No business survives on the idea that buyers will just arrive and toss money in their direction. In the current competitive marketplace, buyers are constantly researching and exploring options through the buyer’s journey to find the best solutions to their problems, unwilling to settle for less. So, how can you market and reach out to your customers? It’s easy enough by utilizing the three buyer’s journey stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Let’s take a closer look at each of the buyer’s journey stages and see how to best strategize your marketing content at each step.
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Buyer’s Journey: Overview
Marketers understand the buyer’s journey as the prospective customer’s path to discovering, considering, and potentially deciding to purchase a product or service. However, the buyer’s journey isn’t a straight path from A to B; rather, by mapping out this process, organizations can gain in-depth understanding of their customers’ problems and interests to better strategize their product as the solution they need.
Every choice, decision, interaction, action, and inaction taken marks key insights throughout the buyer’s journey that you can use to adjust and promote the most valuable content to buyers throughout each of the buyer’s journey stages. Here’s a look at each stage of the buyer’s journey:
The 3 Buyer’s Journey Stages
Stage 1: Awareness
Awareness is the first of the buyer’s journey stages, where buyers notice and acknowledge they have a problem that needs a solution. Whatever the problem may be, buyers have one goal: to identify and understand what exactly their problem is, and if it is worth pursuing at the moment. Since this stage is the start of their buyer’s journey, the customer is researching information and reliable resources to better understand their problem, unaware yet of any potential options to solve it.
No decisions can be made at this time with so little information; therefore, businesses must only market informational content and resources to customers. This inbound marketing strategy not only gives less pressure to buyers, but also ensures a more positive start when making customers aware of your brand through informational content such as blogs, videos, or infographics.
The Awareness Stage is where buyers research their problem and attempt to gather more information.
Stage 2: Consideration
Once buyers are aware of their problem—as well as your brand—they transition into the Consideration stage of the buyer’s journey to research and weigh all possible options for how to solve said issue.
For clarity, consideration is all about simply “considering” options; not choosing the best ones. Buyers at the consideration stage are laying all their cards on the table and seeing all the available services that could resolve their problem.
Therefore, it’s important during consideration to market your company as an industry expert and potential solution through your content. In short, that your company knows how to solve this problem in the best way possible! Though this doesn’t convince customers to buy just yet, promoting your services through blogs, webinars, eBooks, and downloadable guides will give your brand authority that will inspire buyers to trust your expertise.
Stage 3: Decision
The last of the buyer’s journey stages is the Decision: where buyers finally select the company, product, or service they need to solve their problem. Rather than ensuring buyers purchase from your company, buyers at this stage gather their list of companies from the consideration stage to narrow down which vendor to use for their purposes.
With individuals at the decision stage ready to buy, it falls to your sales representatives to interact with potential buyers and inform them why your brand is the best solution. Content reflecting great case study results, whitepapers, and reports on your past projects can help entice buyers towards choosing your services!
Build Better Relationships at Each Stage
By gathering an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s journey stages, you can determine your audience’s priorities and adjust your content to entice more conversions towards a final purchase. At Sharp Wilkinson, with each new relationship made, we seek to improve our marketing strategies and delight our clients with better solutions. Interested in learning more about our inbound strategy? Contact us today!
