3 challenges of B2B customer journey mapping
Plotting out the B2B customer journey is a crucial step in empathizing with your prospects (and hopefully streamlining the path to conversion). However, B2B customer journey mapping is not without its challenges. As we mentioned above, these interactions can be complex, lengthy, and span numerous touchpoints. The point being: there is rarely a linear path between awareness, conversion, and retention when it comes to B2B customer journeys.
Below, we talk about these challenges (and how to overcome them) in more detail.
Identifying & prioritizing potential customer touchpoints
For a long time, marketers have turned to third-party cookies to help them with ad attribution and retargeting prospects. But in the past few years, data privacy regulations and browser-led changes on iOS, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome have been leading to one thing: the end of third-party cookies.
However, many companies haven’t completely broken up with third-party cookies yet – meaning they may be ill-equipped to understand the customer journey in its entirety if they don’t implement a new strategy.
So, what’s the way forward? In short, a prioritization of first-party data. This type of data, which businesses gather from direct interactions with their customers, is compliant and serves as a competitive differentiator (that is, no other business has access to those insights). But for first-party data to be effective, it has to be consolidated – or in other words, there shouldn’t be any blindspots between teams when it comes to customer interactions.
Integrating the customer experience across touchpoints
One goal of customer journey mapping is to create a consistent experience across channels and touchpoints. But as the number and variety of those touchpoints grow, integrating tools can be complicated.
For instance, different tools might use different naming conventions for data collection. You’d have to standardize these names if you want to unify data from multiple sources. To create this unified view, there are a couple steps you need to take:
Create a universal tracking plan for your business that clarifies the proper naming conventions for data, what’s being tracked (and why), and where that data originates from and ends up.
Ensure this data is consolidated into a central repository and that data is democratized across teams (e.g, marketing teams don’t need to depend on analysts or engineering to pull audience lists – they can do it themselves, in real time).
Preventing data silos & ensuring all teams can access customer data
The lack of integration between tools results in data silos and missed opportunities to engage customers. Let’s say sales has given a product demo to a specific prospect. If marketing doesn’t know that, they might email the prospect an invitation to try a demo. As a result, you waste the customer’s time (and your own), along with inviting their annoyance.