What is the buyer’s journey?
The buyer’s journey describes the process your buyers go through as they become aware of a problem, evaluate potential solutions to their problem, and ultimately decide on the specific solution that’s right for them. In marketing terms, reduce this down to three stages: awareness, consideration and decision (some call this view an early-middle-late sales funnel). Be aware that you may have a much more elaborate buyer’s journey but I will use the reduced form to describe the process of mapping. With this in mind, the customer journey map is a tool to visualize the experience of interacting with your brand from the customer’s point of view. This map is critical because it forces you to look at how your customers actually experience your brand versus how you think they do. By better understanding your customers, you can better deliver on their expectations. So lets begin by defining each reduced stage as follows:
- Awareness
- In the awareness stage, a person is experiencing symptoms of a problem, but they don’t fully know what their problem is. Their goal at this stage is to more clearly understand and define the problem they’re experiencing.
- Examples:
- I have a sore throat. Am I getting sick?
- I’m not getting enough traffic to my website. Why?
- Our production machinery is getting old. Is it time to replace it?
- To create content that helps buyers when they are first beginning to experience a problem, focus on addressing pain points, challenges and goals at a relatively high level. Useful but low-pressure content like guides, quizzes, and blogs educate buyers and help them figure out what their next step should be.
- Consideration
- In the consideration stage, the person understands what the problem is and begins researching possible solutions.
- Examples:
- I have all the symptoms of strep throat. Should I see a doctor, or should I try a home remedy?
- My website is not properly optimized for search engines. Would it help to start a blog?
- We should begin planning now to replace our machinery next year. What features of a new model will be important for us?
- Businesses often struggle with creating consideration stage content because there’s this urge to promote your business as the best solution. Fight it! Instead, create in-depth content that acknowledges different approaches that might work for the buyer. However, you can still subtly position your solution as the best option.
- From your perspective, consideration-stage content is a terrific way to identify potential good-fit leads – the buyers who are right for your business and can benefit from product or service you sell.
- Decision
- In the decision stage, the buying prospect has settled on a specific approach and is putting together a short list of vendors to possibly buy from. Their goal here is to narrow down that list and ultimately make a final purchase decision.
- Examples:
- I think I should go to urgent care. Here are the urgent care centers near me that also accept my insurance.
- I would like to blog, but I need help. Here is a list of three agencies that might be a good fit for me.
- We need better production automation capabilities. Here are the models on the market today that offer what we need.
- With decision-stage content, you can finally openly promote your product or service. Show how you can solve your buyer’s problems and explain why your option is the best approach. Be honest yet humble, and wherever possible back up any claims with data. For example, rather than unprovable statements like “We are the best in the market,” instead try to be more specific: “We have a 4.9 out of 5 rating on this industry site” or “We helped Company XYZ grow by 50% last year.” Data sheets and case studies are powerful content for these stages.
In an ideal world, every person would move through the buyer’s journey exactly the way I described above – in a straight line from awareness to consideration to decision. As they move through that journey, they’d have all the information they needed to make a purchasing decision once they arrive at the decision stage. Unfortunately, real life is rarely so neat and tidy. People today don’t always move through this journey in a linear fashion. They’ll jump around, skip stages, and go backwards rather than forward sometimes. They might even get all the way to the decision stage only to realize they misidentified their problem, which means they have to start the whole process all over again. Your job as a marketer is to plan for as many of these situations as possible. The best way to do this is to create content that fits every stage of the buyer’s journey. This will ensure that no matter where someone is in their journey when they find your brand, you’ll be able to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed buying decision.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
You might be telling yourself, “This doesn’t seem necessary for me or my company. We understand the needs and pain points of our customers, thank you very much.” This may be true at surface-level. However, breaking down the customer journey phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touch points accordingly are essential steps towards maximizing customer success. After all, everything you do should be about solving customer problems and helping them achieve their outcomes by using your product or service. Here are some benefits of customer journey mapping:
- By creating a customer journey map, you will gain an invaluable and essential view of your potential and existing customers. This more complete picture positions you to realize a better return on your marketing investments, and equips everyone in your company to better engage with prospects and customers. You can accordingly create the kind of content that will attract them to your company and keep them there.
- If you don’t properly understand the customer journey, you probably don’t completely know the demographics and psychographics of your customers. This is dangerous; it’s a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad an audience than the one that actually is interested in your products, services, and content. Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers and mapping out their journey will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone in your marketing to that specific audience.
- A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer’s experience. It shows you moments where people will experience delight as well as situations where they might be faced with friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy accordingly, and intervene at ideal times that maximize your brand’s value to the buyer. Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable to your customer base. For example, if it’s around the holidays and you’re anticipating a customer service surge, you can send a message to your customers letting them know about your team’s adjusted holiday hours. You can also let them know about additional support options if your team is unavailable and what to do if there’s an urgent problem that needs immediate attention. This way, customers won’t feel surprised if they’re waiting on hold a little longer than usual or call you outside your new working hours. They’ll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.
