As a marketer, at the end of the day, your core objective is to help grow the brand and turn visitors into buying customers. Fair and square. Your marketing activity probably consists of producing and distributing content across several channels that cater to your ICPs (or buyer personas) with the intention of helping them “move down” the infamous marketing funnel.
BOFU, TOFU... SNAFU?
The traditional funnel approach was a true breakthrough a few decades ago. It posits that the top of the funnel (TOFU) aka the “wide part” consists of people who are interested in what you’re selling while the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) aka the “narrow part” contains leads who are supposedly almost ready to buy. Contacts enter at the top, move down the funnel, and come out at the bottom when they purchase from you.
Insights companies, like most B2B businesses, build their marketing strategy based on this funnel approach and consider the buyer journey linear/sequential.
They generally expect people to click on an article or an ad on social media or Google that leads to a landing page where they are asked to give up their personal data to get a piece of content. The visitor is then put into a CRM system and categorized as a lead. Companies expect these leads to be automatically interested in buying after getting a single document that is often a pitch masked as educational content followed up with a series of automated emails that culminate in a sales rep asking for 15 minutes of the lead’s time, guess what, to pitch their product/service. All this often happens over the course of 6-8 weeks.
The Way People Buy Has Changed
The funnel approach stripped down to its core is still a great model, but the buyer journey cannot be considered linear. Some companies expect people to pay a five or six-digit price tag for a research project after they sent them a few pieces of content and some follow-up emails. In just 8 weeks, you cannot build rapport with your potential clients.
The average B2B buyer journey (from the first touchpoint until a purchase) can be anywhere between 6 to 12 months. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has revealed that 95% of buyers are even not in the market to buy at any given moment - and in an economic crisis, this can be as high as 98%.
Back-engineering the Buyer Journey
The commonly cited buyer stages (Awareness, Consideration and Decision) are a good starting point. In order to get from Awareness to Decision, we, as marketers, need to provide potential buyers with free information on:
- the problem they have and the potential solutions
- similar problems others had and how they solved it
- similar problems you solved for others (aka case studies)
- information on how your service/product can solve their problem
In those 6 to 12 months, your task as a marketer is to consistently feed your visitors with valuable content in different formats. Write blogs, create infographics, lead online discussions, appear at in-person events, talk on podcasts, etc. Recycle your content that focuses on solutions to business problems and minimizes risks for your buyer.
The journey, in some rare cases, may actually be linear and sequential, but in most cases, it’s a scribble. It might look something like this:
The point of the journey is not to sell. It’s to build trust. And trust is built over time. Think of referrals - they are the best source of acquisition because they imply an initial level of trust. Someone had first-hand experience where they solved their problem effectively. Now they can vouch for the product or service thus reducing the risk for someone who doesn’t know or have any trust with your brand.
As a marketer, you have the ultimate responsibility to build trust and rapport with potential buyers, offer solutions to their problem and reduce the initial risk they’re facing. This is why people turn to review sites and closed communities (like Slack, Reddit, WhatsApp) to ask for recommendations from peers.
In a Nutshell...
Help people solve problems. Pay it forward and expect nothing in return. If you do it right, once people are ready to buy, you’ll be top of mind and RFQs come in with an established level of trust, resembling that of a referral.