The drastic transformation of the customer journey means buyers are now in the driver’s seat. Not only that ‒ they’ve taken the wheel and they’re steering the course. With so many choices and access to endless amounts of information empowering them to make their own decisions, buyers are now in complete control of the purchasing process.

Especially in the B2B world, customers are comparison shopping online and taking a much longer time to evaluate their options than in the past. A huge part of the customer journey is now invisible to the traditional sales view. In fact, the vast majority of the journey ‒ about 70 percent, according to SiriusDecisions ‒ is now complete by the time a typical prospect is ready to engage with sales.

So, we as marketers have a new challenge. We must learn how to get in front of buyers, get involved in that purchase journey much earlier – simply put, we need to adapt.

Here’s how.

1. Plan to keep customers front and center

The first step to creating a high performance marketing plan is to commit to using five distinct objectives to orient your marketing plan throughout the buyer’s journey. Why? It keeps your customers at the center of your planning. These essential stages are:

• Attract: First you need to attract customers and get their attention by establishing trust through thought leadership.
• Capture: Find a mechanism for capturing their information, such as gating a piece of content with a form, asking them to trade some of their information for your high-value piece of content.
• Nurture: Then nurture the relationship by informing and engaging them in a way that makes sense for them and feels very personal.
• Convert: By this point, they’re ready to convert from a prospect to a customer. But, once they’ve converted the marketing shouldn’t stop there. Keep it going.
• Expand: Continue to nurture the customer base to maintain and expand customer relationships.

2. Focus on themes and messages customers receive

The next step in building your marketing plan is choosing the types of messages you want to send to your target buyers. This is the right time to talk about your brand and your product or service. Pick a few essential topics and convey them clearly to your prospects through your content. You need highly focused themes to tie together all of the content that you’re producing. Make sure your buyers have the information they need to make the crucial decision that you want them to make – which is to become your customer, not your competitor’s customer. Strategic communication will also help you position your product and frame how current and future customers think and feel about your company.

Effective campaign themes are:

• based on buyer pain points and needs
• simple to understand
• relevant during all stages of the buyer’s journey
• enduring enough to stand the test of time

Once you’ve organized your program around the five major customer lifecycle stages, map all the content in your library to the stage that would resonate most with your audience.

3. Get in front of buyers in each stage

Next, consider the tactics included in your marketing plan. You’ve already oriented your content around the buying stages, now is the time to ask: What challenges are my buyers facing at each stage of their journey? What are their primary objectives in each of these phases, and what do we, as marketers, need to do to help them realize these goals?

Here is a simple, yet powerful, visual overview of the opportunities you could pursue to optimize your effectiveness at each segment of the journey:

Once you’ve built a framework for the opportunities at each stage, you can begin to pinpoint specific areas that need attention. Identify and highlight any gaps, opportunities, obstacles, and areas you want or need to focus on.

4. Implement technology that works best for your program

Figuring out what technical systems you need to support your marketing activities and customer interactions is essential to any successful program. There are more than 3,000 marketing technology vendors. That’s a lot to choose from.

So, how exactly do you begin to make sense of it all? It’s important to begin with the basics ‒ the platform backbone. Most midmarket companies and larger companies will have a marketing automation platform (MAP) and a CRM, or will at least investigate getting both of those platforms in place.

The next layer to connect to the backbone platforms is channel technology, such as ad platforms or social networks. Additionally, use marketing operations platforms to manage internal processes, data, and reporting. Finally, many content platforms will allow you to produce personalized content, videos, and many other interesting tactics and materials to engage your buyers and help you along the way.

The driving idea behind your marketing technology stack, is that it should enable you to efficiently communicate with your audience in a way that makes sense both to you and your customers. And, implementing marketing automation as a backbone platform can help you consolidate the need for multiple tools into a single command center for marketing teams.

5. Establish your metrics and report back to your boss

Another major advantage of MAPs is that they offer marketers the chance to document and report on their results and successes. Take the time to properly set-up the system you will use to track your efforts.

First, establish overall funnel metrics by defining your goals in each of those five stages of the buyer’s journey. Then develop specific KPIs to measure progress for the “gaps” you identified earlier. In order for you to be successful, you’ll need to get buy-in from the whole team. Make sure you have the right technology in place to actually track the performance. Finally, map your goals to the customer lifecycle stages.

By doing all of these things, you will know if your marketing program is on track … and so will your boss.

6. Be an innovator and leave your mark.

And, speaking of bosses, why not show your boss and your team what you’re made of? Building your marketing plan is a great time to shine.

Start with championing a new channel or tactic that could open new doors. For example, if your company is not yet engaged on social media, maybe that’s the big idea that you’ll advocate for in the plan. Or, maybe you don’t have a video program and you want to build that strategy up within the business. Or, perhaps you’d like to dive into interactive content and you need to get buy-in.

Pick one great idea out of your plan go full force with it. Be creative, be innovative, be bold. This will give you the opportunity to be an internal leader and an agent of change.

Conclusion

Overall, a high performance marketing plan is one that addresses your customer’s needs at every stage of the buyer’s journey – even when they’re not even considering purchasing! A successful plan is one that is flexible, adaptive, and meets your customers where they’re at. After all, the modern buyer doesn’t just have one path to reach the purchase point; there are literally millions of ways that your customer can find you, connect with you, and eventually purchase from you.

Ultimately, the best marketing plan is the one that focuses entirely on what really matters: your customers.