The buyer’s journey is also sometimes called the customer journey.
It’s a crucial element to marketing planning and should be a key foundation underpinning how to attract, engage, nurture and get people to take action.
Four Stages Of The Buyer’s Journey
There are four stages in your buyer’s journey, and this diagram below beautifully illustrates it. Take a look at the various stages down the left hand side.
Prioritise Your Marketing With The Buyer’s Journey
- You need to prioritise your marketing efforts to make the most of your time and money.
- You need to maximise the marketing at the stages of the journey that will have the biggest impact on your bottom line.
The Decision Stage (Bottom of the Funnel)
At the Decision Stage, your prospect is ready to say yes, but they must first seek reinforcement and validation of their decision before progressing.
This is one of the key stages that you have to get right. Even if the rest of your marketing strategy fails, having the right content on your website for the decision stage can help make all your selling easier.
Even if there aren’t lots of people coming into the top of the funnel, your website can still help your sales team during the decision stage. Crack this and it will help make the selling easier.
Once you’ve cracked this you can then get the other stages right.
The Consideration Stage (Middle of the Funnel)
During the consideration stage, the prospect will seek a demonstration of your expertise and compare you to other websites that provide similar services. They will come to your website and they will look for in-depth resources such as:
- Free webinars
- Case studies
- Reviews
- Book
- Testimonials
- Brochures, products, spec sheets, packages and plans.
- Videos
The Awareness Stage (Top of the Funnel)
Get Traffic & Brand Awareness
This is the top of the funnel and this is where people seek educational information to help grow their knowledge of solutions.
They have problems and pain, but they’re not sure how to solve it.
The goal is to get a larger amount of relevant traffic and to increase the awareness of your brand, using some of the following:
- Aspirational/inspirational photos
- Free tip sheets
- Free brochures
- Free buyer’s guide
- Emails
- Blog posts
