What is Buyer’s Journey and why it’s so important?
Buyer’s journey is one of the most important part of a marketing strategy.
You need to find out how your buyers are moving from Awareness stage to the final purchase stage.
As a marketer, you must understand, how can you apply this knowledge while creating new campaigns with respect to the customer lifecycle?
It’s not easy to figure out who your buyers are, and what stages they go through before purchasing from you.
For that, you need to understand what exactly is your target audience, and what are their pain points?
Show your prospects relevant content they can relate to, targeted for each stage of your buyer’s journey.
In order to personalize the sales process, it’s very important to understand the buyer’s journey in detail.
The 3 stages of buyer’s journey are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
Create Buyer’s Persona:
Firstly, you need to create a Buyer’s Persona of your ideal customer based on your research or lookalike audience based on the real data of your current customers.
Once, you have created Your Buyer’s Persona, create a Storyline or a message you want to convey for each stage of your Buyer’s Journey.
After you have created the storyline, implement the content strategy to create content ideas for your content calendar targeted for each stage of your buyer’s journey.
The stages are explained in detail below.
Now Let’s talk about Buyer’s Journey in detail.
What is Buyer’s Journey:
The buyer’s journey is when the buyers know about your product to the point when he made his first purchase.
On the other hand, retention of that same customers so that they will keep buying your products or services is known as the customer lifecycle.
It all depends on whom you will market your products.
Content Strategy:
It’s hard to cover everything about content strategy in this post since it is a lengthy topic and lot of discussion can be done on it. However, I will do cover the important things you need to know.
You need to create content according to the Marketing goals you want to achieve for your business.
These Goals are:
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Conversion
- Nurturing
- Customer Conversion
- Customer Service
- Retention
- Upsell
Create content based on your business niche whether its B2B or B2C.
Let’s talk about the Difference between B2B and B2C Content:
For B2B:
- Solution:
Create content to educate your prospects to prove them you have all the solutions to their pain points.
- Testimonials:
You need Testimonials from your current customers to display the worth of your business to your prospects.
- Subject Matter Expertise:
Become an authority in your field of service by developing subject matter expertise.
B2C:
- Customer Engagement
- Community Building
Here are some of the important stands of the buyer’s journey stages and how you can convert them to customer buying cycle.
1. Awareness
The The buyer’s journey mapping begins with awareness.
It is the stage at which your customer will know about your business’s products or services for the first time.
Here, you have to aware them what your business is about with a storyline that clearly outline the problems you are solving & creating content on a regular basis to grab as much attention as you can.
You have to work on the buyer’s journey mapping and find out where most of your customers are available and share your marketing content to all those platforms.
Some of the most common marketing platforms are:
- Blogs
- Social media
- Research studies
- Press release
- White Paper
- eBooks and e-guides
- Educational content
Make sure that you share highly engaging content which is both visually appealing and conveys its message.
The more time your customers will spend on your content or marketing posts the better will be chances that they will buy the products you are offering.
2. Consideration
At this stage of the customer buying cycle, the buyer knows that you have the solution for all the issues that he is dealing with but yet he is not ready to make a commitment.
At this stage, you have to gain the trust of your prospects by showing them the content that proves your organization to be the best.
You can show them:
- Comparison Articles
- Case Studies
- Research Articles
- Videos and Podcasts.
Remember that if your customers will read the entire article or listen to the whole podcast the chance is that decision will be in your favour.
3. Decision & Purchase
At this stage, they have researched, and already aware of your product and services.
Now, they will decide which product to buy from your store.
Your customers will compare your products with those provided by your competitors.
They will look for the best deals to assure they are getting a great value. At this point, show them the positive reviews of your clients.
After complete research, the prospect will finally purchase from you.
Congratulations! You have just got a sale.
Now, as you have got the sale, you need to retain that customer so that you will get repeat business.
Now as you have got the sale, you need to retain that customer so that you will get a repeat business.
Retention
The most important step of a buyer’s journey is the retention of the customers.
It is the time that you give your customers another reason to come back to you.
Whenever you introduce the latest item or there is a discount offer available at your store you should share the information with your client.
You need to offer:
- Customer Support
- Chat services
- Email Follow-ups
Loyalty
Even after retention, your job is not done yet. You have to gain the loyalty of your customers because that is the only way they will turn into your long-term customers. You have to keep your customers engaged with the content like:
- Product-focused articles
- User guide
- Customer newsletters
- Product updates
- News and event details
- Promotion and loyalty programs
- Surveys
You can send all your long-term customers special gifts because everyone loves free items. It is one of the most powerful marketing resources you can have.
Wrapping it up:
You have to be careful with the B2B decision-making process.
Remember that the entire lifecycle of the customer depends on the lifecycle marketing and management.
There are different types of marketing facilities available when you are online.
Make sure that you understand your customers, and select the strategy that is easier for you to implement.
Give attention to what your competitors are doing. It is important that you never copy their style. You have to be as unique as possible because that is the only way you will retain most of the customers.
Do not forget to continuously analyze your marketing strategies. It will give you the perfect idea of how your strategies are performing, and where do you need improvement.
Analyze data and upgrade your marketing strategies to assure that in all situations, you will get the best possible results.
