 2000s when the need for information forced interactions. Buyers had to engage with us to learn more about our products. That hasn’t been true for more than a decade.
We haven’t changed our approach — or our mapping skillsets to embrace this reality. We still think we can control our buyers, despite evidence to the contrary.
Lack of Evolution Limits Success
We build static buyer journey maps manually based on what we wish we could make true at the point in time that we build them. But change is rapid. By the time your campaign hits the road, it’s likely to run into a detour.
We’re still not using the data we collect to validate our assumptions. Silos from too many tools and systems and incomplete or dirty data turn reporting and analysis into a climb of Mt. Everest.
Many of us lack the data literacy and the tech to interpret the contextual relevance of the data or to identify patterns that can predict what’s most likely to happen next.
We’re not talking to our customers to learn their point of view, what they care about, and what outcomes mean to them and their companies. Despite a critical need for relevance, we’re still relying on our assumptions.
We’re still gating content to drive form fills (not leads). And, by extension, marketing to a contact, rather than to an account, in many cases. Yet in B2B, buying committees have grown dramatically.
And we can’t easily prove the value of marketing to the organization in a way that matters to our executive team.
As an aside > we think we can apply GenAI to solve our content woes, gaining efficiency along the way. But without fixing the above, what are the chances the outcome will be effective?
Why You Need Plans…And Reality
We can’t go to market successfully without a plan. But if we don’t match plans with the reality represented by data, we’re still groping around in the dark.
For example, we plan to engage a segment of buyers with touches 1, 2, 3n — in our plan. However, a buyer only engages with touch 2 in our campaign. We disregard him as unengaged, limiting our campaign reporting to the emails sent and associated click-throughs in a specific campaign.
What we don’t know is he also read a couple of blog posts on the same topic and looked at our reviews on G2. This first buyer also follows us on LinkedIn and engages with our posts. In fact, he’s in our campaign because he responded to a LinkedIn display ad.
Add to this that one of his colleagues, who may be on the buying committee, attended a webinar on a related topic. But we don’t have visibility to that interaction — or a way to correlate the behavior — not as a matter of course.
We scanned a third colleague at our booth at a conference last week. She’ll go into the follow-up campaign the events team launches next week. She’s also representative of a role often on the buying committee for accounts that fit our ICP.
Given this activity, would you say this account is in-market?
What are the chances you’d know all of that?
Here’s the thing. You need the plan. Without it, you’ve got nothing to execute against. A well-built plan provides a structure for building the problem-to-solution story across the buying committee.
B2B marketers lack control over the buyer journey. This may be true, but we still need to map out the problem-to-solution journey based on buyer research. We need to create the content they’ll need to move from start to finish. Regardless of how your buyers choose to access that content.
According to research, the B2B buying process requires a volume of content and impressions. I’ve seen everything from a few hundred impressions to thousands. And content touchpoints up to 16 per person on the buying committee. Although I’d argue that some need more and some need less depending on the role they play in the decision and the impact the decision will have on them and their team.
You can’t create a compelling story with random content. You need a plan to map the storyline. The trick is in enabling your buyers to access the parts of the story that appeal to them in the moment, based on where they are. And you need to enable them to easily access the other parts of the story at will.
So, you do need a plan for creating the content. But you can’t stop there. Especially since buyers self-educate through as much as 70% of their buying experience.
Enter reality.
You need data to validate the parts of your plan that are working. And create a baseline to gauge performance and identify areas for optimization.
- Which content is engaging which personas? On which channels?
- Does that engagement align with the plan, or look like a spaghetti bowl?
- Are they engaging with your other team’s programs/campaigns?
- Are others from the account engaging…anywhere you can track?
- Is engagement self-directed or is it drive-by views motivated by only your email sends?
- Have sales reps gotten involved? If so, are you coordinating your efforts?
- And so much more…
These are among the questions that occur to me when I evaluate client programs. Evaluation must happen consistently to help you identify gaps, tweak underperforming content, and collaborate with sales. It’s also how you’ll be able to gauge whether an account is out-of-market or in-market.
Therefore, it’s critically important to realize that your plan is just that. Your plan. Your buyers are unaware of it. They could care less. Until they need the information you’re sharing. And that could activate on touch 10 of your nurture program…
Or a buyer could activate with a sudden surge of self-directed access to your content due to a shift in their world that you have no way of knowing happened… until now.
The point is that you need to engage them from mild interest and curiosity through to full-blown in-market mode. You have no control over this transition. What you can control is the quality of your content and its relevance and resonance to your target audience. If you truly understand them.
The Reality Impact
Instead of creating the plan, launching it, and letting it run its course, you must continuously ask questions like those above, overlaying the data with your plan to tweak, course correct, and build higher engagement and momentum.
Buyers have high expectations — even though they keep vendors at arm’s length until they’re ready to engage. The impression your content (and your brand) makes while they’re out-of-market will dictate whether they choose to put you on their Day 1 list when they move in-market.
But this doesn’t mean we can afford to sit back — knowing we’ve created a kick-butt, relevant plan — and leave buyers on their own. They don’t know what they don’t know. They need our help even if they refuse to ask for it.
With data that provides visibility across channels, campaigns, content, accounts, personas, and ICPs, we’re armed to identify patterns, improve access, and help them connect the dots between the ideas, trust, and confidence they need to move in-market.
And now, we’ve got the insights to enable sales to win the deal that’s become theirs to lose.