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When does a journey begin?

02 December 2014 | Phil Brown


Understanding your customers’ journey is a critical element in any successful content-led marketing programme. Yet organisations often think about their customers’ journey too narrowly, and are therefore missing out on significant opportunities to engage and influence their customers in the early formative stages. In this article we look at the questions marketers should consider to help them map the early stages of a customer journey.

So when does a journey begin?
An easy question surely. If you’re taking advantage of our consistently amazing British summers to holiday in the UK this year, then you’d probably say your journey begins when the last suitcase is loaded up, you start the car engine and pull out of the drive.

Or does it? If I was an organisation trying to persuade you that holidaying in the UK was a preferable option to the Mediterranean or some exotic long-haul destination, then I’d consider your journey as beginning much earlier. For my purposes your journey began at the point you first started considering potential options for this year’s break.

Understanding the journey is vital
Understanding your customers’ journey is a critical element in any successful content-led marketing programme. We need to understand the series of steps – whether thoughts or actions – that a customer takes which ultimately leads them to (you hope) the purchase of your product or service. To do that we need to know where the journey starts.

Yet we often find that organisations think about their customers’ journey too narrowly, and are therefore missing out on significant opportunities to engage their customers and influence their thought processes in the early formative stages.

The easy option limits thinking
Too often marketers limit their thinking about the customer journey to those elements that they have visibility of. So the starting point will be defined based on when an organisation typically first engages with a prospective customer, whether that’s through outbound marketing activity or via inbound contact (e.g downloading a brochure or technical paper from the supplier’s website).

That’s partly because that’s the easiest approach; understanding the ‘invisible’ part of the journey is far more challenging. Whereas it’s relatively easy for holiday companies to predict when people will start thinking about their summer holidays, in most B2B sectors it’s far more difficult to know when a customer’s journey will start or even who the people are that are likely to take that journey.

Maximising opportunities to influence
Yet research has shown that on average 60% of a B2B purchase decision is made before a buyer ever speaks to a potential supplier, by which time the buyer has already defined the parameters of the problem, evaluated possible solutions and narrowed down the range of options.

So if you’re only focusing on the part of the customer journey that you traditionally have visibility of, then you’re actually ignoring the majority of what goes on in the customer’s world to determine a purchase decision.

If you want to maximise your opportunities to influence customer thinking, demonstrate value and build relationships, then you need to be thinking about the end-to-end journey, and building strategies to engage and influence the customer throughout that journey.

Common first steps
Typically there’s a fairly common series of steps that a buyer (or in a B2B context it’s more likely to be a group of buying influencers) will have gone through before deciding to engage with a potential supplier.

Initially the buyer will have to have undergone the important transition from ‘zero consciousness’ to some level of awareness that there could be a problem or an opportunity that they should be addressing. This could be triggered by an individual event or series of events, or by something that is read or observed.

The buyer will then go through a process of gathering additional information to help assess how real the challenge or opportunity is, and the scale of it. Initially there level of commitment is likely to be low, but if the issue seems real and substantial enough then gradually a commitment to ‘do something’ will form.

The buyer (or buyers) will then try to ‘frame the problem’ – translating a lot of disparate information into a clear statement of the problem, an prioritised set of needs that could potentially be ‘solved’ and a number of criteria they can use to evaluate different options. This may happen formally, but more often than not it will be an informal, and maybe even a sub-conscious, process initially.

Receptive to the right content
All of this needs to happen before a prospective customer even starts to think about potential solution suppliers. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not receptive to information from suppliers during this process. If that information is helping them develop their thinking, increase their knowledge, and identify steps they can take to move forward then it stands a high chance of being welcomed.

As their motivation to do something increases, they’ll probably want to engage other stakeholders who’ll need to be party to any decision. So they’ll also be on the look-out for content that they can use to socialise the issue, stimulate debate and help build consensus around the way forward.

All of this creates opportunities for supplier organisations to engage influencers and decision-makers with relevant and insightful content during the early stages of their journey.

Questions to consider
To help identify what that content is you need to be considering a number of questions about the thought processes that buyers will be going through:

What are the triggers that provoke initial awareness of the issue? Are there opportunities for us to create those triggers with some challenging and thought-provoking content?

What will be motivating them to take the next step on the journey at each stage? Why will they care enough to want to know more?

What are the primary questions that they will have at each stage of their journey? What are the uncertainties or gaps in knowledge that will be at the forefront of their mind?

What actions are they likely to be taking at each stage? Who will they be discussing their ideas and concerns with? Where will they be going to educate themselves and seek out further information?

What are the major barriers, personal, organisational or external, that will be preventing them from moving to the next stage? How can we help them remove those barriers?

To influence or ignore?
If we leave our customers to their own devices during the initial stages of their journey and wait until they’re ready to engage ‘suppliers’, then we’ll always struggle to be anything other than a name on an RFP list.

However if we can successfully put ourselves into the minds of our customers as they go through their buying journey then we stand a much better chance of developing content that engages and interests them. If we can do that then we give ourselves the opportunity to influence their thinking and build our perceived value.

So as you head off on your holidays this summer, take a moment to consider when your journey began. And then forget about it for a couple of weeks. After all everyone needs a holiday. Let your subconscious think about the implications for your business, while you enjoy a well-deserved rest.