DemandGenReport's 2017 B2B survey highlighted three trends that vendors need to consider to earn the attention and gain the trust of modern B2B buyers:

Relevant content is the key: 75% of B2B buyers said it is very important that the vendor's website present relevant content that speaks directly to their company; 66% said it is very important that the website address the needs of their industry.
Buyers expect customized content relevant to their needs regardless of whether the supplier has access to their personal information: 71% of buyers expect an experience tailored to their individual interests and needs even if they conduct an anonymous search.
Buyers become more risk-averse: They focus more on risk mitigation, especially as the number of stakeholders involved in buying decisions increases along with the length and complexity of the buying journeys.

Be innovative

Use social media

Practice reciprocity

Price it right

Establish authority

Appeal to emotion

A simple, interactive worksheet designed to help get all the customer wisdom from your agencies, internal team and entire ecosystem in one place

This simple, interactive worksheet template is excerpted from MMC 5422 | Customer Research and the Fundamentals of Online Testing, a course in the Communicating Value and Web Conversion graduate certificate program from the University of Florida and MECLABS Institute. It is designed to help your marketing team, agencies, and other stakeholders and partners collaborate and get aligned to power your customer-first marketing — on who your customers are, what they want (even when it doesn’t directly relate to your product), and in what context they view your marketing messages.

Use this simple template as your guide to help increase customer intimacy, share it with your entire marketing and agency ecosystem along with key business stakeholders and partners from product development to customer service to manufacturing, and ultimately create customer-first marketing that resonates with your customers and increases the probability of conversion.

Conduct Research

Define Persona to Be Used

Begin Creating Your Customer Journey Map

Step 1: Discovery

Stage 2: Comparing

Step 3: Considering

Step 4: Purchase

Step 5: Post-Purchase

An option is using software that’s specifically designed for building a customer journey map, like SuiteCx. Their customer journey mapping tools can help make sure you don’t skip any steps in this process.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide of their platform. You can still apply these steps to any software you’re using, even if it’s no

A new study by Accenture shows that B2B companies seem to struggling to deliver the kind of personalised customer experiences that drive loyalty and growth due to the growing complexity of customer buying journeys.

The global professional services company surveyed 1,350 sales, service and marketing executives from organisations around the world, and found that 21% thought that they had have “total control over their organisation’s sales networks and overall customer experience”.

According to the survey, most customers are on average 57% through the buying process before they have their first interaction with a company representative. 90% of customers refuse to respond to cold calling, with 61% of all B2B transactions starting online.

71% of the B2B executives believe that customers want experiences that increasingly match B2C experiences. B2C experiences are based around fast response times, consistency across channels and 24/7 availability. Of the survey respondents, 49% think that they are currently failing to deliver the experiences that their customers want them to.  

Step 1. Understand Your Customers
Step 2. Define The Steps of Your Journey
Step 3. Think about the customer’s touchpoints and actions
Once you’ve defined the stages that make up your customer journey, you need to consider what your customers are doing at each step.
First, determine where your customers are going. These places are referred to as touchpoints. Now that you’ve thought about where your customers are going, think about what they’re doing at each step. In other words, think about the actions they’re taking and lay them out on your map.
Step 4. Find the flaws in your journey

"So how can your organization begin the process of sales acceleration?

• The first step is to break down the departmental and data silos present in your organization by having all teams work from one set of data, one set of goals and one set of measurements.
• Another shift from traditional prospecting is the need to make sense of all interactions, both online and offline, that influence the buyer journey. This disconnect between offline and online worlds is what is frustrating customers . 
• In addition to knowing your data and establishing a connected identity, companies must use the right tools to generate that holistic and consistent customer view. 
• Finally, companies must develop the right analytics to find truth and meaning from the data and surface those insights into the systems and the workflow of the people or sites that should take the next best action."

New research launched last week by Marketo shows that marketers—both B2C and B2B—continue to be borderline delusional in terms of what customers actually expect, and how they are and are not delivering against those demands.

• 82% of marketers believe they have a deep understanding of customers. 56% of customers agree.
• Irrelevant content is the number one reason consumers don't engage more often with brands
• 48% of marketers think their engagement efforts are achieving organization strategic objectives

New research indicates where to focus digital investments so that they will reap rewards in online and face-to-face channels.

Learn about the newest member of the Demand Waterfall family and how it can help b-to-b companies
drive demand and revenue creation performance optimization throughout their organization.

The challenge is to break down traditional silos by engineering engaging, omni-channel experiences that exceed customer expectations. Differentiation in the B2B marketplace is not just about product. It requires leveraging data, knowledge, and technology in order to create a virtual crystal ball that presents customers with the right information at the right moment.

A fully integrated B2B platform — one that goes beyond e-commerce to include customer data, marketing assets, content management, campaign orchestration, and analytics — provides a roadmap for customer engagement by providing real-time context about the person interacting with specific company content. That context then becomes a powerful tool for enabling highly targeted content delivery that offers customized solutions and product options.

Today’s B2B companies need a marketing platform that provides users with a rich digital buying experience that facilitates engagement and makes it easy to use. That means providing customers, sales reps, distributors, and service technicians with desktop and mobile apps that offer real-time access to marketing collateral, automated sales processes, and key sales systems that streamline purchasing and fulfillment.

'Why?' questions are always difficult to answer, but the current state of customer experience is puzzling.

The concept is a simple one: no content plan is complete unless it's based around delivering content consistently. To do this requires a focus on strategy, not just on a few blog posts and the odd bigger campaign.

That consistent delivery — and the audience retention it creates — comes from the smaller content pieces, the glue that binds it together; the strategy in its entirety.

The discussion around the purchase funnel often turns out to be incredibly important: it ensures you look not just for ideas that help with awareness, but also further down the funnel. It's also possible to tie content types in to this to ensure variation between the types of content you produce. To do this we use the Content Matrix I created specifically for this purpose; you can see it above:

Organizations that use a mapping program to manage buyer and customer journeys average a 79% increase in cross-sell and upsell revenue, marketing research

Fully understanding the customer journey involves five key steps:

1) Building the business case

2) Identifying the channels

3) Acquiring the data

4) Joining the dots

5) Measuring effectiveness