Clarifying the B2B Customer Journey: Strategies for Success in Google's Messy Middle

When it comes to B2B marketing, it can be tempting to assume we’re dealing with purely rational decision makers focused objectively on ROIs, data, and bottom lines. Yet the reality is that your buyers are human beings who are driven by the same instincts and cognitive quirks of our early ancestors.

Things can get messy when these instincts meet the complexities of the modern world. While we adapt remarkably quickly to new technologies, our core mental processes still leverage ancient coping mechanisms related to pattern recognition, emotion, and social cues.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by a slow decision-making process and wondered if your clients were stuck in the Stone Age, it turns out you were at least partly right. Our processes for evaluating options and risk share more with prehistoric thinking patterns than many B2B marketers realise.

Google's report, "Decoding Decisions: Marketing in the Messy Middle," explores this phenomenon, offering key insights into our decision-making processes. The aptly-named report helps demystify the 'messy middle' – a crucial, non-linear phase in the buying journey where buyers loop between exploring and evaluating options. 

Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey underscores the relevance of Google’s findings from a B2B market’s perspective. The analysis depicts multifaceted B2B decision processes involving multiple stakeholders juggling conflicting priorities across extended timeframes.

With so many voices and considerations creating complexity, B2B buyers can find themselves overwhelmed evaluating endless options, looping through the same stages over and over again, unable to pull the trigger - a state better known as analysis paralysis.

Below, we'll explore how B2B marketers can leverage Google’s insights to effectively break the cycle of analysis paralysis, fostering more streamlined and confident decision-making in their clients.

Understanding the Messy Middle

Google describes the messy middle as a complex space in the consumer journey. It exists between the trigger - when a need is recognised - and the purchase, where old behaviours break down and new behaviours emerge. 

Here, consumers loop between two modes: exploration, where they expand their options, and evaluation, where they narrow their choices. This non-linear path makes understanding and influencing consumer behaviour in this phase challenging and crucial for marketers.

A Helpful Consumer Perspective

Fortunately, to fully grasp the messy middle’s'impact on modern B2B buyers, we need only turn back the clock a few decades. 

Consider the typical options available to consumers in the 1970’s and 80’s. What shoppers saw on the shelf, in magazines, and on TV largely defined their choices. This might seem restrictive compared to today's ‘digital high street’, but buyers actually thrive when given a finite set of choices.

Too many options and too much information leave us feeling like there's always one more review to read, one more vendor to consider, or one more solution that might be slightly better. This short-circuits our primitive heuristics, setting us up to get trapped in the messy middle. We  might delay the purchase decision indefinitely, evaluating and re-evaluating our options, or succumb to decision fatigue.

When guided by trusted information sources, the result is more confident decision-making.

The Impact on B2B Buyers

If one human can spend hours or even days in the messy middle trying to decide on a pair of trainers, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to picture what happens at enterprise level with a buying committee involved. 

Because B2B decision-making processes often involve long-term commitments and significant finance and personnel implications, they’re typically far lengthier than the consumer buying process. 

They also involve multiple stakeholders. Gartner pegs the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution at six to 10 decision makers, each with unique concerns, biases, and levels of expertise. 

When was the last time you and nine of your colleagues agreed on what to order for your next lunch meeting - let alone the right path for a significant business decision? In many cases, just getting consensus on whether an issue actually exists can be so tough that companies never even enter the ‘trigger’ state.

Buying groups do sift through the detail. They need data-backed content to engage in a thorough exploration and evaluation phase before arriving at a decision. However, B2B decision-making is also influenced by the same irrational emotional factors that drive individual consumers. 

As B2B marketers, we must address both types of collective decision-making dynamics by providing authoritative content to guide buyers through the 'messy middle' towards confident and informed decisions.

Google’s Three Key Takeaways

Winning in the messy middle means helping your buyers feel confident in their decision. Do so, and the collective cognitive barriers to taking action fall away. 

Happily, Google's report offers three clear takeaways for crafting marketing strategies designed to help shepherd buyers through the decision-making dynamics that dominate B2B buying:

• Be there

• Be compelling

• Be experimental

Let’s take a closer look.

Be There: Maintain a Brand Presence

Google’s report highlighted an interesting phenomenon around brand presence. Simply showing up in the buyer’s journey can sway preferences.

The search giant found that when they presented consumers with a second option in a given category - even a fictitious one - 30% of respondents, on average, shifted their preference to this alternative brand.
The goal is to become the trusted voice buyers turn to as they explore and evaluate.

Consistent visibility might be vital, but creating a meaningful connection also requires delivering relevance and value. This means understanding buyer needs during their exploration and evaluation phases. Then matching educational content, blog posts, social interactions, and personalised email marketing to each stage.

Whatever the medium, purchasers overwhelmed by options yearn for a narrator to cut through the noise.

