the buyer persona ,
the buyer journey or purchasing process,
content marketing and
marketing automation.
In our previous article in the Inbound Marketing series we talked about the first pillar: the buyer persona , and we even gave you a downloadable template so you could develop your own. Today we are going to focus on the second pillar, the purchasing process or buyer journey.
What is the purchasing process or buyer journey?
Look at yourself and what surrounds you. Anything you carry around or use every day has gone through a purchasing process. All of this has gone through a process that is divided into 4 major phases, following the AIDA model.
AIDA Customer Journey Model
1- Everything starts with a need . Suddenly you realise that, oh!, the online shop your friend Paco made for you, where you sell your felt brooches, is beautiful, but nobody architect phone number list goes there. You need people to come in, fall in love with your designs and buy them. You love designing them, but money is money.
2- This need continues with a research phase. At this point, you start searching on Google and the networks, on any source of information. You find lots of options proposed by bloggers. You compare the alternatives offered by the market before making a decision.
3- We've already gotten ahead of ourselves, and the third phase is the decision-making phase. After hours in front of the screen, you already know many of the channels through which you can get traffic, from Facebook, along with its ads platform ; to Google, either organically through SEO , or paying for clicks with Adwords. And much more. You even see that you can do it yourself or hire professionals to do it.
This is the moment when you decide what you are going to do after having investigated all the options, and you choose to speak with a digital marketing consultancy .
4- The last part of the buying process ends with the action. With the decision firmly made, you move on to action. That agency, which seems quite serious despite its website being full of birds, is the good one.
As you can see, everything goes through a purchasing process. Let's now see how an Inbound Marketing strategy is highly conditioned by the Buyer Journey.
Inbound Marketing and the buyer journey
Within the purchasing process we have seen above, it is normal for companies to focus their efforts on the decision and action phase. This is where conversions mainly occur, where money moves.
This means that the first two phases are forgotten: both the need and the research are abandoned. Inbound Marketing enters the purchasing process from the beginning. Therefore, each stage of the buyer journey must be accompanied by a type of content. Let's continue with the example to illustrate it better:
1- Need. Your online store has no traffic and you have a need: you must attract users to your felt brooch website.
Sample content:
Post → 5 ways to attract traffic to your online store at zero cost
2- Research. Yes, of course, there are options to attract traffic to my website, even for free. But damn, you don't know where to start. You start your research phase.
Sample content:
Ebook → SEO: optimize your website in 25 steps to attract traffic from Google.
3- Decision. You have decided on SEO as the medium-long term way to attract buyers to your store. But, hey, this is not as easy as it seemed and the website that my colleague Paco made is like this, like this. As we had already captured your email when you downloaded the ebook…
Sample content:
Success story → Online fish tank store grows 4000% in one year.
4. Action.
Sample content:
Email → We sent you an email to invite you to visit our offices.
As you can see, each moment has its needs and we cannot enter into commercial actions before the user is ready for it.
It is essential to clearly define the user's purchasing process for your product and service. It is the first step to generate appropriate content for each phase of the buyer's journey.
