Marketing Automation And the Buyers Journey A StrategyMix White Paper By Jonathan Calver, Managing Director, StrategyMix About this Paper This paper will first introduce you to the principles and concepts of the Buyers Journey. We will then examine traditional marketing approaches and consider their effectiveness in light of what we understand about the Buyers Journey. We will describe some of the new automated marketing technologies that can be applied to the Buyers Journey. Finally, we will give you a few tips to help guide the development of your own Buyers Journey thinking. Understanding the principles of the Buyers Journey What is the Buyers Journey? The Buyers Journey is a term coined by Hugh MacFarlane of the MathMarketing Group (www.mathmarketing.com.au). It is a cognitive process that takes place in the heads of your Buyers. It is a process of continuous decision making that we all go through when we buy complex products. In the previous diagram, we show an example of the Buyers Journey. This one has six stages. Some have more stages, others have less. In this example the key stages are: Unaware: The Buyer is untroubled. If they have a problem that needs fixing, then they are unaware of it. They probably don t know who you are or what you do. The job of marketing is to change that. - 1 -
Shown Interest: Problem Established: Looking at Solutions: May Purchase: Customer: The Buyer responds to one of your marketing campaigns and becomes aware of who you are and what you do. You now need to help them realise that they have a problem. The Buyer realises that they have a problem. Your job now is to exacerbate the problem and introduce them to your solution. The Buyer decides that they not only have a problem but that it needs fixing, so they start to look for solutions. At this point, you want them to consider or trial your solution. The Buyer is impressed with your product and can see that it will solve their problem. They now consider implementation issues such as cost, support options and risk management. Providing them with client references and case studies would be suitable at this stage. The Buyer becomes a customer. Hopefully, they have become your customer. An Example of the Buyers Journey: Buying a Car As previously mentioned the Buyers Journey is a process that we all go through when we buy complex or expensive products. To help you internalise the concept of the Buyers Journey, let s put you into a hypothetical Buyers Journey for a moment and consider the purchase of your next car. In this example, let s assume that you are not currently looking for a new car. So you start at the Unaware stage. You have no car troubles. You drive to work with no problems. And as you drive to work you may even pass by car dealerships and billboards advertising cars, but you don t even give them a second glance. Then something happens. Maybe your car develops problems or you notice that you car is looking a little old or a friend makes a disparaging remark or your company advises you that it s time to buy a new car. Whatever the reason, something in your head changes. You are no longer unaware. The next stage is that you start to show interest. You start to notice car dealerships and other cars on the road. Adverts on TV or in the newspapers are suddenly relevant to you. You probably won t do anything for a while. You say to yourself that you need a new car, but the other voice in your head says you don t really need a new car, not now anyway. It s still a luxury, nice to have but not really necessary. You probably have other priorities. So you live with the need for a while, but then something else happens. You suddenly reach a decision that you ve had enough. The voice in your head changes from: I should get a new car to I m looking for a new car. One day it was I should, the next day it s I am. So you start visiting the dealerships and researching cars online. At this point you narrow down your search to the type of car that you re going to buy. It s now a question of where to buy, price, availability, color, funding, etc. You re at the purchasing stage. Finally, you drive out of the dealership in your new car. You have become somebody s customer. You can probably relate to this simple example. - 2 -
The Parallel Marketers Journey The role of the Marketer is to facilitate the Buyers Journey by helping them smoothly transition from one Buyer Journey Stage to the next. The table below shows the Buyers Journey and the role of marketing seen side by side. Buyers Journey Unaware / Untroubled Shown Interest Problem Established Looking At Solutions May Purchase Become a Customer Role of Marketing Establish Contact / Generate Interest Establish Problem Exacerbate Problem + Introduce Solution Offer Trial or Demo Smooth out Implementation issues Ensure Customer Satisfaction + Look for Referrals An Alternative Example of the Car Buyers Journey Let s now go back to our car example, but this time we have a car dealership which is capable of Buyers Journey Marketing: You re back in your BMW (why not), driving along, straight past the dealerships and the billboards advertising cars. By now you ve long forgotten some of the extra questions you answered when you first bought the car. Questions like How long did you have your last car? What other types of car were you considering before you bought this one? Could we have your email address? Then out of the blue, you get an email from your BMW dealership. It s been 15 months since you bought your car, they remind you. Please click here to see a graph of how BMW resale values decline after 18 months. Interesting, you think to yourself. Whether you click on the link or not, something has changed. They ve planted an idea in your head that wasn t there