The Buyer’s Journey

BUYER PERSONAS

Let’s have a look at the process. Firstly, setting up buyer personas are important.  This will help you understand your buyers, what they are looking for, where they go on the internet to find information, what pains they are are experiencing etc.  Results 2Day have also written a article and created a buyer persona template to help you.   You can read the article here and download the buyer persona template here.   

You can start with a few buyer personas and extend them over time if you wish.  The best way to understand your buyers is to interview your customers and prospects. The payoff is significant! By marketing and selling in the way your buyers specify, you generate more qualified leads, improve conversion rates, and spend your budget more efficiently, resulting in stronger sales outcomes.

The Buyer’s Journey

We then need to define your product’s buying cycle. For the purposes of this blog, I will use buying journey and sales cycle interchangeably.  Here is an example:

Many marketing systems will suggest three buying stages in the journey: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Some products may work with three; however, at Results 2Day we believe that complex high-value sales have more than three stages, so we have defined five.

Once you understand your conversion rate and your buyer’s journey/cycle, you can identify your KPIs. We all love a good set of KPI’s don’t we? For example, how many social media views do you need to get the click through rate to your website? How many website visitors do you need to get qualified prospects? How many trials do you need to get your revenue numbers? You get the gist. KPIs are critical to keep you on track.

We now need to review and create your content to make sure it is answering your prospect’s needs and moving them through the buying journey.  The Buyers Journey is a term coined by Hugh MacFarlane of the MathMarketing Group.  It is a map of the decision making process that buyer goes through in order to make a decision.

Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Explore: the buyer is unaware of the need for the product. At this stage the marketer feeds education information

Interest: the buyer is aware of the need for the product but may not have a project/budget at this stage. The marketer feeds scenarios to indicate the importance of acquiring the product

Delve: the buyer is now in the market for the product. They have need and budget/project. They are evaluating options and coming up with a list of vendors. The role of the marketer is to feed differentiating/value information. Why is this product better than most and what is the value proposition of the product?

Test: the buyer is now creating a short-list and selecting a solution and testing the viability of the product. The role of the marketer is to provide a trial, comparison charts, and differentiation.

Buy: the buyer makes the decision and purchases

In addition,  a set of potential questions and objections need to be identified that your content needs to answer to help you move your buyer to the next stage.  It looks simple, however, covering all the bases, understanding the information that your buyers need and handling the potential objections so that you progress your buyer through to the next stage can be tricky. So spend some time here, survey lots of customers and talk to your experienced sales people.

Content Library

Once you have defined your content types, you’re ready to create your content library, which matches up content to buyer personas and buying cycle. This is one level of detail down into the specific content that you need.

Content Schedule

You now can setup your social media content schedule. Here is an example: