The B2B customer journey is a tough nut to crack, changing fast. Multiple decision-makers, multiple channels, and a longer sales cycle mean a more complex path to purchase than the average B2C business experience. That’s why taking time and understanding the B2B customer journey is essential to developing effective marketing strategies that help you reach and influence your customers.
What Is a B2B Customer Journey?
Customer journey mapping is a way to track and understand a customer’s experience with your brand, from first contact to purchase. It’s also a great way to identify touchpoints and opportunities for improvement.
A journey map can be used in many ways, including:
- Identifying which channels are most effective at connecting with your target audience (via phone, email, or social media).
- Understanding where customers have questions about products and services that need answering before they buy from you (perhaps this is where an FAQ page would come in handy).
The B2B Customer Journey Stages
The B2B customer journey is made up of six stages, which are:
Awareness – The first step in engaging with a company. The goal is to get your prospects interested in your offer.
Consideration – Once a prospect has become acquainted with your brand and its products or services, it’s time for them to evaluate whether or not they need what you’re selling. This stage of the journey can be tricky because you’ll likely run into competitors trying to win over those potential customers.
Evaluation – This stage involves deciding whether or not they will choose your product or service over another option that may come their way during this process (or even before). At this point, most companies will be looking at pricing options and evaluating features/benefits associated with each one so they can make an educated decision about who will ultimately provide them with what they need most (and at the right price).
Purchase – Once someone decides to purchase something from us, we want them to come back for more! To achieve this goal, we must ensure that both ourselves and our product/service continue delivering on expected standards over time; otherwise, we risk losing their business altogether.
Examples of B2B Customer Journey Maps
So, what does a customer journey map for your industry look like?
There are plenty of examples to choose from. Here are some common ways that B2B organizations have used them:
- Customer pain points and overall objectives (e.g., increase sales). For example, here is one company’s experience creating a customer journey map. In their case, they focused on the conversion process from web traffic to lead generation and closing sales. You’ll notice how much overlap between these three stages—this company’s initial goal was to improve the way they handle leads.
- Communication strategies (e.g., nurture campaigns). This might seem an obvious use for a customer journey map: it shows you where different channels fit into the overall communication cycle with prospects and customers alike. But this kind of mapping can also help you visualize what kinds of content might be most effective at each stage in order to achieve specific goals (for example: lead generation or nurturing).
How to Build Your Own B2B Customer Journey Map in 7 Steps
- Gather your team.
- Get the right tools.
- Understand the customer journey map.
- Learn how to create a customer journey map.
- Consider your audience’s environment and psychology when creating a customer journey map.
- Understand what goes into making a customer journey map and how it works in practice.
- Use the resulting insights from this exercise to improve your business’s offerings and marketing channels.
The Benefits of Creating a B2B Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is a visual representation of your customer’s experience with your brand, starting at their first contact with you and ending when they’ve become a loyal repeat customer who is spreading the word about you. In addition, a B2B Customer Journey Map aims to give you insight into how your prospects get to know you, fall in love with what you offer, and then stay in love forever (or at least for as long as possible).
Further, a CX journey map is a great way to align your sales and marketing teams as they work together to deliver the customer experience and drive revenue growth. By identifying where your current customers are in their buying process, you can pinpoint where they get stuck or decide not to buy.
Creating a CX journey map enables you to identify the practical activities that will help move them through their buyer’s journey faster. This will ultimately help drive more revenue growth by closing more opportunities quickly.
- It helps you understand your customer better.
- It enables you to understand your customer’s journey better.
- It helps you understand your customer’s journey map better.
Make sure you build a customer journey map.
In this article, we’ll explore the best practices of customer journey mapping and how to apply them in your business. A few key elements that you need to consider before getting started:
- Who is your target audience? This will help you narrow down what phase of their journey.
- How do they find out about your product/service? What are their main pain points? These questions will help you identify where they are in the process and what stage of the journey they’re currently at.
Conclusion
Building a B2B customer journey map is not exactly a piece of cake. It takes time, research, and effort to develop an accurate map that reflects the reality of customers’ behavior. But, once you have it ready, your business will benefit from it in more ways than one. So please put on your thinking cap, and make some magic happen!