4 Ways to Streamline Non-Linear Buyer Journeys With Marketo

Buyers today have more choices, channels, options, basically more of everything. To start their buying journey, they no longer have to wait for a sales rep to guide them, they can just pick up their smartphone and begin their search.

Most of us still think of the buyer’s journey as a linear path, with well-defined stages that occur one by one. But given that buyers are now savvier and in control of their journey, their path to a decision is not so much of a linear line but a zig-zag path.

Here’s a glimpse into what the journey looks like:

As a matter of fact, the non-linear buyer journey is more evident in the B2B landscape. In the B2B environment, purchases require extensive research and are usually made by different decision-makers with different priorities.

This requires B2B marketers to be more adaptive in handling each customer journey individually instead of forcing each customer down a similar journey.

How do they do that? By leveraging the power of a marketing automation platform like Marketo.

Let’s understand how Marketo can help untangle your buyers’ non-linear journey to make it more personalized, engaging, and effective to ensure marketing success.

How Can Marketers Handle a Non-Linear Buyer Journey?

Today, it’s essential for marketers to take the automation route in their marketing efforts. You need to understand the intent of your user and focus on nurturing them. This can be done based on their unique buyer journey to build awareness and affinity for your brand while a prospect is looking for answers.

That’s where Marketo can truly empower marketers to create personalized campaigns that help to build trust and convert leads.

4 Ways to Create a Seamless Buyer Journey With Marketo

To make the buyer’s journey smooth and profitable for you, you need to streamline their journey and personalize it every step of the way with the power of automation. Here are 4 ways to do that:

1. Identify and Target Your Buyer

Marketo’s targeting allows you to individualize every single visitor’s journey. You can align buckets of related characteristics (page of entry or forms filled out) for a separate target audience and then optimize the experience for that lead. For example, if your lead’s industry is healthcare, you can design a pop-up offering your latest healthcare eBook.

Marketo’s ability to track anonymous leads on your website allows your team to paint the right picture possible and deep dive into the actual demographics of your website visitors.

2. Build Personalized Marketing Campaigns

When the buyer is still looking for a solution for their challenges and they are occasionally visiting you or your competitors, that’s when you need to provide a better experience and show that your solution can combat their challenge.

Use the Web Personalization feature in Marketo, to present personalized web content to your audience. Understand what type of information your potential buyers need at every stage and create specific content in a mix of formats (eBooks, videos, dynamic content, and more). Make it available when and where your buyer is ready to consume it.

For instance, you can customize the content, offers, or design in real-time based on the data you collected for the visitor. With Marketo Predictive Content, you can identify assets on your website and recommend that piece of content to the customer right then and there.

3. Implement Effective Lead Nurturing

B2B buyers may speed up or slow down their decision journey but slowing down doesn’t always, or even usually, mean it’s a hard stop. Let prospects take the journey at their own pace and meanwhile, you can focus on nurturing them. Use automation to nurture leads and provide them with helpful resources that can help produce more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads.

In Marketo, you can segment your leads and depending on the triggers you set up. You can filter those leads into engagement or drip campaigns targeted exactly towards their needs so that you can be on the top of their minds.

Levels of Engagement Marketers Need to Look Into for Lead Nurturing

• General Engagement: Users that exhibit a basic level of engagement, like occasionally reading your content or social media posts, can be categorized in a universal engagement program. These users are more likely to proceed in their journey faster, if nurtured well. Your aim for this should be to build a relationship with prospects by supplying them with the kind of content that they previously engaged with.
• Deeper Interest Engagement: The prospects that show a higher level of engagement, maybe the ones who have frequently downloaded high-value content assets, visited your website, filled forms, etc, can be categorized to become a part of specific nurture programs plan as per their interests, challenges, research history, or industry.
• Inactivity: Some prospects engaged with you. Good news, right? And then, just like that, they went MIA without even saying goodbye.It is important to monitor inactivity, identify who hasn’t engaged with your emails, website, or other content in a long time. The inactivity window will depend on your communication cadence.

Next, introspect data quality in your database- are there duplicates, or obsolete data? If you find these issues, fix them. With Marketo, you can set up triggers that automatically listen for inactivity windows and then send reactivation emails to try and win back those prospects.

4. Leverage Multi-Channel Marketing

Modern buyers use different channels throughout the decision journey, that’s why you need to think across channels in your lead nurturing. Make use of advanced lead nurturing technology, like Marketo’s customer engagement engine, real-time personalization, and more, across multiple channels to create a unified experience.

With Marketo, you can create targeted email campaigns and create new and interested customers, stay in touch with past purchasers, and even upsell satisfied customers in just a few easy clicks.

With the aforementioned ways, you can implement a solid marketing strategy utilizing the power of Marketo that can, ultimately, increase your conversion rate, boost engagement, and drive more revenue.

Wish to ace the art and science of a non-linear buyer journey with Marketo? Talk to us.