when you woke up in the morning. As you drive to work, you start noticing cars again. You re starting to show interest. You get another email. You ve now got 6 weeks left before you reach the 18 month limit after which your car value is going to decline, or in other words, after which you re going to have a problem. You didn t have a problem six weeks ago, but now you ve got one and it s getting worse. The next email lets you know that as a valued customer, your car dealership will guarantee to provide you with a 20% better exchange value for your old car if you buy your new car through their dealership network. They re now offering to solve the problem which they created. Furthermore, they ve now started talking about your old car. It s not just your friends anymore. Five days later you get a phone call. It s the Finance Arm. Lucky you, you ve been given a preapproved car loan for $50,000 which you can draw on any time in the next 6 months. They re not putting pressure on you, they re just facilitating your Buyers Journey. Your next email shows you a series of pictures of cars you like (remember they asked which other types of cars you considered before you bought the BMW). The prices look reasonable, but then they usually do when you ve got $50,000 in your virtual back pocket. You click on some of the pictures to get more detail. Next comes the phone call. A friendly voice offers to bring one of the cars, you just clicked on, to where you work so you can give it a test drive during your lunch break. You can hardly refuse. - 3 -
Two weeks later you park your new Audi in the driveway. It feels good. You re happy. It s a good job those nice people at the Dealership solved your car problem!!! OK, so please forgive the poetic license. The purpose of this scenario is to give you a feel for what Buyer Journey marketing might be like. The important points to take note of are: It was a multi-phase, rather than single-phase marketing program It was pre-planned and well coordinated In this Buyer Journey, multiple channels were used The timing of the campaign was orientated around the buyer, not the seller The challenge, of course, is to adapt Buyer Journey thinking to your own products and services. Let s now examine the 6 key concepts of the Buyers Journey, which as Marketers we need to be aware of. The 6 Key Concepts behind the Buyers Journey 1. You need to develop different marketing messages for each and every stage of the Buyers Journey As Buyers move through the Journey, they need to make different decisions. It therefore makes sense that you should tailor your marketing communications to address each of those decisions at the time that it is relevant to the Buyer. 2. You have to know which stage of the Journey your prospects have reached Obviously, if you are going to be able to send the right marketing messages at each stage of the journey, then it is going to be essential that you know exactly who has reached each stage of the journey and when. 3. Individuals in the same company may be at different stages of the same journey An important realisation that comes with the Buyers Journey is that it is a process that goes on in the heads of individuals. Decisions are not actually made by corporations, they are made by individuals in corporations and those individuals may be making decisions based on different information. As an example, you probably know of a situation where one individual in a prospect company is clearly at the Looking for a Solution stage, yet they have colleagues who don t even seem to realise that there is a problem. In this scenario, you should provide the right information to those that don t yet realise there is a problem, so that they can start to make better decisions. 4. Individuals start the Buyers Journey at different times and travel at different speeds The fact is that your prospects do not discover you at the same time. They begin their Buyers Journey at different times and depending on their situation, they will progress along your Buyers Journey at different speeds. - 4 -
5. You can t skip steps in the Buyers Journey And if you try to skip steps in the Buyers Journey then you will create resistance from the Buyer. As an example, if you attempt to demonstrate your technology to a prospect before they recognise a need for your type of a solution then, they will generally fail to see that it is relevant to them and will therefore resist your presentation. 6. If you don t have anything to say, say nothing In our second Car Buyers example, the dealership waited 15 months before their automated marketing system woke up and began sending out their multi-phased marketing campaign. What is wrong with Traditional Marketing? Now that we are familiar with the Buyer Journey concepts, lets consider how traditional marketing approaches work or, as we shall soon see, usually do not work. Traditional mass marketing approaches have the following problems: A. Mass marketing is Single-Phase rather than Multi-Phase In a typical campaign, you send out say 10,000 messages that are all the same. It is one message. The next time you communicate with your prospects, you send out another message to your 10,000 prospects. However, according to the first principle of the Buyers Journey, you need to send out different messages for each and every stage and to do this you need to know which stage each prospect has reached. And this leads us to this question: How do you keep track of all your prospects simultaneously and ensure that you send each of them the appropriate information at exactly the right time? The fact is that most Marketers can not do this. Why not? Because even if they know when an individual reaches a new stage of the Buyers Journey, they don t have the automated system capability to implement a campaign based on the needs of a single individual. B. Mass marketing only works with large groups Mass marketing approaches, by definition, are most appropriate when used with large groups. For most companies, the largest number of prospects will be found at the initial unaware stage. After that, the numbers reduce as you go up the Buyers Journey. For this reason, most Marketers concentrate their efforts where they have the largest numbers, because that is what their systems are capable of. - 5 -
But: The unaware stage is not necessarily where most Marketers should be concentrating. This means that the later stages of the Buyers Journey are often ignored. And, finally, you shouldn t be wrongly guided by inadequate systems in the first place. C. Mass marketing lacks consistency Mass marketing approaches are run as separate campaigns, rather than as a single marketing process. There are usually gaps between the campaigns, which reduces consistency. If marketing is not consistent then lead generation will not be consistent. This results in the sales roller coaster effect. The pipeline dries up, sales teams focus on existing clients looking for easy up-selling opportunities, forecasts become increasingly inaccurate, sales targets are missed and management start to wonder what happened Given that traditional marketing is essentially random in nature, you would have to be mad to think it will work most of the time! So let s look at the alternatives Applying Automated Marketing Technologies to the Buyers Journey There are 3 Marketing technologies which can be applied to assist prospects travel along their individual Buyers Journey, which are: Logical Campaigns Active Surveys Smart Responses These are enabling technologies, in that they enable you to do a kind of marketing which you will otherwise be unable to do. Automation Technology 1: Logical Campaigns A Logical Campaign is a series of campaigns which are sent to an individual prospect by an automated marketing system. Each campaign is known as an element of the Logical Campaign. These campaigns can be multi-channel, which means they can include emails, phone calls and direct mail. In general, you would create a Logical Campaign for each stage of the Buyers Journey. A key feature of Logical Campaigns is that they are able to re-adjust themselves according to the behavior of the Prospect and the Logical Rules of the campaign. In the example shown in the screen shot below, the first campaign (P012) will be sent out. The system will then wait 14 days (the interval) before deciding what to do next. In this case, the system would check to see if the prospect has responded to the campaign. If not, then the system will check the repeats (set to 1) and send out a repeat email. If the prospect has already responded to this campaign, then the system will send out the second element of the campaign. The Logical Campaign will continue until it runs out of campaign elements. - 6 -
Importantly, Logical Campaigns work on an individual level and the frequency of communications is controlled by the interval and not by a pre-scheduled date. This is important because prospects join the Buyers Journey at different times and travel at different speeds. How Logical Campaigns Work When you put someone into a Logical Campaign, the system simply puts the first element of the Logical Campaign into a campaigns table, together with a Logical ID number. The system then checks in each day to see if there are any emails due to be sent out. If it finds an email that should be sent, it first checks the rules of the logical campaign and responds accordingly. Automation Technology 2: Active Surveys Active Surveys are short 3 or 4 question surveys which are attached to the bottom of campaign registration forms. See below. - 7 -
They can be attached to any type of campaign but are typically used with events, white papers and webinars. Active Surveys are usually run in series so that when a prospect has completed Survey 1, the system recognises this and the next time they respond to a campaign, the system provides them with Survey 2. And then Survey 3, etc. Active Surveys are particularly effective because they have such high response rates. This is because (a) they are short and (b) people want to complete them because there is something in it for them, such as, they want to register for the Event or the White Paper that you are offering. Active Surveys are used in 3 ways: 1. Diagnostic Questions Active Surveys are used to ask diagnostic questions that can help you determine the current capability of each prospect. Where you find there is a capability gap which matches your solution, you will have gained powerful evidence that the prospect has a problem which you can solve. This should be one of the pre-requisites of a Sales Ready Lead. Your Sales team will need this extremely valuable and otherwise hard to obtain information to facilitate the later stages of the Buyers Journey. This will have a positive impact on reducing sales cycle times. 2. Profile Scoring The idea behind customer profiling is that you identify the key characteristics of your best customers, so that you can identify prospects that share those same characteristics. Basically, you re looking for more of the same. Profile Scoring use survey responses to compare the characteristics of your prospects with the known characteristics of your best customers. Profile scoring allows you to assign a number of points to each survey response. So as a simple example, you might ask the question: Do you have an XYZ problem?, and then allocate 10 points if someone said Yes and 0 points if they said No. - 8 -
