5 Strategies for Optimizing Your Customer Journey

Every business-to-business (B2B) company owner knows that digital marketing evolves rapidly. While client acquisition was once the most critical part of the funnel, the customer journey now takes top billing. A fully optimized customer journey does more than just generate a sale. It has the power to turn a B2B customer into a repeat client and an advocate for your company.

For B2B consumers in the digital age, the journey defines the experience. Discover five strategies for optimizing your customer journey and taking your B2B client experiences to the next level.

Create Customer Personas

No matter what type of business you run, you’re bound to have a variety of clients with different needs and objectives. To target the right types of B2B decision makers at critical points in the customer journey, understanding your customers’ goals is essential.

Most successful B2B business owners target key client types by developing customer personas. Start by thinking about what drives your customers and how your products and services can help them meet their goals. Ask yourself or your team a few questions about your customers as you divide both current and potential clients into segments:

  • What does success mean to them?

  • What drives them to purchase?

  • What is their price range?

  • What type of businesses do they run?

Use your answers to create a series of frameworks that will shape your B2B customer journeys. Focus on their goals, purchasing power, and decision-making potential to craft your marketing strategy.

Develop Customer Journey Maps

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With personas in hand, you can begin to map out customized customer journeys for each distinct group. Compile website analytics, social mentions, and testimonials to track customer journeys, and create a customer journey map to visualize the key points on the pathway.

Your customer journey can look like an infographic, a linear path, or even a circular cycle. Use the visualization method that best defines the customer journey for each persona. Since each persona’s journey will look different, you can begin to tailor your marketing messages for specific client types.

Continue to track social, web, and CRM analytics to ensure that you have an accurate picture of how the customer journey progresses in real time. When you have a better understanding of how much time it takes clients to complete the journey, you can fine-tune your marketing efforts to encourage customers to take the next leap.

Make the Most of Your Data

If your company is relatively new to the market, you may not have much historical data to build upon. However, if you’ve been selling related products for months or years, you should have plenty of numbers that can help you move your marketing initiatives forward.

Start by analyzing the actions that your past B2B customers have taken. Make note of a few important data points:

  • How long did they use your free products before becoming paying customers?

  • How long did they remain active customers before abandoning your product or service?

  • What types of clients tend to be repeat customers?

  • Which platform refers your most lucrative customers?

As you gain a better understanding of where your customers come from and why they take certain actions, put your data to work to lead clients along the customer journey. Target and retarget customers on platforms they frequent, improve your social strategy to retain customers, better your email marketing content, or even use your data to make crucial improvements to your products and services.

Know the Micro-Moments

Image via Screenshot on 5/5/17.

In its push to capture smartphone traffic, Google has begun to place increasing emphasis on what it terms micro-moments. These are key points when consumers search for in-the-moment purchasing information or seek out immediate solutions to business problems, and they’re the ideal time to draw in a new client and generate conversions.

As Google explains, consumers’ expectations are much higher than normal during these micro-moments. If you can connect with potential B2B customers during these moments, you’re more likely to satisfy clients.

To win a micro-moment, you have to anticipate your customers’ micro-moments and be there with SEO-driven content that delivers the products, services, or information your clients need. Ensure that your content is relevant to your consumers’ needs, and make their experience with your mobile platform simple and straightforward.

Analyze User Experience (UX)

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If you’ve been in business for long, you know that getting customers’ attention doesn’t always result in a conversion. In many cases, a lost conversion results from a poor user experience.

To improve UX, review your customer metrics and understand where you tend to lose both current and potential customers. If potential customers frequently click through from your social channels but rarely make a purchase, your landing page content and functionality may need some work, such as placing key decision-making content above the fold or making buttons more prominent.

If your initial conversion rate is good but your clients rarely renew subscriptions and frequently unsubscribe from your mailing list, you may not be delivering what your customers want. Improving calls to action and targeting content to key personas can improve UX.

