If your organization is finding that marketing campaigns are missing the mark, there could be any number of factors at play, but the most likely is that your marketing team doesn’t have solid strategy in place. You may be creating and distributing great content, but with no clear focus or direction, in what one SiriusB2B Marketing study referred to as “random acts of marketing.”

Without that high-level strategy that guides marketing decisions, even the most incredible product or service — the one millions of people need and would pay serious money to have — is only going to have minimal impact out in the world. So if your marketing efforts are feeling less like a well-oiled machine and more like throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks, it might be time to take a step back from activities and focus on the strategy that drives them.

To get started creating that strategy, take a look at the Three C’s of a successful buyer journey.

Customer

Start by creating detailed customer personas that will help the team understand exactly who’s involved in the buying process and how your products and services will make their jobs easier. It’s not enough here to identify your potential buyers’ job titles and industries. You need to drill down even further. What is their average age, and what level of education have they likely completed? You’ll look at how big your target buyers’ companies and who they report to. What are their goals on the job, how do they measure success, what are their biggest challenges, and what tools do they use to make their jobs easier? How do they find new information, and what social networks are they on?

Thorough answers to these questions for each of your buyer personas will be a valuable resource to the marketing team as they craft content specifically designed to show how your products and services will measurably improve the target buyers’ lives.

Content

Once you’ve got a real handle on who your buyers are — and you should feel like you know them as well as you know your colleagues — then
you can start crafting the perfect messages to communicate your value in a way that will resonate with each target buyer. All of your collateral, from blog posts and e-books to mailers, brochures and floor signs, should be created with your solutions to these personas’ most pressing problems in mind. You’ve used the personas to chart the buyer journey, and now the collateral becomes the roadmap.

Connection

And finally, how will you deliver your content to potential buyers? You’ll need to identify the right channels and the right times, aiming to meet customers wherever they are to offer them the solutions they need. Digital distribution will be critical, but so will print marketing, from flyers and post cards to catalogs for sales reps to grand format vendor signage.

This part can be the most difficult and time-and-resource-consuming piece of the marketing puzzle, as it requires juggling printing, kitting, assembly and mailing along with inventory management, campaign tracking and more. But it’s also the most important. After all, without a strong distribution strategy — and flawless execution — those target customers will never see the killer content you created just for them, and the buyer journey will never even start.

Fortunately for your organization, the connection stage is where OneTouchPoint steps in, streamlining distribution by acting as the singular, centralized manager of marketing supply chain operations. With our U.Connect platform acting as a central asset management and fulfillment hub and our wide range of services supporting on- or offsite printing, kitting, mailing and inventory management, your team is left to focus on what really matters: developing marketing strategy and guiding potential customers along that buyer journey.

If marketing efforts are feeling scattered, or if the results you’re seeing aren’t what you were hoping for, step back and reassess your organization’s overall marketing strategy, starting with the Three C’s. And when you’re ready, we invite you to contact OneTouchPoint today to learn about how we can help power the third C — connection — one touchpoint at a time.