+91-9540344454 
Buyer’s Journey: From Stranger to Buyer (to Fan)
What is a buyer's journey?
A buyer’s journey is a visual representation of a typical prospectus journey from starting, i.e. knowing about your company or products and then going through various stages to become a loyal customer.
What appears to be a simple journey from point A (Stanger ) to point B ( customer & Fan) is usually not ( until you have a plan)
When a customer is introduced to the company or product of the company, the journey gets started. As this journey progresses, at every step, you need to have a guide to direct the prospectus towards conversion.
This guide in the online world is called “Content.”
If you want to access any part of the blog directly, here is the index for Buyer’s Journey
- What is a Buyer’s journey
- What are the various stages of the customer
- a. Research
- b. Evaluation
- c. Short Listing
- Why is the buyer’s journey important
- Role of customer persona
- How to map the customer
- What are various milestones in the buyer’s journey
- How to place content around milestones in the customer’s journey
- How to convert the client by completing the customer’s journey
Why buyer's journey is essential?
Understanding the buyer’s journey in your business is a goldmine.
Like any goldmine, it is also difficult to explore.
The exercise should be done with experienced professionals to find what a successful transaction looks like from start to end in your business.
Buyers’ journey for each company & industry is different.
It may be alike but not the same. That means you have to understand it thoroughly for your own company.
Once you completely understand the buyer’s journey in your company, you can plan your digital marketing strategy around it. Then you can ensure & automate lead generation.
It’s a dream come true for any entrepreneur to see lead generation automatically, month after month, year after year.
Do you want to decode the buyer’s journey? Then keep reading.
a. Research
In the research stage, you will have determined what problem your product solves for the customer. Next, you will want to outline the benefits of your product and describe how customers use it to solve their problems.
b. Evaluation
In the evaluation stage, you want to look at how people choose between different products or services. Typically, customers seek a solution with the lowest cost or risk while also providing them with benefits that deliver high value.
c. Shortlisting
Lastly, in the short-listing stage – again unique to B2B – buyers are looking to decide between two or three vendors they have identified as being able to meet their needs. You need to address any remaining questions or concerns and offer compelling reasons why your business is best suited for the job.
A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Based on market research, including data and customer interactions with your company, you can craft a detailed profile of the type of customer most likely to buy your product or service.
Customer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better and make it easier for you to tailor content to different groups’ specific needs, behaviours, and concerns.
How to map the customer
The first step in establishing a buyer’s journey map is gathering the information. This information will help you understand your customers, their goals and how they interact with your business. The steps for this process are as follows:
- Understand the persona
A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and actual data about your existing customers. It includes demographic profiles, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals.
- Understand the goals
What is it that this persona wants to accomplish? Think beyond what they want from your product or service—are they trying to get through a challenging period in their life? Are they trying to make more friends or find more adventure?
- Understand the challenges
These are obstacles that stand in the way of them accomplishing their goals. What makes this journey difficult for them? What keeps them from buying from you over someone else?
- Understand the needs
Underlying each goal and challenge are specific needs that must be met to move along their path toward accomplishing their objectives—these can be physical and emotional needs.
- Understand the pain points
Pain points are particular elements of dissatisfaction that customers feel when interacting with a company or purchasing its products or services; these can be internal pain points (things you need improvement on) or external pain points (things happening outside of the organisation but affecting it).
- Understand the triggers/incentives for purchase decision making funnel image
- Incentive:
|An action taken by someone who sees an advertisement and moves closer toward making a purchase; triggers include both internal triggers (such as being inspired by something one sees), external triggers (such as seeing a sale sign while walking past a store) and automatic thoughts triggered by things seen along one’s path throughout each day; these often lead people to take action seeking further information regarding an ad they’ve seen somewhere, though not all of these actions lead
What are various milestones in the buyer's journey
Understanding your buyer’s journey is a great way to monitor your overall effectiveness in the business world.
Let’s take an example.
What is the best place for ‘Nike’ to advertise?
A sports event or in a stadium. Right, because their target audience is people interested in sports & fitness.
When you know your buyer’s persona well, you are more likely to attract them to your business at the right time in the right place.
Understanding the four stages and how they fit together will help you create better marketing strategies for each step to optimise the entire buyer’s experience.
There are five critical stages of a buyer’s journey:
Awareness/Need
Research
Comparison
Short List
Purchase
These are the critical milestone in the buyer’s journey from “Stanger to Buyer.“
Understand your customer well, build the content around it and put yourself in front of them.
The journey includes two perspectives: the buyer’s interaction with your company and your company’s interaction with the customer. While this article will focus more on what you as a marketer can do to ensure that you are providing buyers with an outstanding experience, it is essential to understand both sides of the journey.
How to place content around milestones in the customer journey
If you want to make a big splash with your content, you have to know who your customers are?
This means you will need to place content around critical milestones in your relationship with each customer segment.
Knowing this, the buyer’s intent is different at different stages, and accordingly, he would be interested in other types & forms of content.
Like kids of different ages have different interests in topics & content. Your buyers have different content expectations on other milestones.
As a marketer, it is your job to know those expectations and needs of content and build it per their stage/milestone.
Your early-stage or awareness stage prospectus should be fed short-form content, and as their journey progresses, you feed them medium-form and long-form content.
Selection of content type is essential, and usually, your digital marketing strategist suggests best that.
Different industries have different requirements for the type of content, and as a company, you should build those content and place them on milestones.
Mailer’s list
Search Engine Top Results
Paid ads
Social Media
Once your target audience starts taking the bait, they will crave more and follow you step by step, and you can be a guide for them till the sale.
You can convert them into the lead through any of your lead magnets and reach them from the website.
You can then assist them in converting by taking them to step by step, making them more confident and sure about your company, product, costs, and bingo..your first buyer completed the journey and became a paid customer.
Here are a few quotes that sum up the spirit of this article:
- “If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is mighty.” – Jeff Bezos
- “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
- “You can learn more from feedback than you can from success.” – Simon Sinek
Author : Harish K. Saini
Publishing Date : 02 May 2022