Why aligning marketing with your customer journey matters

HDC Digital’s Heather Cooan and Cultivate’s Amy Bishop spoke at the SMX East conference in New York on Wednesday

NEW YORK — Aligning Your Messaging and Marketing With the Customer Journey, a session at the SMX East conference Wednesday, offered a comprehensive overview of how marketing, sales and content should all be aligned and calibrated to each stage of the customer journey for maximum results.

The session represented a kind of idealized process or blueprint that many companies struggle to match in practice.

Speakers Amy Bishop of Cultivative and Heather Cooan of HDC Digital presented a massive trove of material in a limited time and even made it coherent. The process they outlined was as follows:

1. Objective setting and campaign planning.
2. Understanding the differences between the buyer’s journey and the sales process.
3. Differentiating between customer and buyer journeys.
4. Segmenting audiences and creating buyer personas.
5. Identifying your brand’s identity and clarifying brand messaging.
6. Marketing automation and lead scoring.
7. Creating content for different stages in the customer journey.
8. Using first and third party data to understand content needs during the purchase path.
9. Aligning individual campaigns with stages in the purchase path.
10. Campaign and channel measurement methodologies.

While few companies are doing all of these things or doing them well, the presentation offered a roadmap for companies to understand where the challenges, friction and gaps exist.

Asked about where she sees the most common mistakes, Heather Cooan said that many companies are doing well at the top and bottom of the funnel but falling down in their efforts directed at the middle or consideration phase. She also said that many companies are not utilizing their CRM data.

Amy Bishop said that channel specialists can be very helpful in providing insights and input for the overall analytic framework they were recommending. In addition, she stressed that, to succeed, sales, marketing and other groups in the organization need to share information and recognize that they’re engaged in a common objective — to grow revenue.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He researches and writes about the connections between digital and offline commerce. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.