An Overview of the Buyer’s Journey in Today’s Digital Landscape
Even if you’re not a technophile or a digital marketing guru, you can quite easily understand and acknowledge the impact of the internet on areas such as marketing. Whether it’s being able to instantaneously lookup reviews for an upcoming movie, booking tickets to your dream vacation getaway or buying flowers for that special someone with same-day delivery, it’s undeniable how much has changed (for the better) for consumers thanks to the internet. For marketers, it is imperative that their understanding of the traditional buyer’s journey evolves from one that is quite linear to one that is more relevant and reflective of today’s digital landscape. We’ll take a brief but deep dive into the digital marketing funnel so that you can better understand your customers at each step of their buyer’s journey – this is the key to choosing the right marketing tactic to target the right people at the right time. As a note, we’re going to be looking at a B2C funnel for clarity’s sake; much of the following information can actually be applied to a B2B buyer’s journey, however, keep in mind that B2B customers are usually part of a larger buying group (i.e. another business) and are directly influenced and assisted by a sales professional.
What’s a Marketing Funnel?
The old marketing funnel is a model that we use to visualize and describe a buyer’s journey – as marketers and business owners, it helps us understand our target market’s mindset at a stage either prior to or after their purchase decision. The funnel itself consists of (from the very top) an awareness, interest, desire and action stage. The awareness stage presents itself with the greatest market potential – typically, consumers become aware of a need or a want that can be remedied by a certain product, service or idea. Buyers can either become aware of a product or brand from necessity or by being exposed to something that piques their interest and then transforms itself into a want. For instance, if your dishwasher suddenly malfunctions and it’s out of warranty, you’re probably going to find a service to remedy this problem i.e. by seeking out an appliance repair technician. On the other hand, if you’re online and you see an ad encouraging you to book your favorite holiday getaway to Cancun, this ad may evoke a desire within you to start looking up and planning a potential vacation for yourself in the not too distant future. From this “aha” moment, we assume most buyers proceed onto the interest stage, where they’ll identify products or services that meet their needs and then proceed to compare these competing options in the desired stage. Finally, once a buyer has made up their mind, they’ll make their purchase decision accordingly. You see, the problem with this model is that it is a little outdated in terms of a digital marketing context. It doesn’t really take into account a change in consumer behavior, which is now influenced at each stage of a buyer’s journey through digital marketing tactics such as social media posts and ads, PPC ads, SEO and email marketing.
Out with the Old, In with the New
To help you better understand and map your buyer’s journey, the digital marketing funnel should instead be envisioned as nonlinear. In fact, we should imagine a funnel that contains loops at certain stages, where some tactics are better than others when it comes to transforming your prospects into customers. When I say that it is a nonlinear journey, what I mean is that there can be multiple instances where buyers can either transition from one stage to another and then back to the previous stage. For instance, if a buyer discovers a new type of vacuum cleaner in the awareness stage, they may transition to the consideration stage. However, if they’re exposed to another display ad or social media ad for a competing product that appeals to them, they may revert back to the awareness stage. Similarly, this can occur for the post-purchase stage, where buyers can develop loyalty for a product/service or brand and then transition back to the purchase stage as a repeat customer. This looping buyer’s journey coincides with a popular model known as the See-Think-Do-Care model, which was created by Avinash Kaushik. Each stage of the following model is accompanied by a digital marketing strategy that will help move your buyers along their journey.
The “See” stage, which parallels the awareness stage, contains the largest addressable audience that has not yet expressed any commercial intent. At this stage, the most effective strategy would be to generate awareness about your company, its brands or products. Generally, social media ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest, along with PPC display ads on site’s partnering with search engines such as Google or Bing are your best bet to generate this much-needed buzz. The key thing to remember is that these channels can be quite cost-effective if you manage and optimize your campaigns and pay careful attention to keeping consistency across all of your advertising.
Hopefully, with this strategy in action, you’ve pushed your buyer onto the “Think” stage. At this stage, you have the largest addressable qualified audience, with one caveat – they have weak commercial intent. Ideally, you should use a strategy that utilizes SEO,Video marketing, PPC Search Ads and E-mail marketing to help customers learn more about your products or services so that they can potentially consider it as a part of their evoked set. Your goal should be to inform your buyer and then direct them to a landing page where they can discover more about the products or services while they are gently pushed to consider it as one of their purchasing options. This stage can loop back to the “See” stage as consumers discover your products but also decide to research other options for a better value. With this in mind, you need to ensure that you’ve made the best first impression that you can during the initial “See” or awareness stage using its accompanying strategy and that you continue to demonstrate your authority and expertise to encourage your audience to visit your website during their “Think” or consideration stage.
The “Do” or purchase stage can be characterized as the one that has the largest addressable qualified audience with strong commercial intent. At this stage, your buyer is trying to make up their mind on which product or service to purchase, and as such, you want to help influence this decision using strategies such as SEO, PPC Search ads, and E-mail marketing. At this stage, your content marketing strategy should be one that assumes that your buyer already knows what they’re looking for. To effectively target prospects at this stage, create personalized content, including testimonials, case studies, free trials, white papers, product demos, Q&A’s, and presentations for your target audience. Keep in mind your buyer’s persona at this stage and be sure to deliver content that is relevant to their intent. Also, at this stage, PPC search ads should contain keywords such as “Buy”, “Contact”, “Call”, “Request”, “How much”, “Cost of”, and other brands, competitors and location-specific terms.
Hopefully, you’ve moved your buyer from the “Do” or purchase stage to the final stage of their buyer’s journey. Your strategy at the “Care” stage should be to foster loyalty to keep your customers coming back to your products or services. To do this effectively, get feedback from your customers in the form of reviews, engage them on social media, offer them a free promotion during their birthday, provide some helpful advice for their purchase, and offer them a personalized discount. PPC, E-mail Marketing, and Facebook advertising are excellent tools to help keep your existing customers at this stage of their buyer journey. You want to offer a personalized experience, which you can luckily provide through tactics such as e-mail newsletters, Facebook Ads and PPC Display Ads. With all of this information, you’re now ready to optimize your strategies so that they target your potential buyers with the right information at the right time – you’ll never have to waste your resources on things that don’t work by focusing your budget and energy on the most effective tools when your future customers are “seeing”, “thinking”, “doing” and “caring”.
