The wealth of information on the Internet has made buyers more informed than ever before. Before making a purchase, they’re taking on a more active role in sales conversations,...
The wealth of information on the Internet has made buyers more informed than ever before. Before making a purchase, they’re taking on a more active role in sales conversations, steering clear of aggressive and inauthentic sales tactics.
That said, your business will need to adapt to the changing times and communicate with empathy to encourage customers to make a purchase. And it all starts with understanding how the buyer’s journey works.
Before your customers choose your brand as the best business that could satisfy their needs, they go through a process called the buyer’s journey. Getting a firm grasp of the buyer’s journey can help you tailor your message so that it resonates with your audience and increases overall conversions and sales.
Let’s look deeper into this process and find out how you can win potential customers over as they travel from point A to B.
The buyer’s journey, or purchase journey, is the process a customer goes through before they decide to buy a product or service. Understanding how it works can help you create a framework that will guide your marketing efforts.
The purchase journey can be broken down into three stages:
Every stage plays a crucial role. Your job is to craft on-brand messages that will help your prospects move smoothly from one stage to the next and make a purchase. After all, if your marketing efforts fail to cover every stage in the buyer’s journey, you’re missing out on the opportunity to boost conversions and revenue.
The buyer’s journey is an integral part of any content marketing strategy. And it goes hand-in-hand with buyer personas.
Buyer personas are research-based profiles that represent the people you’re trying to reach with your marketing campaigns. A typical buyer persona describes your ideal customer and incorporates their daily activities, decisions, and pain points.
With a buyer persona, you can create tailored campaigns or brand messaging that speak to your prospective customer’s needs. In a sense, creating a buyer persona can help you serve your customers better and build more lasting relationships with them over the long term.
Simply mapping out the buyer’s journey can yield a positive impact on your sales and conversions. So make sure you don’t underestimate how your prospects make purchasing decisions — after all, it can provide fresh insights and inform your future campaigns for optimal results.
People go through each stage of the buyer’s journey before they turn into your customer. So make sure your marketing efforts address customers in each stage of the buyer’s journey. Let’s take an in-depth look at each one:
People at the start of the buyer’s journey typically fall into one of either category:
People in the awareness stage are just beginning to realize that they have a pain point and may need a particular product or service. As a result, they often seek answers to their questions or look for information that will help them address their problem.
These buyers may perform broad internet searches and ask friends or family for advice and recommendations.
In this phase of the buyer’s journey, your customers have a firm grasp of their problem and are actively seeking out the solutions available. After conducting research, they might be narrowing down their options and you might be a part of that list.
Data shows that during this stage, 70% of prospects will return to Google around two to three times to assess their options. They’ll start to make a list of companies that offer the best solution.
At this buyer’s journey stage, the customer has decided on a solution and narrowed their list of vendors. Sometimes, they may consult high-level data and other resources to make a decision. These include:
Keep in mind that shoppers these days want to make an informed decision before finalizing a purchase. And that presents a golden opportunity for you to show them why they should choose you.
Current data tells us that 2.14 billion people shop from online retailers. And as more shoppers flock to digital shelves, it’s expected that 95% of online purchases will take place by 2040. If you want to win the hearts and minds of these e-shoppers, your content should compel them to make a purchase from your brand.
Since you won’t have direct interaction with the buyer during the first part of the buyer’s journey, how can you gently guide them down the path that leads to you? By understanding their pain points and the questions they’ll be asking at each stage, you can craft the right type of content.
To make it easier for you to guide your prospects through the buyer’s journey, let’s familiarize ourselves with the concept of a marketing funnel. This funnel captures the entire process of how you can convert prospects into loyal customers.
Most buyers start at the top of the funnel since they haven’t bought anything from a prospective retailer yet. Eventually, they’ll reach the bottom when they’re almost ready to make a purchase.
Using the marketing funnel can help you understand the buyer’s journey better. But keep in mind that it treats your customers as the “output” as they move from one stage to the next.
An alternative representation of the funnel is the flywheel model, a framework that places the buyer front and center. The flywheel offers a unified and less linear approach to help inform your marketing and sales campaigns.
The funnel is still a great starting point if you want to understand your audience and find out how to make your content resonate with them. But to make things work, you’ll need to know where your customers are in the purchase journey and what channels you’ll use to deliver your content.
The internet has made it easier for people to engage buyers with content, regardless of where those people are in their journey. Good content educates and inspires, and has the power to make your brand stand out from competitors. In fact, a survey conducted by HubSpot reveals that 60% of marketers consider content an important part of their overall strategy.
Coming up with timely content for your target buyer can pose a challenge, however. That said, it’s best to know your buyer persona and find the right marketing channels where you can reach them. By using the buyer’s funnel as your guide, you can lay out content for each phase of the buyer’s journey.
Here are the best types of content you can use:
Crafting the right content for each stage of the buyer’s journey can bring you one step closer to reaching your business goals. So don’t miss out on the opportunity to turn prospects into loyal customers.
If you need help reaching your target audience, get in touch with Growth Rocket. We offer content marketing services that’ll get your brand noticed.
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