3 Ways to Build a B2B Customer Journey That Converts

Where do you consider your very first contact with a potential customer to be? When they land on your website? A social media post? How you are listed on Google? When they first see your logo?

If you’re not considering where your customer journey begins and how to optimise every step of that journey for your ideal customers, you’re likely letting many of them slip through your fingers.

So what can you do to prevent this and create a customer journey that converts? It all starts with being aware of where your customers start their journey with you and tailoring each step for them so that it feels aligned with the last step. Every stage of the customer journey needs to be a progression on what they already know about you or your products, and show them with certainty that your product or service is the solution to their problems.

Here are 3 things you should be aware of and utilising to create a customer journey that converts.

Build a Customer Journey That Converts: Part 1 — Where Are They Entering?

The first step in building a customer journey that converts is to know all the different entry points. While you likely won’t be able to cover every single one, you should be able to cover all your major bases so even anomalies will be channelled onto the right track for them.

Think about your digital advertising (display, paid search, affiliates, promoted social), content marketing, organic social media, partnerships, and other ways you come into contact with new customers. It’s helpful to make a list of these or start a customer journey map to help you visualize the customer journey. Are the customers who enter at certain points different from one another? Are you catering for different audience segments in your ads? Unless all the customers entering are extremely alike and your messaging is incredibly aligned, you’re going to need to personalise and customise the steps that follow on from here until they make the purchasing decision.

Build a Customer Journey That Converts: Part 2 — Align Your Messaging

If you’ve done your job in attracting the right leads to your ads and other marketing efforts, your next biggest challenge is getting that next step (often a landing page) right for the leads you’ve captured. In most cases, you will need to create multiple landing pages to align the messaging on each page to appeal to the audience coming from that first step.

These different audiences are called audience segments, and if you haven’t heard of audience segmentation before or aren’t sure how to utilise it in your business, read our article on improving your audience segmentation and how it helps your marketing efforts.

Let’s look at how audience segmentation and aligning your messaging works and why. Say you have just two ads running on Facebook for an insurance policy for self-employed people — one ad for plumbers and one for a music teacher. Your first ad has a picture of a plumber looking happy and references a relevant situation, while the second shows a child playing the piano and again talks about an issue a music teacher would relate to.

A lead clicks on each advert, so you have an interested plumber and an interested music teacher. Good start, but then you are taking them to the same landing page.

The personalisation that you got so right for those first ads is suddenly generalised for anyone that could be self-employed, and all the relevance and personalisation fall away. You could lose both leads by not being specific in your messaging. Those leads clicked on your ad because it was for them; if you suddenly show them a landing page that is generalised, or worse still, for another audience, they’ll bounce.

You need to apply this thought process to every step of your marketing and customer journey.

Build a Customer Journey That Converts: Part 3 — Give Them Something They Value Before They Buy

At each step of the customer journey ask yourself, “what’s making my leads stick around?” There should always be an answer and ideally, it’s because you are offering something of value and leading them toward why your product or service is the solution to their pain point. A pain point can be anything from a business-critical worry, an unanswered question or a desire for more disposable income.

If you can, offer them something of value to encourage them to stay on the journey with you. Offer content that will help them relieve a little of that pain or ask them to sign up for your newsletter and email marketing in exchange for 10% off — whatever is most aligned to your message and pain point. Good information is just as valuable, if not more so, than a money-off code. This is another time when knowing your audience and what they value is crucial.

When you pay attention to who your lead is at every step of the customer journey and are willing to personalise each stage for them, you’ll be well on your way to a great customer journey that converts. To take this a step further, consider using retargeting (also known as remarketing) ads to pull lost leads back into the customer journey. To learn more about retargeting read this article on the basics by AdRoll.

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