The no brainer business value of speaking to your customers’ needs
If I’m going to buy from you, I need to know you can meet my needs; that’s a no brainer. If I’m going to engage with your company’s marketing, I also need to feel it’s relevant to my needs; that’s a no brainer also. The challenge is linking the two together so that the outbound marketing connects with my needs through the buying journey; that’s harder but as we proved in our first pilot of Odyssiant at a major UK bank, it’s totally achievable.
Why would you want to do that? Here are 3 reasons:
- It helps progress the customer through their buying journey and in our pilot that was one of the key reasons we were able to generate a 51% marketing qualified lead (MQL) conversion rate. How? If each piece of content you create within the buying journey relates to identified needs, then your customer is able to follow their own content journey that matches their needs.
- It’s your best approach for securing higher than industry average engagement rates because the outbound content is crafted to resonate with the needs of your target customer personas. In our pilot, we achieved an open rate of 22%, with 11% of the customers going forward to engage in the first step of the journey by taking this approach.
- It provides actionable insight. This requires a bit more explaining so bear with me…
If you create content that fulfils every step of the buying journey then you have the opportunity to create content that is designed to meet specific customer needs. If you then make that content easily accessible by using AI driven next best content, then it breaks down the barriers for the customer so they can progress smoothly through the buying journey. You then have all the ingredients required for actionable insight.
By passing that information into the customer data file, you now have rich information on what is driving the customer’s purchasing decision. If the sale requires any form of direct intervention (e.g. a direct sales conversation), then this information is gold dust. If not, then you have simply fed your pipeline with a stronger propensity to buy.
Finally, by assessing the content that is being consumed by the various target personas, you can understand what the actual needs are that your customers are seeking to address. This is far more powerful and reliable insight than any survey or research can provide as what you read (and that includes watching videos, etc.) says far more about you than anything you say.