The importance of the Buyer’s Journey and the Customer Experience cannot be understated. It’s hard to believe so many companies are still allowing their prospects to wander around instead of guiding them. If you’re not providing an engineered Buyer’s Journey you really cannot ensure you’re creating a great Customer Experience from the start. First impressions last, and allowing a prospective customer to figure out the best path to take on their own is not going to make a great first impression.

Most companies map their Buyer’s Journey and study the steps their prospects take in becoming a customer. They carefully ensure the prospect has what they need at every step in the process. But, while close attention is paid to the content being served up at each touchpoint, most are following their existing customers’ pathway instead of creating the experiences that would drive greater success.

A clear pathway and leading the customer along the way are the keys to a Buyer’s Journey that drives sales. Engineering the pathway properly will encourage better interactions and potentially shorten your sales cycle. It can also ensure you maintain every advantage throughout the dialogue. Most companies are not actively doing this, which is baffling because every sales professional will tell you that you need to be intentional with all of your contacts.

It is not only possible to guide the dialogue using today’s marketing tools; it’s incumbent upon anyone who wants to grow and scale. It takes a solid strategy for the content delivery system of your marketing program. Interactions across platforms should not just be consistent; they should also advance the dialogue from awareness to decision, through the sale, and, ideally, the post-sale process.

You need to be intentional with your planning and strategic about your tactical integrations. For example, if you want to use your website as the main way to educate the prospect and enable them to evaluate your offerings with respect to their needs, every touchpoint that brings a prospective customer to your website must be clear about the benefits of that website visit. And the website content must answer their questions effectively and easily.

You should avoid bringing visitors to your home page, or letting them figure out their next move from the navigation menu. Instead, their journey should be engineered to bring the prospective customer to the page where they most likely would find the answer to their questions at any given point in their journey, and include clear pointers to their best, next step. This takes skill beyond that of the typical content writer. There is a huge difference between someone who can write very well and a marketing content developer.

Every touchpoint you include in your marketing program should be intentionally engineered to bring the audience to a logical “next step” in their search for the solution they need. It should not only be how you design your website. And you should be engineering interactions to give you insights into the customer (or prospect) that can be leveraged to improve your closing and customer retention rates. This is why it is critical to have a comprehensive, and integrated, Go-To-Market strategy.

Do you want to engineer your Buyer’s Journey to drive more sales and higher revenue? We’d be happy to discuss it with you. Start improving your sales and revenue today!