A customer’s buying journey is very important. The first stage is crucial. If you don’t attract the prospects at this stage, the following stages wouldn’t matter. If your prospects are considering different options and they don’t even know about your brand, there is no chance that they can buy from you.
A study revealed that about 90% of participants think it is crucial to impact buyers’ decisions in the initial stages of the sales funnel.
What is a customer journey?
A customer journey can be defined as an illustration of the full buyer journey. It begins with their initial engagement with your business and brand and comprises all interactions after that.
It assists you in analyzing consumer behavior during the purchasing procedure along with their requirements and expectations.
Key stages in a customer journey
Here are the key stages in a consumer journey.
1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Selection
4. Recall
5. Endorsement
Awareness
At the awareness stage, your target consumer knows about their problem or requirement. They are gathering information online and making efforts to find a solution. It may be called your preliminary impression of your target audience.
You should try to understand your customers and imagine yourself in their shoes. It would help you to engage them in ways that they start trusting you. You should also try to make a strong bond with them.
Use high-quality content to increase awareness
You should use blogs and videos starting with How-To, checklist-style blogs, E-books, whitepapers, and industry reports to provide information to your audience at this stage.
Capture your prospect’s attention at this moment because you know they are roaming around the internet to find their desired item/ information. Therefore, provide them with their required information in an easy-to-understand format.
Consideration
In the previous stage, users carry out preliminary research. They have shortlisted some products/services. Now, they would explore those options in more detail.
Now, your target consumer finds out about your product and its unique benefits. They start inspecting it to find out if it matches their needs.
As we all know, at this point, they would be comparing different products. This would include price comparisons, ratings, and reviews, exploring competitors, and scrutinizing even the tiniest details of your solution.
At this point, the users tend to enter their information through forms. Or they might reach out via a phone call. Or drop a comment on your social media handles.
Your job is to impress them with a prompt, friendly, and professional response. You should come across as the pain killer (solution) to their headache (pain point). Furthermore, the prospective customers want to know whether the price of your product/services falls under their range if they were to buy your offering.
Put up useful content at the consideration stage
You can push these kinds of content during this stage.
· Case studies
· product forums
· demonstration videos
· samples
· frequently asked questions
· data sheets
Selection/Decision
It’s the third phase and it’s time for your customer to decide. They have completed all their research on the potential options and suitable brands.
Now, based on that information, they would make a purchase. According to power digital marketing, 97% of buyers think consumer reviews impact their buying decision.
You can offer a giveaway, discount or deal and ask your customers politely to leave a nicely-worded review. Display those testimonials wherever you think your customer would hang out.
Buyers are still hesitant at this stage. They are remembering all the times when a certain product didn’t match their expectations. Your task: soothe them with the accounts of other happy customers who have solved their pain point with your offering.
A recommendation from people like you works like a magic pill. And does what you as a marketer can’t do.
Retention/Recall
Woah! your customer has finally hit that purchase button. So, does your interaction with them end here? No, you should try to retain them as a customer. The hard work you put in winning a consumer should be wasted.
Now, it’s easier and cheaper to make that customer loyal. A person who has never had any experience with your brand is hard to compel to trust you. But, an existing buyer has already trusted your brand.
Now, keep in touch with them. Ask for their feedback and appreciate their buying decision with a thank you email. You can use polls, review requests, follow-up calls, manuals on using the product, etc.
Advocacy/Endorsement
It’s very hard to make it to this stage. Now, the customer has turned into an advocate of your product/service.
Have you ever heard about referral marketing? It’s the marketing your satisfied customers do for you for free. This is a word-of-mouth promotion.
They might be boasting about your product on their social media handles. They may tell other people how amazing your offering works in solving a specific problem. And how has their experience with your brand been great?
As humans, we like to inform other people if something has benefitted us in some way. Take advantage of it by requesting your buyers to spread the word about you.
This is a kind of advertising that very rarely miss its target. Many successful brands have reached the pinnacle through word-of-mouth promotion.
Understanding the customers’ purchasing journey through tools
Some tools can help you to understand how your consumers buy.
Oribi
Oribi offers actionable insights by converting various analytics information points into concrete results. It enables you to view each customer’s journey through your website to get an idea of the factors that prompt them to participate.
It allows you to find and pin events in the list. And these pinned events signify the major customer behaviors and other activities you may want to monitor. The best part is you can schedule events without ever performing technical coding.
Moreover, it lets you make event groups so that you can categorize them in a better way. And make highly beneficial reports. A company that deals with digital marketing Dubai can help you use these tools better.
Heatmap tools
Heatmap tools are great to keep an eye on your visitors’ engagement with your web page aspects and segments.
You may see a heat map in the form of a click map, a move map, or a scroll map. These maps document various kinds of page engagements like scrolling, mouse navigation, and clicks.
They offer you the patterns in which visitors move on your web page. Therefore, run some tests on the main landing pages.
TouchPoint Dashboard
You can make consumer journey maps over several touchpoints and analyze their experience at all steps. Every touchpoint contains pictures, video or audio files, information qualities, and instant comments from buyers.
Conclusion
You should identify whether you are fully geared up to set up yourself as the best candidate when your target customers would be making comparisons. Your solution should be self-explanatory and explicit. Your business should be found online easily.
The benefits of your offering should be clear. And the price of your product/service should be market competitive. Your product should better solve the customers’ pain points than other similar options. Your unique value proposition should be easily discoverable and understandable.
