The buyer’s journey has evolved drastically over the past decade. Gone are the days of strolling into a store and being swayed by a cookie-cutter sales spiel.
Rather than waiting around, buyers begin a meticulous journey of self-education. Armed with the power of the internet, they dive into the vast sea of information, evaluate the merits of countless solutions (to their pain points/needs) in a saturated marketplace, and then make a purchase decision.
In fact, 82% of customers consider online business reviews to be more influential!
So, what can be your key takeaway from this?
- Have a pervasive digital footprint to prompt easy brand discovery
- Focus on addressing buyer concerns
- Map out your potential buyer’s journey. Keep researching and monitoring the bottlenecks they might or are encountering and work on improving user experience.
Now, what happens if you don’t focus on breaking down obstacles? Customers will abandon their purchase journey mid-way. The fallout from this would directly impact ROI.
Let’s learn more about these barriers in the customer journey and strategize how you can overcome them!
Identifying Barriers in the Buyer Journey
If you want to effectively treat an illness, you have to diagnose it first. Similarly, if you’re looking forward to overcoming barriers in the buyer journey, you have to identify those challenges first properly.
Here’s a look at some barriers customers encounter:
Inadequate understanding of buyer personas: Buyer personas essentially help you peek into your audience’s psyche, understand their pain points, and build targeted campaigns that appeal to them. But often, this arena of research is the most overlooked.
You might think you can operate on subjective guesstimates or borrow personas. However, these shortcuts riddle the customer journey with obstacles, increase lead attrition rates, and decrease the chances of conversion.
So, pay attention. Invest in buyer persona research. This elevates the customer journey and ensures satisfaction. Market research indicates that acting on insights based on a well-rounded buyer persona can increase website traffic by 2-5 times.
Product/Service barriers: Yes, the virtual shopping experience has its perks. It is extremely customer-focused. But it has its pitfalls as well. For example, customers aren’t able to physically experience the products/service, might not agree on the price points, or have trouble accessing your products perhaps because of a sluggish website.
Some easy fixes for these could be furnishing your website with Augmented/Virtual Reality technologies (AR/VR), conducting thorough customer research before you fix prices, improving website response time, etc. Implementing these fixes can do wonders for enhancing customer journeys and improving conversion.
Market Competition: If you’re competing in a crowded market, you need to craft a unique selling proposition for your business. Otherwise, even if customers like you, they won’t remember you. 84% of the customers prefer review sites, and 55% of B2B buyers tend to consult reviews before making a purchase decision.
Without establishing easy brand recall, customers would probably just choose alternatives. Crafting this USP and engaging with the audience in a way that delights and satisfies them is part of mapping a buyer journey that customers would be eager to take.
Breaking Down Barriers: Strategies for Success
The barriers are a setback, yes. Overcoming barriers in the buyer journey is no mean feat either. Your customer satisfaction is your goal and you need to strategize ways for success.
Following are some of the ways you can address buyer concerns and improve them!
1. Content Creation and Personalization
The whole buyer journey is a solo endeavor. The only thing handholding customers need while they make a purchase decision is helpful content. Content is the bridge between you and your target audience. Even McKinsey says that 76% of customers leave a site if they can’t find what they are searching for!
Your content initiates your buyer journey, shaping lifelong associations. Tailoring personalized content to address various stages of the sales funnel, from awareness to decision-making, is the key. 71% of the buyers look out for personalized content marketing. Put out content pieces for the whole spectrum. Long blogs, white papers, ebooks, and instructional videos, are popular forms of content that tend to attract eyeballs.
Pervasive presence has many advantages, but in the context of the buyer journey, it gives you a competitive advantage. You have some control over influencing your buyer’s decisions. You can lay the groundwork in a way that they perceive you’re the best option and choose you.
2. Integrated Marketing and Sales Alignment
If your marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned they will clash on lead qualification. This means rough lead handoffs resulting in inconsistent customer experiences: a significant hurdle in the buyer journey. Without a common ground, attempts to address these hurdles will also continue. Consequently, customer acquisition costs would rise, revenue would dwindle and the scales would tip towards losses.
Marketing team ideations should always be fuelled by sales team feedback. This has several benefits but in the context of improving user experience, it resolves a major bone of contention: disagreement on which leads to pursue. The main upside to that is it allows for smoother lead handoffs.
Research indicates that “Tightly aligned” companies experience 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth. Sales and marketing alignment directly impact revenue and profits. Collaboration fosters strategic marketing campaigns, leading to increased deals, revenue, and accelerated growth
3. Data-Driven Decision Making
Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable. To ensure a seamless customer journey, it’s crucial to monitor and integrate responses from various channels where your brand is active. This consolidated data provides insights into customer preferences.
For example, a customer might download an ebook from your website, call your customer support for inquiries, and subscribe to email newsletters. You need a system that unifies this behavioral data to understand customer intent and preferences and adjust your strategy accordingly.
This is extremely important for enhancing the customer journey. If you do not have such infrastructures or systems in place, data will remain stored in silos across different departments and locations. You will be acting on incomplete and inaccurate information that can seriously harm your ROI as well as instill a bad reputation among customers.
But enough about how technology can slow you down. Let’s look on the brighter side. Today you can leverage predictive analytics to analyze historical barriers to customer journey, find a pattern, and forecast future obstacles. This helps you arrange for preventative measures, and advanced fixes so that your buyer’s journey is never interrupted.
Future Trends and Innovations
Do you know why almost every company is investing in AI infrastructure today? Because AI-powered adaptive algorithms can comb through massive sets of customer data, figure out customer preferences, segment them according to it, and personalize their buyer journey based on this intelligence. This is a game changer because personalization always helps in undercutting customer reluctance, gain customer trust, and ultimately increase conversion rates.
That’s not all though. Today AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can help provide customers with personalized recommendations when they visit your site. Such intuitive technologies lend a hand in improving user experience. Customers are no longer bombarded with random product/service suggestions that are completely irrelevant to their needs. Rather relevant suggestions accompany them at every stage of the buying journey. This ensures customer satisfaction, secures customer loyalty, and acts as a catalyst for purchase.
Virtual assistants also make for a robust customer support system, resolving customer queries in real time. This prevents any delays in customer service and provides a frictionless buying experience. You can also have voice assistants in place to provide your customers with a hands-free shopping experience.
Essentially, fixing buyer journey obstacles with the right tools and technology can help you attract and retain the most promising leads, give you an edge over your competitors, and help you position yourself as a leading name in the industry.
Wrapping Up
In today’s business landscape, all successful enterprises have one common mantra: prioritize the customer. Listen to what your customer wants, understand the barriers they’re facing when they try to access your product, incorporate modifications, and repeat. Once you have cracked the code to overcoming barriers in the buyer journey, it’s just a matter of time before you get to become ‘That’ very name in your niche!
If all of this seems a tad bit lengthy for you, allow Marketboats to step in here!
We thoroughly segment customer data based on intent and preferences and create targeted campaigns according to your end-user’s requirements. Our platform helps you constantly monitor the response to those campaigns and provides you with actionable insights. We’re with you every step of the way, from lead qualification to conversion. So, lift that weight off your shoulders!
Contact us today!
