How Buyers Want to Talk to Your Business in 2018 The 3 Channels You Need

Curated by Paul Helmick

I’m a Technology CEO and Experienced Entrepreneur. I love helping people use technology to grow their business.

  • This is a great in-depth article from HubSpot that answers a challenging marketing and communications question that’s coming up more and more
  • When customers or prospects want to communicate with you, they have many more options than they used to and are less patient in waiting for information
  • You need to be able to communicate with them quickly, wherever they are and on whatever platform they are using
  • This means using a larger set of communication channels (web, email, live chat, social, etc) with various teams/departments within your organization, at the same time, providing tools and resources to your team that are mapped to the various relational stages of communication that customer or prospect is engaging you in
  • The words ‘engagement strategy’ and ‘communications workflow’ speak to this – and it is complex and requires a thoughtful approach to be effective.

Two Perspectives

Buyers and marketers tend to view that phenomenon from different perspectives. For the former, it’s about having conversations with brands where and when customers and prospects prefer — largely because the world has changed, and 80% of internet users report suffering from “information overload.”

But with that also comes a new level of options, which means that your organization isn’t the only one with leverage anymore — or the only one that can give buyers what they want. And more options = less patience in waiting for information. 

The goal, therefore, is to get the best answer as quickly and easily as possible, from the platform they’re already using, whether it be Facebook, a company’s website, or something else.

Marketers don’t always view interactions with that audience in the same way. We tend to view things through the conversion funnel, which is a visualization of the customer journey, starting with the moment she discovers your brand — at the top of the funnel, or TOFU — to when she converts to a customer at the bottom of the funnel, or BOFU.

But in order to be successful, we can’t focus on strictly one POV. While it’s important to look through the perspective of the funnel at that journey (and the way we reach our audiences throughout it), we also have to examine what those efforts look like on the receiving end — in the buyer’s shoes.

When it comes to interaction between buyers and brands, there is no one-size-fits-all option — and even if there was, it would become commoditized very quickly. After all, that’s the historical pattern of human buying behavior.

See the full article on Hubspot to learn in detail how the different channels work for each stage of the funnel.