- When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it’s easier to pick out areas where you should improve. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points which leads to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors. After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience. Customer journey mapping can point out individuals who are on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors and actions that these customers have, you can start to spot them before they leave your business. While you might not save them all, it’s worth the try since attaining a new customer is 5-25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
- As your company grows, it can be hard to coordinate all the departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams. They can often have sales and marketing goals that aren’t based on what real customers want. A clear customer journey map can be shared with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey from initial attraction to post-purchase support.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map
Now that you have a better understanding of what the buyer’s journey is, here are seven steps for mapping the buyer’s journey of your customers.
- Define your buyer personas. I think I say this every time I write a blog, but if you haven’t already created your buyer personas, stop what you’re doing and create them now. If you don’t know who your buyers are – particularly, if you don’t know the questions they have, the challenges they face, and the goals they’re trying to accomplish – you’ll have a hard time mapping the buyer’s journey and creating content that aligns to that journey. For some great guidance on getting started with buyer personas, browse my thought posts. Okay, so let’s assume you have your buyer personas fully identified and documented. Now you’re ready to start mapping the buyer’s journey.
- What symptoms are your personas experiencing? To map the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, first, identify the obstacles and problems that prevent your buyer from accomplishing their goals. Now think about how your buyer first begins to realize this obstacle or problem even exists. What challenges begin to emerge? What concerns do they begin to have? What puts this on their radar? There will be a lot to think about here, so write it all down.
- What are all the possible solutions to these problems? To map the consideration stage, think about the different approaches your buyer might consider. After all, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Is there a do-it-yourself approach? Are there off-the-shelf solutions, or does the problem require something more specialized or customized? As the buyer explores these different solutions, what questions will the buyer have? What concerns will likely be top of mind? What will this buyer be looking for?
- What other companies offer your type of solution? I’ll admit that thinking about your competitors is no fun, but it needs to be done. To map the decision stage of the journey, list the other companies that offer a type of solution comparable to yours. What questions will the buyer have when they vet each of these competitors? How will they evaluate these options? Which features will be most important to their decision?
- Identify points of friction along the buyer’s journey. Whew – you’ve mapped out the awareness, consideration and decision stage of the buyer’s journey. Congratulations! Now, look over the list of questions you created for each stage of the buyer’s journey. What might prevent the buyer from moving smoothly from one stage to the next? What challenges do they encounter during their journey? What might cause them to move backward? What might prevent them from making a purchasing decision? And what can you do to ensure this doesn’t happen? This is going to require you to really think about what your buyers are actually doing rather than what you hope they’re doing. But when you can identify friction points that prevent a buyer from becoming a customer, you’ll be able to create content that truly helps and sells.
- How does your existing content fit into this buyer’s journey? You might already have some content on your website, like blogs, ebooks, guides, consultations and more. Audit your existing content and think about where each piece falls in a buyer’s journey. Which content addresses pain points and challenges at a high level? Which content is focused on specific solutions? Which content proactively sells your business as the right partner? Don’t rush through this step. Once you have a good handle on what role your content can play, map each piece of content to the corresponding stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Create new content to fill in the gaps. Now that you know where your existing content fits into the buyer’s journey, identify any gaps. Many marketers find they have a lot of awareness- and decision-stage content but that they don’t have enough consideration-stage content. Don’t stress – it’s totally normal. As you strategize how to fill in these gaps, we recommend starting at the end of the buyer’s journey and moving backward. In other words, start with creating decision-stage content, then consideration, and then awareness. This accomplishes two things: First, it helps you keep your eye focused on converting buyers into customers. And second, it ensures that for every new content piece you create, you already have a “next step” to point to. For example, if you start by creating a decision-stage vendor comparison checklist, and then you create a consideration-stage ebook, you can follow-up with any buyer who downloads the ebook and share your checklist as a natural next step. But if you start with the ebook, you won’t have any next-step content ready to share with those buyers.
As you’re creating all this new content, continually refer back to your buyer journey map. Make sure each piece of content addresses the specific questions, challenges, and goals your buyers have at each stage of the game. When you do this, you’ll provide helpful, valuable and relevant information that provides your buyers with the information they need when they need it and reduces friction along the way – ultimately leading to happy, satisfied customers who will turn into promoters of your brand
Now that you know what the buyer’s journey looks like for your customers, it’s time to create content for each stage of this journey. Request a personalized mentoring session to work on your buyer’s journey by using a buyer journey map format that I have successfully used.
For more help with developing your buyer’s journey, view the free video entitled Marketing For Business Owners Session 1.
Copyright ©John Trenary 2021
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