Buyer Journey

A buyer journey is a way your customers make from identifying the problem to solving it by purchasing the right product. The cornerstone of the buyer journey is to provide people with all they need at each communication touchpoint.

A though-out buyer journey helps to build long-lasting relationships with your audience, create a positive brand image, and come up with more targeted content based on users’ specific needs.

Watch this HubSpot Academy video, which describes the buyer journey in detail.

Marketers pick out three phases of the buyer journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. Customers go through each of these stages.

Let’s take a simple situation as an example — buying a mattress — and see how people get through each stage of the buyer journey.

Awareness stage

Say, a couple decided to move in together. They’ve just bought an excellent antique bed, but it turned out that the old mattress didn’t fit. Now they are aware of their need to buy a new one.

The situation is simple, but if only a few people knew what to make up their bed with, they would google ”how to sleep right,” or “how to make the bed less hard.” At the awareness stage, share helpful educational content and make it easy to find on Google and other search engines. Promote a solution to the problem right in that content, and follow up with contextual advertising to move people to the next stage.

Consideration stage

Since our couple has never bought mattresses before, they want to find out which properties mattresses usually have, like size, materials, and softness. During the consideration stage, they decide which kind of mattress would meet their needs and fit the bed.

At this stage, provide how-to videos, instructions, justify why your solution is worth considering and link to well-structured product pages. It will transfer people to the next stage.

Decision stage

At the decision stage, a couple compares mattresses with specific properties in different shops based on the quality-to-price ratio. They are finally ready to buy.

Make sure that the checkout process is smooth at your online shop and assist in this process. Send the email to confirm the order, and email notifications to update the delivery status.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that the buyer journey is finished. If everything goes right, people will return to you with any issues your business can solve.

Developing the buyer journey for your business is all about stepping in your customers’ shoes, so focus on the next best practices to achieve that goal: 

• Develop your buyer persona. Find out what barriers may stand in buyers' way that your product or service may solve. Analyze the age, location, gender of your customers. It will give you options for personalization and segmentation.
• Analyze the behavior of your audience. Point out the common patterns in the behavior of users with the help of Google Analytics or statistics of email campaigns. Pay close attention to the stage where they leave you.
• Adjust your content. At some point, your content may lack expertise, social proof, positive feedback, or you failed to describe the features of your product clearly. Ask your support team what questions people ask most frequently and create an FAQ section on your website.
• Automate processes. Use email workflows to send follow-up emails to share content that will move a user to the next stage. It’s a good idea to send a series of welcome emails, depending on the first touchpoint with the user.
• Use a CRM system. With its help, you can track the path of each of your clients. The SendPulse CRM allows you to store personal information about the clients, the history of their interactions with your brand, handle orders, monitor the progress of each transaction, launch marketing campaigns on one platform. The service is free. This way, you can create an effective sales funnel and speed up the deal closing process.
• Motivate for further relationships. Don’t abandon the user after the purchase. Share valuable content via emails, SMS, chatbots, or any other channel convenient for them.

References

1. The article “What is the Buyer’s Journey” by Hubspot defines the term and explains every stage in detail.
2. The article “Understanding Buyer’s Journey” by Pardot helps to understand what the buyer journey is and how important it is.

Last Updated: 22.03.2023