Focus on Engagement

Whether you need to retain customers or attract new ones, engagement is a key part of the customer journey. You can keep the conversation going with clients at any part of the customer journey using a combination of social media strategy, blog posts, email marketing, and high-level content like white papers.

With each of these channels, you can continue to demonstrate how your company’s products and services help clients optimize their business and meet their objectives. When you keep clients engaged with targeted content, you can lead them along a rewarding and worthwhile customer journey.

If you’re new to developing an optimization strategy for your customer journey, rest assured that you don’t have to map it out on your own. With optimization services from FunnelEnvy, you can increase your conversion rates while improving your customer journey every step of the way.

By |2025-05-12T04:36:41-07:00May 11th, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|1 Comment
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Incorporating Account-Based Personalization Into Your Marketing Strategy

Casting a wide net in search of business-to-business (B2B) customers isn’t the right strategy for every company. Rather than spending resources on a larger market, find out why a personalized approach that targets specific accounts could better help your business achieve its sales goals.

If you’ve never used account-based marketing (ABM) before, there’s never been a better time to start. B2B companies with highly targeted audiences use ABM to create effective sales funnels that drive results. Find out how to take this marketing strategy to the next level with account-based personalization, and learn how it can help you meet high-reaching objectives.

Define Your Market

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One of the key differences between traditional digital marketing and digital ABM is that the former casts a wide net, while the latter considers individual accounts to be their own markets. To make the most of ABM, you’ll need to break your pool of both current and prospective clients into individual markets.

Doing this offers ample opportunity for personalization. Since you’ll work to build a marketing strategy for each client individually, you’ll customize digital campaigns, sales goals, and even relationship structures. Do the necessary research for each major account you want to win, and you can easily define and optimize your market.

For example, email marketing company Strongview used account-based personalization to define its target market and provide custom content with different greetings and unique images for each industry targeted.. As a result, the company experienced a 42 percent increase in web traffic, 29 percent increase in conversions from previously inactive accounts, and a 42 percent increase in engagement from target accounts.

Create a Personalized Experience for Each Account

With ABM software, you can even personalize website content for each account you’re targeting.

Easy-to-use personalization features track IP addresses for your target customers and enable your website to serve custom content to users from these select IP addresses. Doing this increases the chances that you’ll give representatives from each account exactly what they want to see, whether they’re searching for an answer to a question or they’re ready to make a purchase.

Integrate your ABM initiatives with marketing automation and sales platforms so you can easily follow up with the clients you want to land. Most ABM platforms offer seamless integrations with select platforms. Doing this automatically incorporates your target customers into each step of your marketing strategy, so you won’t miss the opportunity to follow up at key intervals.

Identify the Key Players

As you begin to develop an ABM strategy, it’s important to remember that each account or market consists of several key players. After all, most companies seek a consensus before reaching a decision, and not every person at the table will respond to marketing messages in the same way. That’s why it’s essential to identify the key decision-makers for each account and understand how best to get through to each one.

For instance, the marketing director, project manager, and CEO will each analyze your sales pitch from a different perspective. If you need all of these major players to sign off before greenlighting your project, then you need to tailor your messages to each one with headers, pictures, and white papers.

Find out who the key players are by doing basic research on the company’s website or on LinkedIn. As you shape each personalized account, review the key players with your team during internal meetings and redraft your list of target employees as necessary.

Use Retargeting

3D illustration of behavioral retargeting principle over white background.

Just because you don’t generate warm leads the first time you get the attention of prospective clients doesn’t mean you should cross them off your list. Instead of abandoning hard-to-get clients, retarget them instead.

Retargeting is a key component of ABM, as it identifies clients who have engaged with your content previously and then works to place your content in front of their eyes again. Many ABM platforms utilize ad-based retargeting strategies that serve ads to users who have previously visited your website or clicked on your content.

Some platforms even automatically provide personalized content that prompts conversions and drives sales after detecting buying signals. With this kind of personalized power, you can strike while the iron is hot and land the clients you’ve been pursuing at the precise moment they’re ready to buy.

Measure Your Results

When you use a marketing platform like Funnel Envy, Google Analytics, or a combination of both, you can easily measure the results of your ABM strategy. Social tracking tools like Kissmetrics also enable you to monitor engagement across platforms to ensure that you’ve targeted the right players.

In addition, you can quickly collect metrics that help you determine the return on investment (ROI) for each campaign. Since you’ve already done research to determine how much each account is worth to your business, you can easily do the math to calculate your return. As Alterra Group states, most executives look for revenue growth over any other measure of ROI.

By knowing campaign ROI, you’ll reduce risk and wasted resources. Don’t let a generic marketing strategy deliver results that are less than optimal. Take advantage of FunnelEnvy’s account-based personalization tool, and find out for yourself how this strategy can help you take your B2B sales to the next level.

By |2025-05-12T04:36:41-07:00May 9th, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|0 Comments
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Webinar: Increase B2B Conversions with Personalization and Social Data

Dive deep into growth strategies used by leading B2B organizations.

B2B Marketers! Are leads coming to your site but not converting into paying customers? 

Your problem could be a lack of customer engagement across the marketing funnel. At the FunnelEnvy transformative webinar, learn the strategies we use to have explosive customer engagement for our customers like Optimizely, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Autodesk.

We will also be talking to Socedo’s Senior Marketing Manager, Adam Hutchinson, about how Socedo uses social data to create personalized emails that convert!

By |2025-05-12T04:36:41-07:00May 3rd, 2017|Full-Funnel Optimization|0 Comments
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4 Tips for an Effective B2B Social Media Campaign

B2B marketing is undergoing huge changes.

Thanks to the developments in marketing technology B2B strategies have had to adapt to evolving purchaser desires. The traditional approach to B2B marketing is, if we’re being honest, dry and dull. It’s always aimed at the professional, who apparently is a very boring person.

There seems to be an unwritten rule in traditional B2B that dictates the message to every person needs be delivered with professional courtesy that ultimately robs it of anything resembling personality.

But the times, they are a-changing. What you’ve got to remember is, while your primary B2B prospects are being approached in their professional capacity, they’re still a consumer. And thanks to the popularisation of channels including social media these B2B buyers expect a ‘consumer-like’ experience to the marketing materials they receive.

It’s something the B2B world is catching on to. If you take a look at the developing budgetary trends, you’ll see that while marketing campaign budgets are set to rise by 5% over the next year, those for digital marketing are projected to increase three times as fast.

That budget is largely going to be funneled into your content marketing strategy; the production of blog posts, white papers, eBooks, etc. However, the shift in buyer expectations has an increasing number of business recognizing the importance of social media content.

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By |2025-05-12T04:36:39-07:00March 1st, 2016|Full-Funnel Optimization|1 Comment
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The New World of B2B Marketing: What It Means for You

It’s easy to see B2B and B2C marketing as completely different animals.

After all, that’s how their customers have behaved over the years.

The common thinking: it’s easier to sway B2C customers with media, ads, and special offers. They care about brands, but most of the time, switching between them is not a big deal if they’re not happy with their experience.

B2B customers, on the other hand, do extensive research. They care about the technical specs of your product. If they decide to buy, it’s often done through a formal procurement process. Once they become your customer, they tend to stick with you for a longer time because switching to a different provider can disrupt their workflow.

This explains why B2B has moved slower than B2C sales in responding to changing technologies, trends, and customer preferences…

However, continuing along that slower path today leads to some serious missed opportunities.

Traditional B2B strategies – from cold calling and direct mail to relying on word-of-mouth referrals – still have their place and can be effective. But you can supercharge your sales if you’re willing to integrate a few new concepts to help you adjust to today’s rapidly-changing B2B environment.

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By |2025-05-12T04:36:38-07:00January 14th, 2016|Full-Funnel Optimization|3 Comments
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