For a potential buyer to make a purchase, they must first undergo a journey. The buyers journey outlines the steps the buyer takes before, during and after a purchase. The buyer’s journey must also align with the marketing funnel so that interest turns to purchase, or leads turn into a conversion. Brands that understand the customer buying journey can use targeted content to engage consumers and refine their campaigns for better results.
Read our guide to learn the customer buying process and to explore the stages throughout the marketing funnel, including common mistakes and actionable strategies to align your marketing and sales teams for optimal success.
What Is the Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey is the overall process of identifying a need and solving it through product or service. While the concept may sound simple, modern buyers are more informed than ever and spend a lot of time conducting research to see what their options are. Competition also plays a part in this and with more choices around product or pricing, the journey can be more challenging.
Marketing plays a major role in this because it makes those needs apparent to the consumer through strategies that help a brand to bring awareness to their offerings and their key differentiators. This ultimately guides the buyer through the entire journey and supports overall brand growth.
The Three Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
Before a client decides to make a purchase or book a service, they go through several stages in their decision-making process that make up the buyer’s journey.
Awareness Stage
During the awareness stage marketing phase, a client is looking to find the solution to their need or their problem. They may start to research information related to their need. For example, if you are in need of a new pair of headphones you may be researching different types of headphones such as noise cancelling, ear buds vs over the head styles, etc.
Consideration Stage
After a consumer realizes that they have a need and sources out some information on that issue, they are now looking for brands that support the solution with high-value consideration stage content. In the example above, the client would now be looking at different brands of headphones to determine the best fit. They may be looking at case studies, comparison guides or other means of information to best understand the differences between presented options.
Decision Stage
This is where the consumer takes the information they have collected and makes the decision on which product or service and which brand to make a purchase or book a service with.
A strong decision stage strategy should include reviews, testimonials and incentives. Reviews play a major part in this phase and impact consumer confidence. Special discounts or offers are also important and can potentially sway a new consumer to try out a brand they haven’t based on savings.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in the Buyer’s Journey
Many businesses fail to move their prospects through the marketing funnel due to misalignment or ineffective tactics. Here are common mistakes:
Ignoring the awareness stage
Some companies may focus too much on their sales efforts and content to support their sales team, vs informational content that attracts buyers in the early stage of the funnel when they are doing their research.
Lack of collaboration between marketing and sales
Sales and marketing working in silos is not beneficial to the brand, or to the consumer. Marketing needs to target the consumer and sales needs to follow up with the consumer, and vice versa.
Failing to personalize the message
Hyper-personalization is the name of the game. People today are more likely to purchase when the ad is specific to their needs. Taking the time to understand your audience and how they relate to your product will help you to create personalized content or messaging that will truly resonate with your consumer.
Neglecting the leads
Lead nurturing is very important. Not everyone buys at the exact time that they are presented with a marketing effort. Knowing who and when to retarget and follow up with potential customers is an important part of the marketing funnel.
How to Align Marketing and Sales for Better Conversions
It’s no secret that in many organizations, there is a disconnect between sales and marketing. With each department having unique goals, often times there is a misalignment of information, poor communication and operation is happening in distinct silos. However it is important to create “buyer-first” sales experiences where both teams are working together, seeing as how the number one cause of revenue loss is the misalignment of those two teams.
Collaboration between sales and marketing puts the client as top priority. These two teams working together to create the right buyer personas will help with an accurate understanding of your brand’s audience and their decision-making journey. Marketing and sales combined creates awareness of goals as well as challenges from all sides of the spectrum and can support a very personalized message across the sales cycle from the first point of the interaction down to the purchase. According to Sprout Social, 56% of consumers will become repeat buyers if they enjoy personalized experiences.
In order to facilitate this alignment, it is important to understand the critical steps needed:
- – Develop shared goals and KPIs
- – Create open communication channels
- – Collaborate on content (both creation and distribution)
- – Leverage technology when applicable
- – Seek out feedback to improve
In addition, using your customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help define your buyer’s journey is a key component of your marketing strategy. Whereas some customers may prefer a face-to-face interaction, others may prefer non-verbal communication like email or text message. Your CRM is your tool to identify where prospects are in their journey and streamline communication as well as track interaction.
H2: Using Data and Analytics to Improve the Buyer’s Journey
In order to optimize your marketing funnel, you must track key data and use that data to refine your strategies.
Key metrics you should be monitoring:
- – Website traffic
- – Website engagement rates
- – Lead conversion rates
- – Email click through rates
- – Customer retention and lifetime value (LTV)
Leverage Consumer Feedback
As important as it is to seek out feedback, it is equally important to really listen to what your customers are saying, and to take what you learned and leverage it to improve marketing strategy. Feedback is valuable and directly equates to where the pain points are in the buyer’s journey, allowing you to make changes to improve the overall user experience.
A/B Testing & Optimization
Buyers may have a hard time trusting your content and your brand. If they don’t have trust or deem you authentic, they may not consume the content that you are putting out. It’s important to use A/B testing to create and launch variations of your content and then review the data to understand how the changes and differences impact your customer’s journey. From there you can optimize properly.
AI & Predictive Analysis
AI and predictive analysis are being used now more than ever to truly evaluate how the consumer digests the overall message and then alter that to fit the needs and personalize the message for better targeting. For organizations that leverage a CRM that integrates with other applications, the data and insights provided are invaluable to helping them understand their true buyers journey.
Creating a Seamless Experience for Your Customers
The better your business understands the buyer’s journey and how to optimize your marketing funnel to support leads and conversion, the better prepared you will be for growth. Creating awareness stage marketing allows you develop the right content and implement an effective decision stage strategy.
Is your marketing funnel converting leads? Contact the HardPart Media team today! Our marketing specialists will help you assess your current sales funnel for efficacy and work with you to refine your inbound marketing strategy for optimal results!