Meeting Buyers Where They Actually Are in the Funnel

The Goal: Delivering the Right Message at the Right Time

The buying funnel — the concept of buyers moving through a linear progression of stages, from initial awareness through actual purchase — is the accepted foundation for most marketing programs. Yet most marketers acknowledge that in the real world, buyers follow a much more meandering path, mixing activities from different stages as they move toward a decision. Buyers go forward, then backward, then off the path entirely and back on again in pursuit of different types of information at different times. 

As the number of interaction points between the buyer and the brand grows, those paths become more personal, complicated, and unpredictable. And as funnel stages increasingly overlap, the importance of giving each buyer the right information at the right moment has only grown. 

This poses a new challenge to marketers: how to deliver the information that buyers need — where they are, and not where you think they are, or should be — in a world where they cannot be assumed to be following a simple progression from one funnel stage to the next.  

The answer to this challenge is data. While many buyer activities happen in channels outside the company’s control, the most relevant interactions still take place directly between the brand and the buyer. These interactions, taking place on websites, apps, social media, and sales calls, all generate data about buyers’ needs that can build a history of buyer activity and interactions over time. 

Using Buyer Activity Data Most Effectively

Accessing and making effective use of this data enables marketers to respond to actual buyer behaviors in a strategic way — in other words, to deliver the right message to each buyer based on their needs at that moment. Ideally, marketers should be able to pull together a holistic view of each account to compile data and learnings through each interaction to drive the next desired interaction. If you’re not able to collect and capitalize on this information, you’re missing opportunities and revenue.

The data generated by buyer activity provides the key to selecting the right message in each situation. Relevant information includes:

• The current interaction, including the channel, queries made, content consumed, time spent, and other events

• Past interactions, including the same data as current interactions

• Buyer attributes, including demographics, intent signals, purchase history, and competitive product use

This data provides insights into how buyers are interacting with your brand and which messages have been effective. These insights guide media and content choices for future marketing programs.

Collecting this data requires capturing interactions as they occur, linking the interactions to a comprehensive account profile, and making the profile accessible to other systems. The interactions will take place in different systems that are not necessarily designed to track account-level interactions, so some effort may be needed to collect the relevant data. For example, it may be necessary to add a website tag that reports on events such as page views, site searches, and content downloads, and ties these to an identifier such as a user account, first-party cookie, or device ID. As buyers interact with your company through an ever-broader array of channels, it becomes more difficult — but also more important — to capture data from as many of these as possible. This ensures you have the most comprehensive picture possible of their behaviors.

Applying the Insights from Buyer Data

Information from the interactions is fed into a customer data store that extracts useful insights such as topics of interest and degree of engagement; links the results to a comprehensive customer profile; and prepares additional analysis such as predictive model scores to guide future interactions.

Unified buyer profiles are the basis for selecting the best message in each situation. Analytics based on those profiles helps to select those messages. But the actual message delivery is typically left up to channel-specific systems such as websites, mobile apps, and email engines. This creates a problem for marketers who would like to optimize each customer interaction. 

Most channel systems have their own campaign engines that are used to select messages to deliver. These campaign engines draw from data loaded into the channel system’s own customer database, which often is limited to a simple format that cannot accommodate the full customer profile from the central customer database. But even when the channel system does have the ability to ingest the full customer profile, running separate campaigns for each channel makes it virtually impossible to ensure that all channels follow the same rules for managing buyer interactions.  

There are better alternatives, however, for making optimal use of the collected buyer data to meet buyers where they are in their circuitous journey through the funnel — delivering the most effective messages and consequently building stronger relationships with them. To keep exploring this topic, read our white paper with the Customer Data Platform Institute, “The New, Dynamic Buying Funnel: Using Data to Meet Your Customers Where They Are”.