FOCUS 2: Buyer Experience Foundations of a great experience

Navigating buyer expectations alongside compliance demands

How is the buyer experience changing?

Today, buyers and customers interact with your brand primarily through digital touchpoints. From day one, digital interactions shape the perception of your brand and impact sales, retention, and growth.

Paul Jarman, CEO at NICE CXone, a customer experience platform, puts it this way: “Avoiding friction is the key factor today in shaping opinions and differentiating between brands consumers love and those they feel are not worth their time." (NICE 2022)

So what does this mean for marketers? Marketing teams need to create an engaging digital experience while addressing key concerns and compliance requirements around privacy, security, and accessibility.

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.

6 ways to improve buyer experience

Find brain-friendly formats

The race for success is filled with competition and challenges that require innovative solutions. Assess your collateral and communications to adequately understand how advanced and effective your format is. Looking at modern research or recent data can provide helpful directions as we see in Lumen Research's scientific study into PDFs.

Map content journeys

An effective map will guide creators to guarantee your business's unique buyer journey is covered. 77% of organizations have issues with content waste and utilization, and 39% of this waste is because of poor quality and irrelevance to the buyer journey. Save production costs and boost content outcomes by taking the extra time to strategize. Here's how we do it.

Engage authentically

When businesses don't fully appreciate their human side, people become disengaged. Successful marketing leaders understand that finding real and honest ways to connect with clients and staff will ultimately improve their bottom line. An easy way to do this is with powerful personalization that integrates with existing marketing tech stacks.

Innovate to leap ahead

When the pandemic hit, many businesses had to adapt to a completely digital way of working and engaging prospects and customers. Willis Tower Watson was already leading the way: after 19 years of the status quo, they transformed their reports to a new interactive digital format. They quickly saw an impressive uplift in sign-ups, readers, and read rate, while discovering an untapped sales market with the data they gained.

Build feedback loops

We know a prospect or client's interests and interaction do not follow a straight line, so why does our communication? By creating opportunities for interaction and two-way communication throughout content and comms, marketers can adapt buyer journeys to the individual and gain valuable sales insights along the way.

Think outside the box

Collaboration has been a business buzzword for years, but the way we collaborate is changing. Internal teams are becoming more flexible and boundary-less. As functional silos break down and knowledge sharing is encouraged, faster decision-making and reduce time to market become possible without risking a loss of brand standards. To accelerate this, consider tools that break down data and production silos.

Remain firm about your goals,
but flexible about your methods.

Dr. William A. Donohue, Professor of Communication at Michigan State University.

The value of compliance beyond legalities

🔎 Privacy

Privacy is a big deal for readers and leaders alike. Recent changes to laws and regulations, high profile data breaches and misuse, and spammy sales tactics have led to mistrust and hesitancy when it comes to providing personal data. Cookies are disappearing, clicks are unreliable, and gated content is less effective.

But this data is fundamental to a great buyer and customer experience, enabling personalization and relevance, and reducing wasted spend.

So how can marketers bridge the gap? To start, you can ensure a value-led journey that prioritizes value-led gating, first-party over third-party data, and reducing friction in the buyer journey.

🔓 Security

Businesses can never be too careful when it comes to data security. While it is often seen as an IT problem, data security has a big impact on brand perception and customer experience. Marketers make an implicit and often explicit promise not to misuse customer data, but security best practices are often overlooked.

Many digital content formats don't enable businesses to protect their materials, whether that's setting clear access controls or keeping sensitive information secure.

Moving to a secure content platform gives marketers the ability to keep information safe by enabling SSO and version/author controls, unpublishing or updating live content, and integrating data directly with a CRM or BI tool.

🔑 Accessibility

Inaccessibility online is a business risk. Many marketing leaders worry about keeping content accessible to avoid non-compliance fines or brand damage. The problem? Information published in PDF is harder to find, use, and maintain, and is rarely compliant.

The benefits of inclusive and "brain-friendly" content go beyond people with disabilities, including neurodiverse and time-poor readers.

Publishing content that is natively accessible gives your team in-built features that can be adapted for any reading format like mobiles, laptops, or screen readers. Hosting materials online also means content can be edited to feedback or updated whenever things change.

CASE STUDY:
How a global brand improved engagement and conversion with digital content

Turtl's case study with Telenet and LeadFabric shows how interactive content provides actionable insights for future personalization and audience targeting initiatives, allowing them to improve buyer experience and see direct business outcomes.

In two months, Telenet tracked over 2000 identified readers and then used the data collected from each reader's behavior to feed back into their tech stack to support a robust segmentation and nurture strategy.

Within less than 60 days:

Average read time reached over 4 minutes per document
Found more than 500 engagements with interactive features
Conversion rate rose to 88%
1400+ MQLs generated
Bounce rate dropped to 11%
4x more meetings booked
10x more subscriptions gained