How to scale a personal buyer journey in the customer era

Mark Kilens, VP of Content and Community at Drift, and Nick Mason, CEO and Founder at Turtl, discuss how marketing and sales teams can stand out, deliver value, and increase engagement and conversion at scale.

Key takeaways:

• Many B2B marketing and sales teams are using tools and processes from the company era, where messages and materials were static and broadcast one way.
• In contrast, top-performing companies are seeing huge growth and loyalty gains by embracing the customer era, where customers are given control, two-way lines of communication are opened up, and a data-driven feedback loop enables effective and personalized communication.
• B2B websites and content are stuck in the company era, missing opportunities for interaction, insight, and conversations.
• To embrace the customer era, create and deliver exceptional content, personalize your content and journeys, and spark conversations along the way.

(If you’d rather watch this than read about it, scroll down here)

The company era vs the customer era

Nick explains the success of companies who have embraced the customer era:

Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Uber, Amazon: what do they all have in common? When we look at some of the true success stories that we’ve seen from businesses over the past 10 to 20 years, we’ve seen some amazing companies emerge. They’re now household names. It’s almost impossible to imagine life without these companies.

One of the most striking things about all of these businesses is the excellent and exceptional experience that they all offer to their end customers and end users. Those experiences are typically individually tailored.

That gives the user or the customer or, you know, whoever’s interacting with their applications and their services, a tremendous degree of control over what they experience and what they don’t experience as part of their time with that company. Human beings like to feel in control and empowered: we like to feel like we are in charge of our own destiny. And that sense of control that these businesses are so successfully able to provide for their users and customers is a key part of their success. It brings about tremendous degrees of loyalty and repeat business.

Another way to put it: these businesses have made the transition from the company era into the customer era. They place the customer at the center of everything they do, and they provide control over the relationship to the customer, rather than reserving it for themselves.

What are B2B websites missing?

Mark looks at evolving buyer expectations and the current experience gap:

How we communicate as people fundamentally has changed. The way in which you as a consumer or buyer expect to receive information has been transformed because of the rise of the mobile platform, and then software platforms or communication platforms or ecosystems within the overall mobile hardware platform.

80% of buyers who visit a B2B website today will never want to fill out a form. Most websites have a 1% conversion rate: which means just one in one hundred people going to engage with you.

The problem? We haven’t made our websites actionable. Our business websites today are informational. Going back to when the company had control of all the information they would broadcast all the things they wanted to say and would control the buying process.

But because in our consumer life, or just everyday life, all of that has changed, we as businesses haven’t quite adapted fast enough. We have to keep up with how people buy today, especially now that digital transformation has accelerated from a three to five-year timeline to a three to five-month timeline.

Why doesn’t traditional content work for today’s buyers?

Nick weighs in on how content misses opportunities for interaction and data:

B2B is very content-heavy: whitepapers, case studies, and reports are really valuable assets that we have and that we pour a huge amount of time money, and resources into. And they contain some of our most important information and a lot of the story around our business.

But yet again, similar to the websites, it appears from the research, that these are falling short in similar ways. Almost 60% of people say most vendor content is useless (Forrester via Sirius Decisions 2020) and 94% of people surveyed are annoyed by communications that they receive from businesses (Twilio).

Content really hasn’t changed a lot since the days of print. In the days of print, you would have hired a copywriter. You would have hired a designer. Then, you would have got them to lay the thing out and you would have produced a PDF. You would have sent it to the printing presses.

You wouldn’t have got any data back. There wouldn’t have been any interaction. There wouldn’t have been any two-way communication. Because you can’t do that with dead trees. Right? Fundamentally, it’s just not possible. 94% of B2B firms struggle with content insights. 77%, as a result, can’t deliver and activate effective content. 39% of content is not relevant or useful for the buyer journey (Forrester via Sirius Decisions 2020).

Now that we have entered the digital age, we have taken that PDF, and rather than sending it off to the printers, we’ve just stuck it on our website. So all of these opportunities that digital provides for interaction and for engagement of the data to be collected is completely non-existent.

How can we create a better buyer journey?

Nick outlines the opportunities for sales and marketing teams to exceed buyer expectations:

We need to make sure that we are creating and delivering truly exceptional content. What does that mean?

When we’re talking about content we should be thinking about all the pieces across our entire buyer journey. This includes everything from our ebooks and website pages, to our case studies, reports, and whitepapers. Everything that someone experiences, down to the emails that we send.

As an example, people switching from PDF to something more engaging and interactive, have been proven in independent empirical studies to show 73% more engagement than they were getting with PDF.

Click to read Cisco + Turtl | Case study

By switching from PDF to Turtl Docs, Cisco had 7x more buyers engaging with their content.

And that wasn’t because the words were different, it wasn’t because the message was different. It was because the content itself was actually a joy to interact with. It was actually something that people felt gave them control, it gave them autonomy. People felt as though it was something they wanted to spend time with.

How can we start having more valuable conversations along the way?

Mark on conversations that build relationships along the buyer journey

I use a simple framework; Engage, understand, and recommend. It’s how a person would have a conversation with another person.

There’s some type of engagement that happens for a given reason. There has to be a shared understanding that comes from that conversation or that happens during that conversation. In addition to this, there are recommendations that flow back and forth. It’s like you’re passing a ball back and forth as you understand each other and as you ask questions.

Ultimately, there might be a recommendation at the end. This could be something like “Let’s meet again tomorrow to talk more about this” or “Let’s take these action items and follow up.”

Businesses need to start thinking about how they can give that type of experience to their customers with their content.

It’s about guiding someone to that next piece of content and understanding more about them. You are helping them understand more about your business and your solution. Along the way, creating a more immersive experience that’s pulling on their emotional strings.

Content that drives results and revenue

Nick explains the power of personalized content for hitting ambitious growth targets:

The amount of content we actually see being personalized for us is super limited. This is despite the fact the vast majority of marketers say customers expect personalized experiences. We can see a direct correlation between the amount of personalization and, for example, email reply rates.

We’ve been using personalized content for our outbound outreach.

Personalization is automatic. Simple things like pulling through their name, logo, and homepage, allow someone from that company to read the content and see that it’s for them. The content inside the material that we’re choosing to show this company has been selected based on what we know about them. This can include details about their size, about who we’re speaking to, and the problems they experience. They’re receiving a fully personalized experience from the front cover all the way through to the back cover.

If we send this piece off to someone else, they’re going to receive a different set of pages. They will see a different front cover and a completely different experience with the information that is relevant to them.

Results in accelerating revenue growth

We’ve seen impressive results. One out of two meetings over the past six months have been booked because of personalized content. In that same period, we saw a 60% increase in meetings booked by sending this more personalized, directly relevant content.

Mark on content to accelerate revenue growth:

If you’re trying to produce revenue, content is already probably a pretty good top performer for you. But how can you create that pipeline faster? If you start to engage with people faster, that’s great.

Secondly, if you update your content and create a better experience, people will be better educated and more informed. Readers will have a higher amount of trust in your organization. They will feel that there is something different about your organization versus a company that doesn’t provide that same experience. This is an intangible edge that gives you a competitive advantage because there are probably many alternatives to what you sell.

Dive deeper into these topics and see more examples of action steps, watch Mark and Nick’s full masterclass here: