What Is Your Perfect Customer Path

Convert Prospects Into Customers Faster

Knowing the ideal path that most of your current customers took allows you to create a clean buyer's journey that future prospects can experience which decreases your days to close and drives revenue faster.

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Setting Up Your CRM

With the advances in technology, you can know exactly who you should be targeting, where they are in the buyer's journey and the exact message to share with them and when.

You're probably asking, how?

Marketing and sales is only as good as your data.

Anytime you try to do personalization, intent-based marketing, account-based marketing, or anything other types of advanced marketing strategy, the first issue that always happens, is the amount and the cleanliness of the data you have on your contacts and accounts within your CRM.

Before even thinking about the ideal customer path, you're going to want to find a good duplication software such as ZoomInfo, formerly RingLead, Koalify, or Insycle to manage and clean all the data you have in your CRM.

Secondly, you want to pull together as much data as you can on your contacts and accounts so that there are many ways to segment them into different lists. I suggest using tools like ZoomInfo, Winmo, BuiltWith, or CrunchBase and would include:

• Account Fields
  • Annual Revenue
  • Employee Account
  • Years In Business
  • Company Address
  • Market Industry
  • Phone Number
  • Website Address
  • Social Media Links
• Contact Fields
  • Email Address
  • Phone Number
  • Personal Address
  • Education/Universities
  • Past Job Experiences

Once you have this data, you need to pull a list of all your current customers and from here you'll want to start segmenting your audience to find the things that a majority of your customers all have in common.

Discovering The Ideal Customer Path

There are several steps you need to complete to understand all the different paths your customers took and how you can share those steps with prospects so they know which steps to take next and continue down the path of becoming customers.

Engagements & Conversions On Your Website

Once you have a breakdown of the ideal customer profiles, you now can reverse engineer the path that most of your customers took before becoming a customer.

If marketing is done properly, there should be either campaigns or lists of any interaction point a contact made because most CRMs or ESPs come with tracking codes that you place on your website that allow you to pull data that includes:

• Webinar Attendance
• Resource Downloads
• Website Page Visits
• Conference Attendance
• Email Engagement
• Advertisement Engagements
• Demo & Sales Calls
• Social Media Engagement

Alternative Source For Best Content

If you don't have this documented in your CRM, your next best source of data is using Google Analytics and filtering the content on your website to find what pages had the most views and longest average visit time. This is most likely the content people are most interested in.

Matching Best Performing Content To Buyer's Stage

This list shows you what content customers engaged with that made them trust you and find you a reputable solution to solve their problem. After compiling this list, match the content with the stages in the buyer's journey so that you can understand when you need to share it.

If someone isn't problem aware, offering them something specific to your solution will fall on deaf ears because they aren't even aware they have a problem in the first place.

Engagements & Conversions Sources

A good attribution model ensures that you understand the advertising sources, conversations, and other channels that drove people to your website that caused the engagement.

Using UTM variables, and adding those variables to each engagement, allows you to understand what marketing strategies caught your customer's attention and persuaded them to some sort of action.

These entry points into your marketing could include Google Adwords, organic search engine traffic, social media advertisements, organic social media posts, email marketing, public relations, cold calling, tradeshows, and many others.

The main idea here is you want to encourage your marketing, sales, and customer success teams to be OCD about documenting these and ensuring their accuracy. You can make these required fields in your CRM and monitor the values to ensure people are being accurate and not just choosing random fields.

Automating The Buyer's Journey

Once you have a clear understanding of the contacts that lead to paying customers, the engagements they made, and the entry points that caught their attention, you can then hyperfocus on these inputs.

Working Backwards To Create Success

The first step is ensuring that all your paid media, content marketing, and the internal team are focused on the ideal customer profile and buying personas you discovered after segmenting your customers based on the data you collected.

Later down the road, once you've saturated this particular market, you could introduce new markets, profiles, and verticals, but at the beginning, focus allows you to understand the process that allows you to scale.

This step allows you to become highly targeted on your paid media which also reduces the costs of acquiring a new customer because you're not spending as much money on people that don't fit your ideal customer profile.

Driving To Your Best Awareness Engagements

The first step of your customer path is making your best-engaged content easier to find on your website for the visitors who find you organically.

This could be done by highlighting the content on the homepage, your blogs/resource sections could offer suggested or featured content, and you could also do pop-ups (pop-ups are a bit messy and sometimes reduce your SEO, so use them lightly).

