What Are the Stages of the Buyer’s Journey?

The study and decision-making process that accompanies a purchase is referred to as the buyer’s journey. There’s so much more to it than that. We’ll look at the buyer’s journey, the stages it goes through, why it’s essential, and how to design one for your target demographic. We’ll also discuss developing content relevant to the buyer’s journey and how this can help your inbound marketing efforts.

How Does the Buyer’s Journey Operate, and What Is It?

The buyer’s journey is a description of a customer’s purchase process. To put it another way, buyers do not buy on the spur of the moment. They go through a process of being aware of, considering, and evaluating a new product or service before acquiring it.

Sales staff may better sympathize with buyers and place their product or service along that road by understanding the buyer’s journey, the challenges and problems they face along the way, and the influencing elements that influence their thinking. So let’s delve a little further.

Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

There is no universally applicable buyer’s journey. Every firm will go through numerous stages, but there are usually three basic stages of the buyer’s journey

Stage 1: Awareness

Prospects become aware of their problem at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. They’re still doing their investigation to figure out what’s wrong, so they’re not looking for solutions just yet. Businesses typically exhibit their industry knowledge and experience by giving a lot of instructional content that gently guides customers to the next step of the journey to grab prospects.

Stage 2: Consideration

Prospects at the consideration stage have defined their problem and decided how to solve it. They have not, however, come up with a precise remedy. At this point, consumers will attempt to comprehend various techniques and solutions for resolving their issues. They haven’t yet expressed an interest in locating service providers. They want to know what the best options are for meeting their requirements.

Stage 3: Decision

Prospects are aware that they have a problem that must be addressed. They know potential options but haven’t decided which one is best for them. Buyers will now seek information on your brand, products, or services because they haven’t decided on a single service provider yet.

Remember that they’ll also consider the competitors’ offerings while weighing their selections. They’ll weigh the benefits and downsides of many options to find the one that best meets their requirements. They are more inclined to trust you if your brand has assisted them in reaching this point in their journey. Determine the criteria customers use to evaluate potential offerings to make your business stand out from the competition.

What is the Most Effective Method for Mapping Content to a Buyer’s Journey?

Now that you’ve learned a little about the advantages of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to consider how you can include it into your inbound marketing approach. If you want to do buyer’s journey mapping for your firm, here’s how to get started:

Marketers Should Create Buyer Personas

Yes, we’ve already discussed how important buyer personas are, but having them in place makes it easier to describe your audience’s buyer journeys. How can you generate helpful content if you don’t grasp their challenges, requirements, motivations, and goals?

Awareness

Assist the buyer in identifying and defining their problem.

Content: Blog entries, whitepapers, and checklists help you establish your brand as a trustworthy knowledge source.

Consideration

Provide the buyer with options for resolving their newly identified issue. Customer testimonials, product videos, and live webinars may aid the buyer in selecting a solution to their problem.

Decision

Persuade the buyer that your business is the most excellent fit to supply the solution they’ve chosen. Free samples, demos, and product factsheets can help consumers decide if they’re the right company for them. However, as previously stated, these are only suggestions that content should tailor to each consumer persona and the product or service you provide.

Keep in mind that your goal is to provide content as helpful to your personas as possible at all times. Your content is more likely to drive more visitors to your website and lead to more transactions if you can deliver real value to your target audience.

Adapting Your Sales Process to the Buyer’s Journey

With this in mind, buyers do not want to be prospected, demoed, or closed before they are ready. These steps bring little value to their eyes when presented incorrectly. When buyers need additional information about your product that they can’t find online, though, a sales representative may shine.

• Awareness

The issue or opportunity that buyers desire to explore is being identified. They’re also debating whether content should prioritize the aim or the challenge.

• Consideration

The buyers have explicitly identified the goal or issue and committed to addressing it. They’re now weighing the pros and cons of several tactics or ways of achieving their goal of resolving their problem.

• Decision

Buyers have chosen a solution category and are currently assessing vendors. They may, for example, have compiled a pro/con list of specific offerings to select the one that best matches their requirements. Some of these factors may come more under the marketing than the sales umbrella, but the answers to these questions will eventually create a solid basis for your buyer’s journey.

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Why Make Content For The Stages Of The Buyer’s Journey?

There are numerous reasons to generate content for the various stages of the buyer’s journey. Let’s go over a couple of the most significant ones to see why this method of content organization is so effective.

Prospect Nurturing Throughout the Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

The opportunity to nurture prospects toward conversion rather than trying to sell them straight away is one of, if not the most important, benefits of developing content around the buyer’s journey stages. Most visitors to your website aren’t looking to buy right away.