Being there consistently without overwhelming your team requires sustainable workflows for ongoing content production. From our experience, the most effective approaches combine human talent with marketing automation and AI to build a reliable content marketing machine. It also means making smart use of every content investment by repurposing core assets across multiple formats and stages. 

Regardless of how you achieve visibility, ensuring that your B2B business remains top-of-mind during potential customers’ exploration and evaluation phases means meeting the right person with the right message at the right time. If you can do that well, you can position your brand as a credible, trustworthy beacon amidst the sea of alternatives in B2B’s messy middle. 

Be Compelling: Activate Behavioural Principles

Remember: yours won’t be the only brand vying for customers’ attention as they explore and evaluate their options. You need compelling content to position your brand as a potential solution that will help solve their problem. 

Snappy headlines and eye-catching designs will attract attention. But to connect with and guide B2B audiences, even more potent tools come from behavioural science research.

Google’s report suggests six decision-driving cognitive biases we can leverage via behavioural science to "supercharge" the efficacy of our marketing campaigns. However, it is vital these techniques be applied ethically, building trust and guiding buyers to optimal solutions aligned with their true needs.

1. Affect Bias: Remember, B2B decision makers are not cold, calculating drones - they’re humans, and thus influenced by emotions, relationships, and personal feelings. Use powerful storytelling tools like case studies to help your brand resonate on a personal level. Ensure your vocabulary shows you understand customers’ pain points.

2. Authority Bias: B2B buyers often look to industry leaders and experts as authority figures when making decisions, seeking social proof to validate their choices. Showcase your brand’s thought leadership by interviewing internal subject matter experts or gathering endorsements from well-known figures in your industry.

3. Default Bias: Sometimes, it’s easiest to just go with the flow. B2B buyers tend to prefer a solution that’s an industry standard or widely known, which makes building visibility even more crucial. Use messaging that positions your product or service as the “go-to” choice for your industry, highlights widespread adoption, or emphasises your understanding and compliance with industry standards.

4. Diversification Bias: When making several choices at once, which is often the case with a B2B purchasing decision, buyers tend to seek a range of solutions or features, even if they’re not all necessary. Case studies that emphasise the versatility of your products or services can be helpful here.

5. Present Bias: Sometimes called the “power of now,” this is buyers’ tendency to overvalue today’s rewards over longer-term gains. For B2B buyers, this could translate into a quick or easy implementation, low switching costs from competitors, or a clear path to ROI in the near term. Emphasise benefits like these in your content, and give the long-term benefits a nod as well.

6. Scarcity Bias: Perceived limitations can spur irrational actions driven by fear of missing out. While scarcity has less relevance in B2B, the psychology remains. Any use of scarcity must consider customer benefit - guiding buyers to optimal fits avoids regrets. Leverage the power of free by offering value-added services to sweeten the deal for your buyers. You might also highlight unique aspects of your product or service that competitors can’t easily replicate. 

In their experiments, Google found that aligning fictitious brands with these biases could sway buyer preferences away from established brands, underscoring the power of well-crafted content in influencing B2B decision-making.

We believe B2B brands can create a win-win for themselves and their customers by delivering high-quality, creatively diverse content that harnesses behavioural principles without manipulating people. 

The ethical barometer is whether you are empowering buyers with what best serves their long-term interests. Positive, responsible content helps buyers find the right solution for their needs while helping you to maintain a healthy sales pipeline.

Be Experimental: Re-evaluate, Learn, and Innovate

For Google, the effectiveness of your strategies and tactics relies on the strength of your data insights. Routinely analysing your performance data, evaluating and re-evaluating, and testing new approaches helps you discover what works for your target audiences. That’s what builds the best strategies over time.

Of course, experimentation has its own ‘messy middle’. Waiting for the data to come in and for patterns to emerge across campaigns requires patience. Yet embracing innovation with a test-and-learn mindset allows new tactics to prove viable before fully committing. 

Making technology a key partner in your marketing strategies can accelerate both your innovation and your customers' sales cycles. Having a 360º view of each contact and each account helps your team to create a data-informed content strategy based on actual customer engagement patterns. 

A data-driven approach allows for more personalised - and thus, effective - marketing efforts. When applied well, workflow automations and customer analytics shape buyer journeys that reduce the complexity and indecision that individual B2B buyers face. By nurturing leads and guiding them out of the messy middle, you can lead prospects towards more confident and informed purchasing decisions.

Break Through the Messy Middle with 1827 Marketing

“The single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling, it is actually our customers’ struggle to buy.”

Hats off to Gartner VP Brent Adamson, who summed up the problem rather nicely: today's primary sales hurdle lies in empowering customers to decide.

B2B marketers who focus on helping their customers to make sense of the messy middle can instil them with the confidence they need to propel them into action. All it takes is a strong and consistent brand presence, content that both understands human nature and respects human relationships, and an experimental mindset. 

Want some expert guidance putting these concepts to work? We’d love to chat about how the 1827 Marketing team can work with you to leverage Google’s insights.