buyer’s journey

By Susan Rose, Senior Director, Insights & Content

I’ve been creating research-based thought leadership for the public sector for almost 20 years. Yet until fairly recently, it was unusual to connect each asset to the buyer’s journey. Or rather, unusual to actively talk about the buyer’s journey.

Over the years, nearly 100% of the assets I’ve created have been targeted to users who are just becoming aware of a problem. That makes sense because that is a sweet spot in the buyer’s journey where businesses can have an impact on creating solutions.

Isn’t that enough? The short answer is no.

I’ve seen my clients miss opportunities to engage with other influencers by focusing all their attention on one audience (users) in one stage of the journey (need).

While we can create valuable and interesting content focused on educating an audience about a specific topic, audiences have different needs depending on who they are and where they are in the journey when they interact with the content.

An end user who needs a piece of technology to work in order to support the mission has different interests than a contracting officer who is putting together an RFP. They do not need the same information.

The graphic shows a very simplified public sector buyer’s journey and where you have the opportunity to impact the buying decision. There are three general types of buyers in the public sector: the person who will use the product/service, the program manager, and the contracting officer. Each of these buyers is critical to the process, and each has different questions about what they’re buying.

What are those questions? Rather than guess, Market Connections decided to conduct a survey of federal buyers. We’re going to the source to find out how they navigate the buyer’s journey. We’ll be sharing the results at Government Marketing University’s GAIN conference on June 8th (click here for more information).

Until then, simply thinking about what stage of the buyer’s journey the target audience is in at the moment they will interact with the asset will help you create content that has more impact… and leads to more sales.