How Your Online Presence Contributes to a Seamless Buyers’ Journey 

Not every industrial buyer’s journey is the same, but your business should provide a consistent experience to all buyers regardless if they start with SEO, PPC, tradeshows, or a referral. The question is, how does a business manage this experience with varying touchpoints? 

This blog looks at understanding your prospective buyers’ journey and tactics that ensure a positive experience like: 

• Aligning touchpoints to your website 
• Maintaining consistent messaging and extending your online presence 
• Validating engagement utilizing TopSpot’s tools 

You’ll learn to craft exceptional experiences for prospective industrial buyers through various online channels. Let’s get started! 

Understanding your prospective buyers’ journey 

The traditional buyer’s journey can be simplified with the following stages:  

1. Awareness   

2. Consideration   

3. Decision  

4. Post-Purchase  

In terms of industrial buyers, the journey is long and requires more research and decision-makers.  

Here we are focusing on stages one and two, and thinking about how your efforts create the awareness and consideration to get your company to those decision stage discussions. These two stages make up over half the buyer’s journey. 

First, put yourself in the prospective buyer’s shoes as you evaluate the experience of each touchpoint. You can evaluate your competitors in the same way to fully understand a buyer’s decision. For example, evaluate the trade show experience. 

Many industrial buyers look to understand what the marketplace has to offer when going to a trade show, and these events offer your business a great opportunity to meet face-to-face with new customers. The way your trade show booth or space looks is critical to your return on investment, especially the messaging featured.  

Does your experience address:  

• The needs or challenges buyers are looking to solve 
• Possible concerns they may have when selecting a business 
• The features and benefits they are looking for 
• Keywords or phrases they would use when searching online or when calling 

Your trade show experience should showcase more than a welcoming environment, logos, and taglines.  

These should include some of the same B-SMART keywords you use on your website that fulfill their intent. In fact, the content between trade shows or any channel experiences should be consistent. Why? After that prospective buyer has a great experience at the trade show, the next step in their journey is likely your website for more detailed information.  

It’s the same with SEO or PPC—a search query leads to link options, which lead to your website. This exercise in walking in a prospect’s shoes mirrors our Four Steps exercise used to evaluate KPIs. The first step is looking at what the customers see when searching online. The way you show up in the search landscape should match your website.  

With so many channels, both on and offline, where is the best place to start building consistency? When thinking of this journey, your website reveals itself as the central hub. 

Aligning touchpoints to your website 

Your website should be the destination for all online and offline channels, its what marketers refer to as “drive-to”. Your website and its landing pages should be connected to your:  

• Social Media  
• Trade Shows 
• Directory Listings  
• Search Engine Listings  

This is why your message needs to be consistent as it leads prospective buyers to the specific details of your products and services, lead forms, and phone numbers. The optimization done for your digital marketing lays the foundation for your channels, which should also state clearly your product and service offerings, as well as the scope of projects you can handle. 

Additionally, keep things focused. When you set up your SEO and PPC strategies, you match your content up with user intent. The same should be done for other channels. You don’t want to inundate people with a list of value adds right away. Focus on fulfilling intent first to guarantee a better user experience. Once fulfilled, then those value adds can be differentiators in the consideration and decision stages.  

What happens when someone enters your site? Try it yourself and think about how a customer would navigate through your content:  

• From your homepage, are your main products and services obvious?  
• From your products and services pages, are you providing access points to informational pages?  
• Are there entry points to validate and learn more about your business?  
• Do you make it easy for people to reach out?  

With the right keyword content strategy for digital marketing and now the right user experience to drive to, you can think outside of the website. What other online channels should you leverage to create a great experience for prospective buyers? 

Maintaining consistent messaging and extending your online presence 

There are a lot of channels marketers can utilize, but it’s important to narrow in on what industrial buyers rely on when undergoing the research needed for the upfront stages in the buyers’ journey. 

Google My Business 

What happens when someone does a branded search after meeting you in person? Can they find your business and the information they need like the website, phone number, and address? This is why Google My Business is a critical channel that should be updated and reviewed to make sure ratings are from legit customers. 

LinkedIn

When it comes to social channels, LinkedIn is the most likely to be used by an industrial buyer and can help differentiate your business with company information and posts on your products and services. LinkedIn can help:  

• Build brand trust through thought leadership 
• Distribute content 
• Prove your value to current and existing customers 

What type of content should I be putting on LinkedIn? Consider: 

• Posting on new product information or announcements 
• Distributing blog posts or new resources like white papers or case studies 
• Providing event information like tradeshow appearances or speaking engagements  
• Use Client visits and Team events to showcase who you are and thought leadership 

Directories

Online directories like The Fabricator still make sense for many industrial businesses and often free listings will have a great impact on your awareness efforts. Why? 

• They increase your visibility 
• Many are setup with your target audience in mind  
• They build credibility and trust 
• Include SEO benefits 
• Many have additional resources or networking opportunities 

Regardless of the channels selected, they should be working in tandem and share the same messaging prevalent on your website. This can also include email, display ads, and sales collateral. Additionally, make sure your Sales Team is aligned on this messaging so that they can continue the consistency when in contact with leads. 

Tools to Validate Prospective Buyers’ Online Experience 

You can validate the prospective buyers’ experience with your online channels using TopSpot’s LOOP Analytics and CallRail to help Teams create data-driven marketing. By learning what is and isn’t creating leads can inform your marketing budget and resources, plus narrow in on keywords that resonate with buyers to inform content across all channels.  

Tips for utilizing data include:  

• Read your forms in Loop and get to know your leads—where they come from, what they are looking for, and the challenges they are looking to solve.  
• Listen to your phone calls in CallRail for those same details you looked for in the forms.  
• Look for indications of user experience problems, like hard to find or lack of information. 

Now confirm if you have content that fulfills their request. If you do, was it hard to find? Replicate those journeys to see if that experience can be improved or create new ones for content you don’t have.  

Finally, don’t forget to tap into your Sales Team. Survey them:

• What are common questions people are asking them?  
• Is there a way to answer these questions on your website and other online channels?  

With this wealth of data and information, you can validate your efforts and find gaps in opportunity. 

For more on creating prospective buyers’ journeys for your industrial audience, contact your Account Team. Not a TopSpot Client? Contact us to learn more.