Profile Scores can be combined into aggregate results, which is useful because it allows you to rank your prospects by order of their overall percentage score. As an example, you might rank the top 20% of respondents as Hot Leads, the next band of 60% as Warm Leads and the bottom 20% as Cold Leads. You can then allocate greater resources to the Hot Leads and qualify out the Cold Leads. But most importantly of all, Profile Scoring will save you time and money because you will not be wasting valuable and expensive resources (such as your sales people) on prospects that do not fit your correct profile. 3. Smart Responses Active Surveys provide survey questions which can then be used to trigger Smart Responses, as described below. Automation Technology 3: Smart Responses There are two types of Smart Responses: 1. Smart Survey Responses, which are triggered when a prospect provides a specific response to an Active Survey question. 2. Smart Campaign Responses, which are triggered when a prospect responds to a specific campaign, such as a white paper or webinar. In both cases, you can choose to have the system initiate any combination of the following actions. Email BDM This option simply sends an email notification to the BDM that has been assigned to that prospect. If no BDM has been assigned, then the email will be sent to the System Administrator. Example: You might ask if a prospect would like you to contact them with a view to organising a meeting. If they say Yes, then you could have the system email their assigned BDM to let them know that they have requested contact. Convert Lead Status This option allocates a Lead Status to a respondent. Example: You could ask someone the question: Are you currently looking for a solution and if they say Yes, you could give them a lead status of Looking for Solution. Add List Code This option attaches a list code to the respondent. Example: You can ask someone if they play Golf. If they say Yes, then you can give them a list code of Golf. You can then easily invite them to your Corporate Golf Day. Send Campaign Email This option sends the individual the specific email, you chose, on the next day. - 9 -
Example: You can ask someone if they would like you to send them your product brochure. If they say Yes, then the system will send them the brochure on the next day. Insert into Logical Campaign This option puts an individual into the Logical Campaign. Example: If a prospect downloads one of your thought leading White Papers as a result of doing a Google search, then you might automatically insert them into a Logical Campaign designed for the Shown Interest stage of your Buyers Journey. Insert into Telemarketing Campaign This option puts an individual into a Telemarketing Campaign. Example: If someone indicates that they are a warm lead, then you might have them inserted into an ongoing telemarketing campaign. In the example shown in the screen shot below, the smart response options that have been chosen are to change the prospects lead status to Looking at Solutions and to insert them into a Logical Campaign designed for the Buyer Journey Stage of Looking at Solutions. This is a typical example as it shows how you use Smart Responses to control the movement of prospects between one Buyer Journey stage and the next. This is a critical point. - 10 -
Developing your own Buyer Journey Marketing Strategies Now that you understand how the automation technologies work, you can begin planning your own Buyer Journey strategies. This is a creative process. Here are a few tips to get you thinking: 1. Consider Reality The Buyer Journey example described in this white paper is theoretical. There is nothing wrong with that except that it might not match the buyer journey of your typical prospects. So your first task is to map the typical journey of your prospects. To do this, look back. Talk to customers and find out how they were thinking when they were prospects. Talk to your sales team as they will have additional insights. 2. Develop Evidence Based Milestones. If you decide to move a prospect from one Buyer Journey stage to the next, then you should make sure that as far as possible you have hard evidence to back up that decision. Without hard evidence you are likely to make the mistake of moving prospects to the next Buyer Journey stage too early and in error. 3. Focus on Establishing the Problem In our experience, most clients have the greatest difficulty in moving prospects from the Shown Interest stage to the Problem Agreed stage. We call this bridge, the Graveyard of your Future Success. You should have a long hard think about the strategies you are going to put in place to facilitate this section of the Buyers Journey. 4. Write your own Buyer Journey Story Re-read the second Car Buyer Journey, then immediately write your own Buyer Journey Story suitable for your products and services. Free up your imagination for a while. It will help you to refine the way you think about your marketing. Good luck. What to do next? Having read this white paper you are now faced with a number of choices. So what are you going to do next? We would recommend that you request a demo of one of the StrategyMix Systems. See below for further information. - 11 -
Live and Online Demonstrations To fully appreciate the power and ease of use of StrategyMix Express, it is best to see a live demonstration, which can be easily arranged by contacting your StrategyMix representative or via the StrategyMix Website. This document will, however, describe the key features of the system and give you an indication of what s possible. For more information, please visit our website or contact you local representative: Audrey Schneider Streams Team Effectiveness & Marketing Solutions in Flow mobile: +49 (0) 173 7272054 info@stream-work.com www.stream-work.com - 12 -