Buyer Personas & Customer Journey: The Foundation for Customer-Centric Marketing

Did you know that 88% of B2B firms admit that their homepages talk primarily about their companies, products, and services. Yet, to boost revenues and motivate buyer action, firms need to take a customer-first approach, where they talk about the issues that buyers face, why their current solutions are not delivering outcomes, and why it’s necessary to seek out a better alternative. There is a huge opportunity to move the spotlight away from our own products and services to our customers.

While the idea of working towards a more customer-centric approach is becoming a popular concept among marketing teams, there is often some crucial foundational work that is missing. Too often, marketers are not putting in the key work of developing their buyer personas and customer journey (aka. Buyer journey).

According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 55% of B2B marketers use personas as part of their overall content marketing strategy. Yet, 65% of firms exceeding their lead and revenue goals have updated their personas recently. Being customer-centric means really knowing your customers. Not just basic demographic stuff such as title, age range, geography, salary, but the details that make them real and 3-dimensional: their goals and triggers, pain points, how they consume information, etc.

Studies show that over 85% of customers will manage their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. Why is this important? Well, building out the stages for your customer’s buying journey is vital to understand what your persona needs to know as they digitally venture from becoming aware of your solution to eventual loyal customer advocates. Knowing what it takes to move your prospect from one stage to the next gives you the opportunity for personalization.

Developing buyer personas and a defined customer journey allows you to do the following functions more effectively:

• Content development: rather than developing content that you “think” your audience want, you spend time building the content they need at each stage of their buyer journey, and then distributing it via proper and effective channel. The goal is to get the right content in front of the right audience at the right time.
• Messaging: breaking down your buyer personas will help you move away from product-centric messaging to customer-centric messaging
• Sales alignment: by working alongside to develop a shared understanding of buyer personas and influencers, your alignment between the two functions will be tighter and there will be transparency on how and when sales is involved with the prospect to customer relationship.
• Partnerships: By knowing where your key buyer hangs out or obtains information gives you insight into where to invest marketing dollars and develop partnerships to increase leads
• Campaign development: your campaign programs have a higher chance of success when you know how your customers actually buy from you. For example, an awareness campaign will work better when you know how your audience becomes aware of your products/services.
  

Takeaway for 2020?

Put the voice of customer in the driver seat, being cognizant of how often you’re centering the conversation on your brand and its solutions as opposed to your buyer and their pain points. Being customer-centric means getting personal, and developing the foundation (buyer personas & customer journey) requires your marketing team to take a step back and do the requisite work.

It’s not an easy initiative, but by placing the proper importance on building out these foundational pieces, your marketing initiatives will improve, your leads will be more qualified, and your revenue will grow. To help you get started, consider downloading our free Buyer’s Journey Worksheet to identify your buyer’s motivations, goals, and desired destination. We’re here to help, so feel free to reach out to us for a no-cost consultation.

(Shameless plug: Rippler Group has TONS of experience building out buyer personas and customer journeys for B2B SaaS firms; we can help by doing the work for you, or guiding your team in the appropriate process to develop these critical pieces of your marketing strategy).