Aligning Digital Marketing and the Buyer’s Journey
Categorized in: B2B Digital Marketing
How do you measure success with your digital marketing? When clients come to us for help, they usually have some goals in mind. Digital marketing goals that we have encountered include increasing brand awareness, driving targeted traffic to the website, increasing customer engagement, and in general, getting the word out about the business. There’s usually a pretty high variety as to the types of goals they have, but the one thing they all have in common is that each of them are interested in using digital marketing to get more business. The details will differ, though, depending on the business itself and the industry.
So, how do you do this? One of the best ways is to align the digital marketing efforts with the buyer’s journey. When there’s room for improvement, this is usually what we see – that most businesses, when setting up their digital marketing, didn’t think about the buyer’s journey when they were putting together their initial digital marketing strategy. Here’s a look at what can be done to align the digital marketing in this way.
B2B Keyword Research
The buyers journey contains three distinct phases – Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Conversion. Considering this journey in your digital marketing starts at the beginning, and depending on the type of process you are undergoing, for many the beginning is to start with the keyword research. While we don’t recommend being aggressive with keywords concerning digital marketing, doing the research can give you insights into customer behaviors. While researching, align the keywords with the different phases, and this will help better align the digital marketing as a whole with the buyer’s journey.
Once you research the keywords, inevitably, you might feel tempted to include these while creating content. We actually don’t recommend this, as being too obvious with keyword use can result in search engine penalties. Instead, we recommend using the keywords to inspire topics, and then writing the content naturally. These days, you don’t need to be exact when using keywords in order to be returned in search results for them. The content just has to be relevant to the search.
Connecting Content to People
That being said, content is an important part of digital marketing, and the keyword research plays an important role in this. As mentioned above, the keywords can inspire some topics. It can also give insights into the way your audience is searching for information. Your audience is, after all, made up of your potential buyers.
The main idea is that you need to learn how to connect the content to the right people. In this case, the “right people” are your potential buyers, and this is the core of why aligning the content with the journey is so important.
Role of Social Media
Social media also plays an important role in this process, especially in the awareness phase. A lot of the times, awareness happens in social media. This is where it shines, but you can align the social media strategy to the other phases of the buyer’s journey, as well. Think of social media as a way to communicate with people. You can control how you want to communicate with them.
The role of social media in this process is as a communication agent. You can use it to attract new people, and you can also use it to keep in touch with existing customers. It’s a valuable part of the process.
Digital marketing needs to be aligned with the buyer’s journey. If you don’t do this, you could be leaving money on the table.
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