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Melissa Machay
Peddler of stories and good vibes. Digital marketing @studionorthusa

Does your customer journey have anything to do with your actual customers?

No customer has ever said, “I have an important purchase to make. Time to go on a journey!”

Yet everyone in business-to-business marketing talks about the “customer journey.” The concept has become an important framework for marketing strategy, and essential to customer experience management. So it’s important to get it right.

Many have tried to define a supreme, one-size-fits-all customer journey. Some describe it as a linear process with four or five stages, some have included a “loyalty loop” as an additional layer of complication, and some have defined it as a continuous, never-ending cycle.

All of these models get it wrong.

MULTIPLE, CUSTOMIZED MODELS

The business-to-business customer journey needs to be about your customers, tailored to specific personas, segments, products, and solutions — what they do, how they think, and what drives them to action.
The journey of a hospital CIO to purchase an enterprise-level mobility solution is going to be completely different than an IT manager who needs to replace a tablet. Would you use the same model for both?

And with as many as 17 people influencing major enterprise technology purchases, can one journey possibly account for them all?

To make the customer journey a more accurate catalyst for your B2B marketing strategy, you have to create multiple, customized models — based on historical data, predictive modeling, market research, industry trends and any other data that gives you insight into your customers’ behaviors.

DEEPER INSIGHTS, INDIVIDUALIZED PATHS

While that new journey model posted on your favorite marketing blog is very cool and trendy, it’s not going to revolutionize — or even improve — your marketing strategy or campaign performance.

Why? Because it’s not informed by the data you likely already have on your customers.
You’ll find deeper insights for creating individualized paths by looking at metrics such as:

  • timeframe to purchase
  • clickpaths
  • assisted conversions
  • purchase frequency

Then, create cohorts to segment all that information — by product category, personas, target markets or any other relevant customer characteristics.

Take the IT manager replacing a tablet. You may find that:

  • Customers purchasing tablets spend about three weeks moving from awareness to purchase,
  • The majority of them are current customers, and
  • They spend most of that time consuming content and researching the product.

From this information, you might conclude when marketing to this cohort, you’d create more product demos and spec sheets to speed up the consideration phase of their journey. And you might focus on awareness initiatives — e.g., display ads — to drive more new customers into the discovery phase.

THE ACTIONABLE JOURNEY

That’s a simple example — there are likely many more indicators and influencers at work — however, it illustrates how individualized an actionable journey can be.

In the end, you should be able to describe a handful of paths tailored to the types of customers you want to target. Your journeys may not only differ in terms of the stages they contain, but also time spent in each stage, and preferred channels and tactics for reaching customers within them.

You may, in fact, discover a distinct journey for every customer and product category you have. But when those journeys are steeped in data-informed insight, they will be well worth traveling.

Originally published at http://www.studionorth.com/blog/ on October 27, 2015.