The buying process for Dynamics users is shifting rapidly to a situation where marketers have less and less control over user decision-making.
What this means is that ISVs need to learn to “think like a customer,” asserts Rich Hanna, a business professor at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, and an expert in digital marketing who has studied the Dynamics marketplace.
What does it mean to think like a customer? It means acknowledging that customers rely ever more heavily on sophisticated content to research Dynamics add-ons. Hanna speaks in terms of ISVs creating a “loyalty loop”—using different types of user content to guide prospects through a five-stage buying process, as follows:
- Need recognition
- Information Search
- Trial/evaluation
- Purchase
- Post purchase
Content at each of the five stages must encourage prospects to advance logically from the prior stage, in this model. According to Hanna, ISV marketers need to see themselves as something akin to tour guides, that they “have to lead people through a particular buying process…..via education.”
At each stage of the “loyalty loop,” prospects become more knowledgeable. That means ISVs need to develop content with different levels of sophistication and with different intentions. “You have to tell your story, create an experience,” explains Hanna.
Need recognition, the first stage, can be promoted via introductory content containing headings that are fresh and engaging, emphasizing an ISV’s distinctive approach to a particular product category. Content should become more technical and detailed at the second, information search, phase. Content for trial or evaluation might be in video form.
Key is keeping prospects both informed and engaged, wanting to move from one stage to the next. According to Hanna, “You’re only as good as your most recent content.” While it’s important to regularly create new white papers and webinar presentations, he also advises ISVs to continually refresh old content, via updating of the product information, along with new headings and reorganizing.
In the final analysis, he says, the challenge is very basic: “How do you turn a customer’s itch into a rash you can get rid of?”
