The psychological buying journey gaps

“It’s all about meeeee!!!” Well it should be if ‘me’ is the customer but all too often the buying journey is all about the company and what they would like the customers to do if only they would behave themselves!

In the real world, the customer is you or me (whether B2C or B2B). Believe it or not that means we behave like human-beings with all our fears, uncertainties and doubts that interfere with a company’s well mapped buying journey. The answer? Make sure the buying journey content caters for the psychological barriers (and opportunities!) that your customers will go through.

The marketing to sale gaps

While most businesses have mapped out the internal process of qualifying a lead and passing it to sales, few are very good at creating a seamless experience for the customer. From a purely content perspective, this is where we typically see the biggest content gaps with businesses failing to provide the ‘threshold’ content between engagement and purchasing consideration. Obviously the content depends on the nature of your business but this missing threshold content can be anything from being clear on happens during the buying process (e.g. the need to provide certain documentation) through to helping create the business case in a B2B context.

The campaign to sustain gaps

If your business runs an active campaign programme and also publishes regular content on social media and your site, then ask yourself how the two are connected. This isn’t just about remembering that the same customer could be reading all the content, it’s about understanding that just because the customer doesn’t progress to a sale from your campaign (98% won’t) they could still be your future customer. In many ways, it’s as important to have content that creates the ability to sustain the engagement from a campaign as it is to convert the customer then and there.

The persona gaps

Do you have your personas mapped out and fit for purpose? Yes, excellent! Does everyone actively use them all the time to ensure you are creating the right content for your customers? No? Well, you’re not alone. Most personas sit on dusty shelves or forgotten, unopened folders only seeing the light of day when someone decides to come up with completely new ones. It’s simple really, every piece of content should be briefed in with personas specifically in mind … otherwise who on earth are you creating that content for? Failure to do so means that by default there will be content gaps.

The customer engagement gaps

Finally, everyone talks about the ‘customer’ in the buying journey which is odd given that a lot of the time they haven’t actually bought anything yet so are not actually a customer yet. But what if they are already a customer? Is your buying journey right for both prospective new customers as well as existing repeat/upsell/cross-sell customers? From a content perspective there is often a lot of missing content here (and channel activation as well!).