Knowing the buyer’s journey is a key element in inbound marketing. When the company is attentive to how prospects decide to buy a product or service, it can implement content marketing strategies adapted to its customer profile, and best support its buyer persona in the sales cycle. ‘purchase.
To fully understand the buyer’s journey and make it yours, we detail here the concept, the steps, and examples of content adapted to each level of the process.
Buyer’s journey: definition
Literally, the buyer’s journey, or more commonly the buyer’s journey, refers to a set of stages that a consumer goes through before proceeding to purchase a product or service. Any purchase involves prior reflection, and the content disseminated by companies will influence the prospect during his research.
If the content displayed is well-targeted for each level of the purchasing process, the buyer is more willing to finalize his acquisition and thus become a customer of your company.
To optimize the chances of consumers buying your product or services, integrate the three phases of the buyer’s journey into your Digital marketing strategy: discovering the need, considering solutions, and making decisions.
Define the buyer persona
The design of the buyer’s journey only works if you have already targeted precisely your or your buyers persona s. As a reminder, the buyer persona corresponds to the profile of the ideal customer of your company, in other words, your target. When you know the type of consumer who is likely to buy your products or services, you can more easily understand the stages they go through before becoming a customer, so you can tailor your speech to generate qualified traffic.
Keep in mind that you will need to build as many buyer’s journeys as you have identified as buyer personas.
Buyer’s journey: the 3 steps
Awareness
In the first step of the buyer’s journey, the prospect encounters problems or realizes that he could seize opportunities to improve his quality of life. He then carries out research on the web, in order to define precisely what he needs to achieve his goals.
During this step, your SEO strategy comes into play: you need to put yourself in the buyers’ shoes and know, in particular, what keywords they are using to describe their problems on search engines. The objective is to get the most Internet users to consult your publications related to their problems.
The consideration
Once their problems and needs have been clearly determined, the consumer will explore the solutions available, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each option.
He is not yet ready to buy: you must therefore provide him with clear information on the different solutions offered by your company, in order to help him decide on a particular method.
Decision making
When the prospect has opted for a strategy to solve his problem, he has one last step to take: decide from which company he will get the product or service in question.
To be chosen by the future buyer, and make him one of your customers, you must convince him that your company will be able to manage its problem as well as possible, with the ideal product or service to meet its needs. Your content must create a feeling of security for consumers, a feeling of being understood and taken care of.
Buyer’s journey: choosing the right content
As underlined in the three stages of the buyers’ journey, your marketing department must be based on an effective and personalized content creation strategy at each phase. Your goal is to generate leads: your publications must therefore meet the expectations of your buyers personas, both in form and in substance.
Experimenting with several approaches according to the three steps is the best way to determine the relevant content, to integrate it into your strategy. Note that the same type of publication may be reproduced in several phases of the buyer’s journey.
We have selected a few examples of content suitable for each level of the purchasing cycle.
- Step awareness: blog article, white paper, quantitative study.
Your posts adopt a neutral tone and contain information that guides the buyer in defining their problems and needs.
- Step consideration: case study, comparative guide of products/services, webinar.
Your content informs the prospect about the different possible solutions, with a focus on the most optimal solution.
- Step decision: comparative table of companies with the chosen solution, contact the sales department, product sheets to download, customer testimonials.
Your publications detail the reasons for buying your products or services and encourage the prospect to contact your company for more information, or even to try your solution before buying.
Buyer’s journey: an example of implementation
Take the case of Altaf, manager of an SME or ETI. Altaf has a billing problem. He uses a paper biller and wastes a lot of time and energy in preparing invoices for his clients, with all the risks of error that this entails. He, therefore, decides to look for a more practical and reassuring solution.
At first, Altaf types the keywords of his problem on search engines, such as “invoice management”. He reads the first results, blog articles written by companies specializing in management and accounting. This is the awareness phase.
Once he has defined his needs, Altaf learns about the different solutions offered: online invoice templates, word processing software, or invoicing software. His research leads him to forums, but also to sites of companies that offer their products. Altaf is in the consideration phase.
Finally, the entrepreneur arrives at the decision phase. He has decided that invoicing software is the best solution for his business. He compares different software, looks at reviews of competing companies, downloads accessible documentation, and makes demo versions of two companies.
At the end of these three steps, Altaf chooses a company and buys its invoicing software. He thus becomes a customer after having consulted several contents of this company throughout his buyer’s journey. These publications seemed more relevant to him because they matched his consumer profile, provided him with clear and objective information, and appeared first on search engines thanks to good SEO.