Over the last 9 weeks we have discussed the four stages of the buyer’s journey, Attract, Convert, Close and Delight.Today’s blog is the conclusion of our Buyer’s Journey blog series and we will discuss again the importance of the four stages and how you can use the buyer’s journey to take your business to the next level.
The poet Maya Angelou stated an old piece of wisdom this way: “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”
This piece of wisdom has possibly never been more true than it is in today’s modern marketing world: You can’t really know where your buyers are going until you know where your buyers have been.
In other words, understanding your buyers’ journey is the key to keeping those buyers returning and attracting new buyers.
In the case of inbound marketing, you create a buyer’s journey that begins with a customer, whom you aim to lead through the stages of Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight. This journey creation involves four steps:
Attracting CUSTOMERS
The first piece of creating the buyer’s journey is determining your ideal customer. Who can benefit the most from purchasing your product or service? What problem does this ideal customer have that you are uniquely positioned to solve? This is the basic premise of inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing. Your potential customers are out there looking for you right now; you just need to make sure those customers find you.
In outbound marketing, you treat everyone as a potential customer and spend a good deal of time and money trying to convince them that they need your product or service, ultimately with a pretty low success rate.
Inbound marketing recognizes that technology has changed buying habits. Consumers now use technology to go in search of products or services that will solve their most pressing problems. They use search engines, take recommendations from social media, watch online videos. They search on their laptops, their tablets, their phones. Your job is to make sure they find you, before they find your competitor.
You do this by positioning yourself where your ideal buyer is most likely to search. You optimize your website for search engines. You create highly educational content, such as regularly published blogs, that will rank well in those search engine results. You establish a strong presence on whatever social media your buyer is most likely to frequent. You produce and optimize videos that provide relevant information for users, not just promotional materials.
Converting into Leads
Once you’ve caught your prospective customers’ attention with quality content, the next step is drawing those visitors in as leads. At this point, they are taking a deliberate action to find out more about your product or service and learn how it can solve their pain point.
This could involve linking to a specific landing page, providing their email address, responding to a chat offer or even requesting a telephone call. You might give an incentive to get them to this point, such as a free piece of software, a coupon code, a demonstration or a limited-time offer.
Sales also becomes involved at this point as you seek to boost them to the next step.
Closing the Sale
While converting a lead feels like a good move, the real action you’re after is closing the sale. If you’re selling products online, that could involve customers adding the item to their shopping cart, at which point you encourage them to keep shopping but also stay active to ensure they don’t leave a full shopping cart online.
If you’re selling service or large products, sales will definitely get into the act here with outreach to the customer to ensure they understand your service or product, and quickly answer any questions or concerns to encourage that sale.
Delighting Your Customers
You’re not done when that sale occurs. The final and equally important step in inbound marketing is to delight your customers so thoroughly that they become your brand ambassadors.
Delighting customers involves giving them that extra customer service that makes you stand out above the competition. You want your customers to be so delighted that they not only become repeat customers (because you know repeat customers cost much less to obtain), but they also become promoters. They endorse you on social media. They recommend you to their friends, and they provide positive reviews you can use in future marketing.
Following the Journey
Once you have created this buyer’s journey, it’s equally important that you track and evaluate the journey experienced by your buyers and your non-buyers. You need to follow the metrics to understand where you succeeded and where you might have faltered.
The more knowledge you have about your visitors, your leads, your customers and your promoters, the more you can succeed in attracting more strangers into the journey and leading them to that ultimate goal.
But you don’t have to be the expert in the entire process. Our professionals can help you create the best buyer’s journey for your product or service and assist with evaluating and improving the process.
We hope you have enjoyed reading our Buyer’s Journey blog series and continue to read our blogs to learn how to maximize your Marketing ROI.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call at 661-702-1310!
