Where Do Your Target Sales Leads Start Their Online Journey?

Where Do Your Target Sales Leads Start Their Online Journey?:by Biserka Anderson
Finding the answer to this question should be the starting point of any digital marketing effort. In a world where the user demands relevant content and a bespoke web experience, knowing who your prospects and customers are, what they expect and where they spend time online is critical to marketing success.
The online user behaviour has changed for good, making it critical for companies to gain user insights and translate them into web content that is tailored to each stage of the customer journey.
Identifying where your sales leads begin their web journey when looking for a solution to their issues is a great place to start and involves finding the right tools and methodology to gather user insights. The following three steps can help you in the vital first stage in the move to providing a personalised user experience.
1. Get specific about who you are selling to.
Spend time answering questions about your ideal sale prospects and what they care about, and then translate these insights into real-life customer pains and gains.
A deep understanding of your prospective leads’ issues, pain points, goals, influences, motivations and attitudes will facilitate a customer-centric approach to online engagement, guide your decisions about the right content and web user journey, and it will ensure consistency throughout the content development process.
Here is a handy template for persona development that can help you get the ball rolling.

2. Categorise leads based on their issues.
A software technology company we have worked with uses an effective method of prospective client segmentation. It has identified its target leads’ issues and on that basis, has put them into two distinct categories – “risk takers” and “risk managers”.
Our client has then mapped the two types of personas to the solutions it provides, thus effectively identifying the type of content that could be found, was in the right format for the respective stage of the customer journey, and would resonate with their audience.
In so doing, the software provider has become one of the first points of reference for risk managers when they experience a system failure, which has earned them the right to take users to the next stage.
3. Create a bespoke content plan.
Armed with persona intelligence, you can now go ahead and build a content plan focused on addressing the potential issues of your target sales leads.
Publishing content that explores certain pain points will help your target leads educate themselves on how their challenges can be solved. When a prospect is looking for a solution, they will type in a query in Google using language associated with the issue so it is critical that you have quality content to address it.
Here is a handy worksheet to help you map your buyers’ issues to relevant content:

Once you have developed your personas and mapped out your content to their issues, you should think about how you can move your prospective clients down the sales funnel.
You can find some handy tips on how to generate more prospects and nurture them to sales-ready leads in the free Essential Guide to Lead Generation.

Image credit: |vvaldzen| via Flickr, Creative Commons