You’ve got great products and a stellar marketing strategy, but customers still aren’t buying from you. Something is clearly derailing the buyer’s journey.
Here’s how you can clear the roadblocks from your customers’ paths through all three stages of the buyer’s journey straight to your business.
Awareness
1. Inconsistent branding
Your brand’s identity should be immediately evident and leave a lasting impression on potential customers. In fact, brand consistency can increase revenue by 33%. By emotionally connecting with customers, your business will stay top of mind as they make their way through the buyer’s journey. However, branding messages that lack consistency or strategy can sabotage your campaign.
Schedule an internal meeting with marketing, sales and other stakeholders to nail down your brand identity, including the voice, messaging strategy and visual elements that will differentiate yourself from the competition. Set brand guidelines to ensure that all assets form a cohesive identity.
2. Subpar website
A poor user experience design (also known as a UX design) drives 90% of customers away. Slow loading times, difficult navigation and lack of mobile optimization all undermine usability.
Redesign your website with best practices and useful features in mind, such as interactive media like videos or ROI calculators, mobile friendliness or an intuitive navigation design, in order to create an experience that your customers will come back for.
Consideration
3. Frustrating research process
When the customer is searching for the perfect solution, you have to make it easy for them to navigate or they will go to a competitor. If you don’t include enough information about your products, or the information is hard to understand, they may get overwhelmed and write you off.
Create clear, easy to understand product descriptions, and use images and video to demonstrate the benefit of your products.
4. Poor content strategy
Publishing content to build thought leadership is a great way to stand out from your competitors, but if it’s not well-researched and consistent, customers may deem you untrustworthy and unknowledgeable. Content that is consistent in quality and frequency increases a company’s worth by 20%.
Communication is key among your content marketers. Whether they are creating case studies, webinars, explainer videos or whitepapers, they should pull from the same set of data and information, so each piece of content aligns with one another and is based on topics that matter to your audience.
Decision
5. Lack of customer reviews
Customers take your word with a grain of salt. If they can’t find unbiased customer experiences, they might skip your product for a competitor with a greater volume and diversity of reviews. Ninety-two percent of B2B customers are more likely to purchase if they read a trusted review.
Enable customer reviews on your website, and run a testimonials campaign or offer incentives to encourage reviews. Even a bad review can reflect positively on your company, if it’s properly handled. Sixty-seven percent of B2B customers even prefer seeing a mix of positive and negative reviews.
6. Inadequately trained sales and support staff
Sixty-six percent of customers expect sales representatives to be able to answer questions about the products they sell. A sales representative being unable to answer questions could stop prospects in their tracks.
Provide educational materials to your sales staff on an ongoing basis and consider inviting them to the same webinars and other virtual events that customers are attending and providing recorded versions and the resource materials for review.
You may also find that your sales staff are being asked for information you didn’t even realize the customer is trying to find, so having an open line of communication will ensure you provide the information your customer — and your sales staff — needs.
7. Unclear product benefits and solutions
When prospects compare your product side-by-side with a competitor’s, your value proposition needs to make yours the clear winner. But what if it’s not clear to your prospects?
The clearer your value is to your prospects, the more likely they are to purchase from you. Revisit your messaging strategies to make sure you are highlighting not just what your products can do, but what they can do specifically for your customers. What types of benefits and solutions are your customers searching for? Outline your solutions directly in product descriptions, messaging and other content.
Conclusion
Anything can derail the buyer’s journey. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes to make sure they’re getting what they need to make a decision. Once you address all of the roadblocks, the buyer’s journey has a clear end in sight: you.
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