As many b-to-b organizations have shifted to persona-based marketing, it is only natural that we’ve started to see the first wave of interest in buyer’s journey mapping. A b-to-b company adopts buyer personas as part of an audience-centric transformation. Once it gets a taste of buyer personas, it realizes that it needs to operationalize those personas across the organization so multiple functions can benefit from those buyer insights.
Enter buyer’s journey mapping, whose purpose is to help organizations use those buyer insights to predict buyer behavior throughout the buying cycle. A well-developed buyer’s journey map informs campaign strategies for more effective execution of marketing and sales programs. Portfolio marketers are responsible for buyer’s journey mapping as part of their buyer expertise and should work closely with demand creation and marketing operations colleagues on development and implementation.
Given that buyer’s journey mapping is currently a hot topic, we’ve seen multiple interpretations of how a buyer’s journey map is defined and what it looks like. These interpretations are often fragmented or lack the correct orientation point. To help clients sort through the definitions, here are the four elements of a buyer’s journey map:
Clients of SiriusDecisions’ Portfolio Marketing service have access to the brief “Creating Journey Maps to Enable Buying Decisions,” which contains the SiriusDecisions Buyer’s Journey Map Framework. This framework provides a best-in-class process for structuring b-to-b journey maps for each buyer persona for an offering. It’s how you ensure that your buyer’s journey map is leading you in the right direction rather than getting you lost.
Christina McKeon is the Service Director of Portfolio Marketing at SiriusDecisions. She has more than 20 years of experience in product and solution marketing, sales enablement, demand generation and social media. Follow Christina on Twitter at @ChristinaMcKeon.