Every business-to-business (B2B) company owner knows that digital marketing evolves rapidly. While client acquisition was once the most critical part of the funnel, the customer journey now takes top billing. A fully optimized customer journey does more than just generate a sale. It has the power to turn a B2B customer into a repeat client and an advocate for your company.

For B2B consumers in the digital age, the journey defines the experience. Discover five strategies for optimizing your customer journey and taking your B2B client experiences to the next level.

Create Customer Personas

No matter what type of business you run, you’re bound to have a variety of clients with different needs and objectives. To target the right types of B2B decision makers at critical points in the customer journey, understanding your customers’ goals is essential.

Most successful B2B business owners target key client types by developing customer personas. Start by thinking about what drives your customers and how your products and services can help them meet their goals. Ask yourself or your team a few questions about your customers as you divide both current and potential clients into segments:

  • What does success mean to them?

  • What drives them to purchase?

  • What is their price range?

  • What type of businesses do they run?

Use your answers to create a series of frameworks that will shape your B2B customer journeys. Focus on their goals, purchasing power, and decision-making potential to craft your marketing strategy.

Develop Customer Journey Maps

Image via Bigstock

With personas in hand, you can begin to map out customized customer journeys for each distinct group. Compile website analytics, social mentions, and testimonials to track customer journeys, and create a customer journey map to visualize the key points on the pathway.

Your customer journey can look like an infographic, a linear path, or even a circular cycle. Use the visualization method that best defines the customer journey for each persona. Since each persona’s journey will look different, you can begin to tailor your marketing messages for specific client types.

Continue to track social, web, and CRM analytics to ensure that you have an accurate picture of how the customer journey progresses in real time. When you have a better understanding of how much time it takes clients to complete the journey, you can fine-tune your marketing efforts to encourage customers to take the next leap.

Make the Most of Your Data

If your company is relatively new to the market, you may not have much historical data to build upon. However, if you’ve been selling related products for months or years, you should have plenty of numbers that can help you move your marketing initiatives forward.

Start by analyzing the actions that your past B2B customers have taken. Make note of a few important data points:

  • How long did they use your free products before becoming paying customers?

  • How long did they remain active customers before abandoning your product or service?

  • What types of clients tend to be repeat customers?

  • Which platform refers your most lucrative customers?

As you gain a better understanding of where your customers come from and why they take certain actions, put your data to work to lead clients along the customer journey. Target and retarget customers on platforms they frequent, improve your social strategy to retain customers, better your email marketing content, or even use your data to make crucial improvements to your products and services.

Know the Micro-Moments

Image via Screenshot on 5/5/17.

In its push to capture smartphone traffic, Google has begun to place increasing emphasis on what it terms micro-moments. These are key points when consumers search for in-the-moment purchasing information or seek out immediate solutions to business problems, and they’re the ideal time to draw in a new client and generate conversions.

As Google explains, consumers’ expectations are much higher than normal during these micro-moments. If you can connect with potential B2B customers during these moments, you’re more likely to satisfy clients.

To win a micro-moment, you have to anticipate your customers’ micro-moments and be there with SEO-driven content that delivers the products, services, or information your clients need. Ensure that your content is relevant to your consumers’ needs, and make their experience with your mobile platform simple and straightforward.

Analyze User Experience (UX)

Image via Bigstock

If you’ve been in business for long, you know that getting customers’ attention doesn’t always result in a conversion. In many cases, a lost conversion results from a poor user experience.

To improve UX, review your customer metrics and understand where you tend to lose both current and potential customers. If potential customers frequently click through from your social channels but rarely make a purchase, your landing page content and functionality may need some work, such as placing key decision-making content above the fold or making buttons more prominent.

If your initial conversion rate is good but your clients rarely renew subscriptions and frequently unsubscribe from your mailing list, you may not be delivering what your customers want. Improving calls to action and targeting content to key personas can improve UX.

Focus on Engagement

Whether you need to retain customers or attract new ones, engagement is a key part of the customer journey. You can keep the conversation going with clients at any part of the customer journey using a combination of social media strategy, blog posts, email marketing, and high-level content like white papers.

With each of these channels, you can continue to demonstrate how your company’s products and services help clients optimize their business and meet their objectives. When you keep clients engaged with targeted content, you can lead them along a rewarding and worthwhile customer journey.

If you’re new to developing an optimization strategy for your customer journey, rest assured that you don’t have to map it out on your own. With optimization services from FunnelEnvy, you can increase your conversion rates while improving your customer journey every step of the way.