Many are simply gathering information because they have recently discovered a need or problem and are still looking for information on the best ways to satisfy or address that need or problem.You may provide them with the right information at the correct times with the suitable types of content, rather than bombarding them with pushy sales text or adverts with the suitable types of material.

At Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey, Lead Qualification

Another key advantage of developing content around the stages of the buyer’s journey is that it allows you to qualify your leads before passing them on to sales or having them contact your team. It’s beautiful if they can figure out that what you give isn’t a good fit for their need or problem.

The only people you should spend time selling to are those who are most likely to buy from you. It’s pointless to spend the workforce educating people when your content can do it for you! Let’s look at the types of content you’ll be writing for each stage of the buyer’s journey now that we’ve covered that.

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Content Types for the Awareness Stage

Your prospect is only becoming conscious that they have a problem or a need at this time and have minimal knowledge of the various options for meeting that need or resolving that issue. They’re still gathering information and aren’t ready to decide what they’ll buy or from whom.

Because awareness-stage leads are the least qualified, most sales teams will refrain from engaging them. Marketers should direct any resources spent on awareness-stage prospects to advance them to the consideration stage and increase their trust in your brand to make them more likely to purchase in the future.

Blog Posts

The blog post is the most prevalent type of awareness-stage material. It’s a user-friendly, non-threatening media format that most people can find with a quick Google search. On the other hand, blog postings can be valuable at all three stages of the buyer’s journey that we’ll discuss in this piece. The following are the qualities of an awareness-stage blog post:

• Copywritten solely to answer questions and resolve difficulties.
• There should be no sales material or brand mentions that aren’t necessary.
• Simple to learn and comprehensive enough to handle most problems.
• Enough to demonstrate your industry experience and provide insight into the benefits of doing business with your brand.

Make a list of all the questions your buyers would ask before purchasing your goods to develop ideas for your awareness-stage blog posts. We’re not talking about questions about your product or service; we’re talking about inquiries concerning the problem that your product will help them address.

YouTube

As marketers, we know that video is quickly becoming the most popular way for people to consume content, and this isn’t to argue that written content is being phased out; far from it. People are just consuming more content, much of it in the video.

Video is a simple-to-understand medium that can convey much information in a fraction of the time it takes to read textual blog material. For a good reason, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. Videos, like blog entries, are an excellent tool to assist people in solving their problems. Starting with how-to and Q&A videos is a good idea.

Facebook Isn’t to Be Overlooked

Although YouTube is a more popular medium for sharing educational video content, Facebook is a beautiful, significantly less crowded alternative. While Facebook has a lot of videos, it doesn’t have nearly as many as YouTube. Many astute marketers generate entertaining and engaging videos about their products or companies that a third party has put together. They look to be being chronicled from the outside and highlight the product’s new, inventive, and unique features.

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Infographics

Infographics are what they sound like: highly informative, highly engaging images. It conveys the most vital information about a topic entertainingly and engagingly. For numerous reasons, infographics are particularly appealing during the awareness stage.

• Simple to Consume

The first is that they are simple to eat. People can extract critical information from an infographic in seconds rather than reading a lengthy article on a subject. It has the potential to catch their attention enough to get their wheels turning and lead them to your more extensive consideration- and decision-stage content.

• It’s Simple to Share

On social media, good infographics receive a lot of attention. People find them considerably more enticing to share than copy-heavy blog posts. Thus it’s a terrific method to get your brand/product in front of hundreds or thousands of new eyes who didn’t know they needed what you have to offer.

Content Types for the Consideration Stage

Your potential clients will comprehend their problem/need by the consideration stage and focus more on options. They still haven’t reached a decision point. They’re listing their options so they can make the best decision. The buyer’s trip isn’t complete yet.

They need help deciding how to tackle their challenge. Many sales teams don’t contact consideration-stage buyers, even though they’re more qualified. This determination will vary from company to company and will likely depend on the sold goods. High-value, low-volume sectors may be profitable investments.

Downloadable Resources / Ebooks

After reading an awareness-stage blog article, ebooks and other downloaded resources are the ideal next step. From your blog article, you may link to a landing page that mentions your resource and guides them through the conversion process one step at a time.

The following are examples of resources that buyers can download:

• Ebooks
• Guides
• Sheets of Advice
• Templates
• Checklists
• Powerpoint Presentations/Slideshares
• And there’s more.

These resources are beneficial because they allow you to deliver value and exhibit your industry experience, giving buyers a taste of what it’s like to do business with your company. Keep in mind that your goal when generating these resources is to provide as much value as possible. 

