Turning first-time visitors into becoming buyers requires a nurturing marketing strategy that can help your conversion rates. Buyers today are well informed, and pushy sales tactics don’t work. Therefore, you need to ease them through their purchase path by helping them along the way.
As your buyers make their evaluations and considerations before converting, you need to understand every pain they experience along their buyer’s journey. You must also know where to carefully place influencing factors that make your product more attractive than your competitor’s.
Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
As your buyers move down the path to converting, they pass three main stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Initially, they become aware of a problem and start looking for solutions online. During the next stage, the consumer has outlined their problem and considers the various ways to solve it. Finally, the consumer assesses and decides on the product or service best suited to their needs and the best vendor.
According to marketing data, 67% of customers make up their minds before reaching out to your sales department or eCommerce site. What this means: you need to provide them with valuable information long before they contact you, ensuring you give them the nudge required to decide to purchase your product as they go through the buyer journey.
Traditional sales required giving the most complex sales pitch when the customer was ready to buy. Today, the best way to move them in the direction of your business is to provide them with guidance at every stage of the process.
Your efforts of guiding and nudging provide the correct type of nurturing, leading to trust building and the highest chance of conversions.
Mapping Out Your Buyer Journey
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Now that you know the stages of the buyer’s journey, you must know how to discover their stage and inform them. Again, simple marketing research can help you understand how to map it out.
Establish Buyer Personas
The more info you collect about your target audience, the faster you can create a straightforward user journey. In addition, the data you collect from your target audience can provide the best insight into your typical buyer personas. Typically, about 3 personas are ideal, but you can have up to five.
Identify Your Customer Obstacles
Your products define the obstacles faced by your potential customers. What are the most frequent questions they ask that need answering? If you aren’t sure, do some keyword research to find what they are searching for online to help you provide well-informed answers with plenty of informative content on your website, blogs, etc. Remember that you also want people to find you in a search as they begin the customer journey, making the progression of your relationship easier.
Provide Solutions to their Obstacles
Users who enter the consideration stage know what they need. Their search now entails searching for the right solution to their problem. Despite being more qualified, they are not ready to buy yet.
Here it would help if you considered delivering the right content but avoiding a clear sales pitch and incentives. Instead, use content that enables them to compare features, prices, and other valuable information that makes your brand stand out among your competitors. Use this opportunity to build trust and show you have the expertise to solve their problem. Providing relevant answers through case studies, content, landing pages, podcasts, webinars, and expert guides delivers lead generation at this stage.
Take note of your competitors’ topics to ensure you understand your consumer mindset and fill in any gaps and important highlights about your products or services. Provide the information on as many channels as possible to ensure prospective customers can easily find you.
Make Your Sales Pitch During the Decision Stage
You want your efforts to pay off at the decision stage by creating conversion rates. At this stage, the prospective customer is ready to decide which supplier to prefer. Therefore, your content plan at this stage must include competitor product comparisons, reviews, testimonials, demos, pricing plans, and incentives.
Final Tips
As you take your prospective consumer through the buyer journey, remember that they want answers to questions. However, your content must remain clear at every step of the journey. Constantly revisit your content to stay up-to-date with new developments in your industry and products.
Therefore, utilize clear and concise content and always keep it updated with some restructuring when needed. Furthermore, staying informed by using data helps you understand more about using the right keywords and knowing the buying persona of your targeted audiences.
Finally, please don’t neglect to create Calls to Action (CTA) that are creative and easy to understand on each page of their buyer journey.
As your customers make the buyer’s journey towards the decision stage. The buyer journey matters and you should use every opportunity to build strong relationships and gain their trust, helping your conversion rates.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the buyer journey?
The buyer journey is the process that potential customers go through when becoming aware of, considering, and purchasing a product or service.
How can I use the buyer journey to improve my business?
By understanding potential customers’ steps during the buyer journey, you can create better content and strategies to improve your chances of converting them into paying customers.
What are some things to keep in mind when creating content for the buyer journey?
When creating content for the buyer journey, some things to remember include understanding the customer’s needs and pain points, providing solutions to their problems, and making it easy for them to find your content. Additionally, you should always be prepared to answer any questions they may have and create calls to action that are easy to understand.
How do I map out the customer journey?
There’s no one answer to this question, as it will vary depending on your business, products, and target audience. However, doing some research on your target audience and understanding their buyer persona can help you understand how to map it out. Identifying customer obstacles and providing solutions can help create a straightforward customer journey. Finally, ensuring your content is up-to-date and relevant at each journey stage is vital to keep customers engaged.
