The Internet has opened up a world of opportunities for businesses to increase their reach when finding buyers from around the world. Coaxing these buyers to work exclusively with your company becomes an interesting challenge for your marketing department as buyers are at different levels of interaction with your company. Some are at the stage of being converted, while others need that helpful push in the right direction. Understanding the important aspects of the buyer’s journey allows you to figure out what type of content is needed for the particular sales stage the buyer is in, and how to guide them toward becoming a successful sale.
What is a Buyer’s Journey?
The term, “buyer’s journey,” encompasses the path that a buyer — whether a consumer or a client — will go through to make a purchasing decision. Typically, the journey will involve some basic steps:
- identifying an issue or problem that needs to be resolved
- gathering more information about the problem
- finding what solutions would work best to remediate the specific problem
- making a purchasing decision based on the gathered information and offered solutions
There may be more or less steps in the buyer’s journey that a person or company will have to go through based on the problems they experience, what they need to do to fix their problem, and the research they perform. The buyer’s journey can also be different based on the particular industry. Yet every buyer will go through a specific set of steps in their journey to reach a sale’s conclusion, as marketers who understand the intricacies of their prospect’s journey can create better targeted content to increase the chances that the buyer will work with their specific business.
Using the Buyer’s Journey to Better Enhance Your Marketing Tactics
As a business owner, you are focused on helping customers decide on buying products and services through your company. When developing your marketing strategies, you can use the specifics of the buyer’s journey to help place customers on the right path in choosing you as the go-to business that can help them with their unique dilemma. This process is referred to as mapping your content toward the buyer’s journey so your objectives match the buyer’s needs.
Before you start making your content to suit the buyer, you first have to determine who your specific buyer is. Developing a buyer’s persona helps you to not only understand the demographic of your optimal buyers, it also helps you determine the specific journey your buyers go through to convert into a sale and where you may be losing them in your sales funnel.
Once you know your buyers and how they journey through your sales funnel, you can tailor your marketing to provide the right content at the best time. Some tactics you can employ with your content include:
Developing the buyer’s interest in your business by further defining a problem they may be experiencing.
Sometimes the buyer may not understand the specific problem that your company can solve for them. By providing content that clarifies some of the problems they may be facing, you place yourself in the best position to show you are an expert in bringing them the right solutions.
Give the right information at the right time.
With the amount of content available online, it can be hard to garner the buyer’s interest when they develop a problem. This information overload can be confusing for the buyer and steer them away from your company. Providing quality, instead of quantity, content from industry experts is having more sway over buyer’s decisions and helps to build more trust.
Offer the best solutions that are tailored for their problems.
Buyers can sometimes get stuck in a rut in using the same solutions for a problem when there are better and more cost-effective options available. Offering a wide range of tailored solutions that are featured in your content allows buyers to select the right one for their specific needs.
Highlight the value you offer to the buyer.
You can take opportunity to highlight the value your business will bring to the customer at different points of their buyer’s journey. By creating continual interest, it keeps the buyer aware of your company and the benefits of doing business with you.
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