Activate the Buyers Journey with Digital Body Language
Today’s buyers are not on a straight path to a purchase. Instead, they obtain lots of information about a solution before they ever talk to a sales person.
A lead might download an ebook on how to solve a particular business problem. A few days later, the same lead might register for an infographic on solution benefits. They might then hop over to Twitter to see what others are saying a competing solution. A week later, they might open an email about ROI from one of your competitors. Finally, they might pick up the phone and call you.
This examples demonstrates that leads are not traveling linearly through a buying cycle. Rather, they are traveling the route that makes sense to them today, at a pace that aligns their current business needs.
Since most buyers don’t contact a company until they have conducted extensive research, marketers have assumed more responsibility to drive revenue and meet sales objectives. To do this, more and diverse digital channels (email, social media, blogging, display ads, telemarketing) are being used by marketers to engage with buyers during their research process.
And to be successful, every interaction in every channel must be tracked. Who visited the website, who picked up the asset, the nature of the asset (type, buying cycle) and how they got to it are all incredibly important pieces of data. The tracked information – known as digital body language – is the trail of bread crumbs that the potential lead leaves behind on their journey.
It is this trail of online interaction data that denotes the leads’ needs, interests, challenges and potential purchase timing. Clues come from email click and open data as well as website interaction data gathered by a marketing automation platform or GoogleAnalytics. And it is this data that can be analyzed in real-time to tell what the lead needs next:
- Is the lead warm and ready to speak to a sales person?
- What is the next email’s ideal personalized call to action that speaks directly to the lead?
- What asset should the lead see next?
- What is needed to advance the lead closer to a purchase decision?
Digital body language empowers marketers to turn away from the obsolete practice of batch and blast emails. General emails to general lists no longer work. Instead, the interaction with the lead (and future buyer) must be specific, personal, and on topic regardless of whether it’s an email or a recommendation for a whitepaper on the company website.
But don’t disregard the body language data once the real-time moment has passed. Aggregated data can provide insight into what assets are performing better overall, where the funnel is leaking, what can be done to optimize nurture programs, when your leads like to read their emails (time of day, day of week and so on).
The easy availability of data on the Web has empowered buyers to look for and expect information to be readily available when they want it. It has enabled prospects to conduct research to solve a problem on their terms. The Internet’s data trail is what allows marketers to know what leads want and to advance them towards a purchase decision. Are you capitalizing on this gold mine of behavioral insight? If you’re not but you’d like to, let’s talk.