Two Ways To Gain Attention For Your Platform

Once you have your organic strategy in place, focusing on attracting people to your buyer's journey is the next play and there are two ways of doing this.

Using Paid Media To Drive Awareness

Using the channels with the best performance, you determined this above, promoting your highest engaged awareness content is the next move.

Most companies, when you ask what their best-performing content is, you draw blank stares. At Contineofy, we measure every engagement and the source of that engagement in your CRM, so we'll be able to answer this question without hesitation.

The trouble most people get into when creating their ideal customer paths is pushing people through the funnel before they are ready.

When you run these initial ads, the idea is to offer them something for free. You're not gating any of the content you place at this stage of the journey because these prospects don't even know who are nor do they trust you, so why would they want to give you their contact information?

Retargetting Engagement

Once prospects have taken the initial engagement, using retargeting ads on Google or Social Media, allows you to target those prospects and share the next few pieces of content that drove the best engagements but are still in the awareness stage of the buyer's journey.

The idea here is to build rapport, trust, and use the law of reciprocity before asking the contact to give you their information.

Converting Your Prospect

Ideally, the hope is that the prospect will naturally, after visiting your website a few times, find something that interests them in the Conversion Stage and provides their information organically.

If this isn't the case, after about 3-4 engagements with Awareness Content, switching your advertising strategy to focus on Conversion Content allows you to capture the information of your prospect.

Conversion To Consideration

Getting from conversion to consideration follows the same path as awareness to conversion, except your sharing content that is problem aware and highlights your platform as the solution, using email marketing, paid advertising, and your development team to distribute messaging, now that you know who you are talking to.

The order of these communication mediums depends on the responsiveness of the prospect. If they engage well with email, there is no need to spend money on advertising to continue to capture their attention and your development team doesn't need to reach out to them quite yet.

If you are having a hard time connecting with them via email, using a mix of paid advertising can interrupt their lives and bring them back to your website. Last resort, use your development team to call them.

Once you have their interest, creating personalized thank you pages after downloads that position related content or using a website personalization tool, like Mutiny, can make your website morph and share the ideal path right before the eyes of the prospect based on their data in your CRM.

Understanding Buying Intentions

Depending on the buying cycle of your typical customers, you can build out a lead-scoring model that allows you to get a clear picture of when your development team should switch from offering free value to asking for a meeting with a sales executive, request a demo or extend a free trial, depending on your sales strategy.

Several intent tools can help you with your predictive model so that you know when you've built enough rapport and have a higher probability of converting a prospect into a paying customer.

Using An Account-Based Marketing Approach

Yes, all that was one route.

The second route follows a very similar path but instead of relying on paid advertising and targeting to fire the system, instead, we'll take an ABM approach and as a company determine who the ideal companies are that we want to work with and then source those contacts via ZoomInfo, Winmo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or other tools.

Skipping the first step of the process, listed above, and instead focusing on using email to initiate the retargeting step.

You can still mix in paid advertising if you're having trouble connecting with the prospect but knowing the ideal content customers engaged with, as long as you have persuasive subject lines, you shouldn't have a problem catching their attention using email marketing.

From this point forward, you use the same process as listed above with the paid media route.

Concluding Thoughts

This process allows you to build a simple but effective ideal customer path for your buyer's journey. The way you can continue optimizing is by introducing marketing automation and content when you find gaps in the journey where prospects are getting stuck moving from one step to another.

Using tools like Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, or other email service providers, you could automate all the emails being sent based on the prospect's engagements, such as, if they visited this page send this, if they downloaded that, now share this.

Website Personalization

As I shared above, using tools like Mutiny, can allow you to personalize your entire website to the active person visiting. This will allow you to share an Amazon-like experience because you have all the data on the current visitor, where they are in the journey, and what they probably need to see next.

Balancing Experience & Business

When it comes down to it, people want an experience, they also need to be able to trust and value your opinions before they'll do business with you.

Finding a balance between the two is the secret because you don't want to be all experience, turning into an entertainment company where no one buys from you, but at the same time, you don't want to be all sales, because people won't want to engage with you.

Visualizing Your Ideal Customer Path

Lastly, when building the ideal customer path, I like building the workflow in Figma. Using Figma allows you to visually see all the steps involved and transitions between stages.

This also allows my team to understand the process of information, so when they're building it out in the different CRM, email, and website platforms, we're all on the same page.

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