Analyzing the Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
The Buyer’s journey is the series of stages that prospects and customers go through when they are considering, using or reusing a particular product or service. Every organization tries to find out who their ideal customers are and come up with strategies to attract the right type of customers to their lifecycle. That means the buyer’s journey might be different from one organization to the other.
Basically when you are targeting a particular prospect to drag into your buyer’s lifecycle. You have to know who your customers are. You must know whether they have used your product before as well as what their interest is as far as your project is concerned. You also need to identify obstacles that will not allow them to purchase your products or services. Your job is to help them to remove some if not all hindrances so that you can be able to convert those leads to customers.
When you understand the stage that your customers are on the journey, you will know which type of questions to ask them. It will also allow you to share appropriate media with them in order to convert them. For individual customers on the different stage of the journey, the type of media that resonates in their minds are different. Also, you have to know what motivates their decision and work on ways that to include all those decision influencers in your products and services.
There is a need for you to carry out adequate research when you are setting up your customers’ buyer’s journey. You have to make sure that you consider your buyer’s uniqueness in the whole mechanism. It must be set up with inbound marketing in mind. This will ensure that whatever you set up answers the curiosity of your customers.
Now the five stages…
Generally, the Buyer’s journey can be divided into five stages. There are some other models that are not up to five but those common form of the Buyer’s journey is what I want to talk about in this article. You have to know that most of the Buyer’s journey has to focus on what happens when customers cannot get in touch with you. There is a need for you to focus on what customers are looking for in your products and services as well as the way they interact with your products and services.
#1 Awareness stage
This is the stage that the Prospect is just getting to know about the organisation for the first time. He might have come across a content that attracts the audience to your website. It can also be seen as the stage that the prospective customer realized that he has a problem that needed to be solved.
To grab the attention of prospective customers at the awareness stage, you need to communicate a benefit. You must be able to tell them about your knowledge of their problem as well as how your products or services can solve their problem.
#2 Interest Stage
The Interest Stage is when the Prospect develops an interest in your products or services. At this stage, he might be considering products from you and your competitors. He might not have decided on which of the products or services that you need to adopt.
To really engage customers or prospects at this stage of your Buyer’s journey, you need to develop the emotional interest of the buyer in your products or services. You have to convince him on why choosing your products ahead of that of competitors is the best option.
#3 Consideration Stage
The Consideration Stage of the Buyer’s Journey is the stage at which the Prospect in question has actually dropped some of the earlier options that he has and you now one of the likely options for him. We can say that at this stage, the Prospect who is becoming more of an Opportunity is actually ready to purchase the product or service. It now depends on how you manage the relationship.
You have to work at this stage to bring your company to the forefront of the negotiation by educating the prospect on the reason why he should choose your product or service.
#4 Conversion Stage
This is when you actually sell the product or service to the customer. The most pathetic thing here is that many organisations are only interested in selling the products, they are not concerned about building a relationship with customers. One of the defined characteristics of such organisations is that they treat customers as if they are doing them a favour. Some of them do not know the actual number of customers that they have.
#5 Retention Stage
This is the stage at which your customers have started coming back for repeat purchase. At this stage, they have used your product and they are willing to recommend your products or services to others. You must make sure that you really leverage on email marketing and social media in order to keep your customers interest in your products and services.
Due to the facts that these ardent users have become part of your community, you are willing
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