Video Comparisons

The purpose of consideration-stage videos is to explain. Your goal should be to demonstrate how your product may assist consumers in resolving their issues. You’ve given them a sample to pique their attention, but they’ll want to see more before making a decision.

Comparison videos are an excellent way to respond to concerns regarding how your product compares to your direct competitors. You can make a film that compares your product to a single competition or one that compares it to numerous industry leaders.

Articles / Blog Posts

As previously stated, Marketers can use blog postings to support each stage of the buyer’s journey. The themes you write about for each step, on the other hand, will be somewhat diverse. As we all know, consumers interested in learning about their possibilities for solving their problems are in the consideration stage. That means it’s up to you to produce content around the many possibilities and present your business positively that appeals to your prospective buyer.

• Live Demonstrations / Webinars

It’s critical to tailor your content to the stage of the buyer’s journey where it will be most effective. While you can use webinars and live demos in the decision stage, it’s up to you to figure out what works best for the product or service you sell. Suppose your awareness-stage content is sufficient to pique people’s curiosity about what you have to offer.

In that case, you may want to encourage them to join up for a webinar or live demonstration to demonstrate how your product compares to industry leaders. If your awareness-stage prospects can engage with your brand enough by reaching the contemplation stage to judge it worthy of their attention, you should employ this type of material.

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Content Types for the Decision Stage

As you may have guessed, when people reach the decision stage, they are ready to make a purchase. In the consideration stage, they’ve narrowed their options and are seeking information on why they should choose your brand. The decision Stage is where you may finally brag about how great your product or service is.

Many businesses make the mistake of focusing all their efforts on putting decision-stage ads and web pages in front of individuals who aren’t ready to see them. The Decision Stage is where all that material comes in handy, but you’ll need more than just your website to capitalize on your decision-stage buyer’s enthusiasm for your product.

Whitepapers, Reports, and Case Studies

When customers reach the decision stage, they’ll be much more interested in learning how you’ve helped others solve problems or satisfy their needs. Case studies, reports, and white papers are handy in this situation. The decision Stage is the most critical in the buyer’s journey because you must be able to back up any claims you’ve made thus far.

This type of writing should provide the most pertinent details on how you’ve assisted others in achieving excellent outcomes. It should be limited to the information you need about their results and how you helped them get them.

Blog Posts

Yes, the tried-and-true blog post can be helpful during the decision-making process. It’s all about how we’re so good at what we do and how we thrive at producing outcomes for clients in various ways. If this was the first item we showed them, we couldn’t have hoped to sign new clients. However, after reading awareness- and consideration-stage blog pieces and downloading guides, people are significantly more likely to be interested in articles like this one and appreciate the information included within.

FAQs on Stages Of the Buyer’s Journey

Q1. What distinguishes buyer personas from ideal customer profiles?

The majority of B2B sales and marketing teams employ ideal customer profiles. They employ them to characterize the intended audience and current clients generally. Sales teams that deal directly with clients of a company use buyer personas. Sales teams use this phrase to describe a specific market audience type. Buyer personas are developed using the information you have gathered about your leads and prospects.

Q2. What distinguishes active buyers from passive buyers?

Prospects or leads who are active buyers have already started the buying process. Because their problem isn’t significant enough to warrant them looking for a solution, passive shoppers are people who haven’t begun their relationship with a brand.

Q3. What makes the customer journey and buyer journey different from each other?

During the buyer’s journey, a business consistently strives to assist a prospect in becoming a customer. They develop a range of content techniques that encourage purchases. By consistently interacting with your clients, you can focus on building relationships with them and your brand.

Conclusions

Modern purchasers follow a self-explanatory and defined process when purchasing. The Inbound Buyer’s Journey is divided into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Let us look at the stages of the buyer’s journey.

• Awareness Stage: Through web research, the buyer seeks to identify their difficulties in a more critical and particular approach. 

• Consideration Stage: Once a buyer has recognized a problem, they begin looking for particular solutions, which leads them to potential solution providers, partners, or vendors.

• Decision Stage: After engaging with competent enough, trust-building information, the buyer may narrow down their list of solution providers and decide which companies product they want. 

Your website is your best salesperson, and as such, it must adapt to your persona’s purchase journey. You should also remember that the buyer’s journey stages are just guidelines. Some purchasers may move directly from an awareness-stage article to content for the decision-making stage. Others could find themselves reading a consideration-stage blog post and downloading a consideration-stage guide before moving on to the decision step. It doesn’t matter which road they pick; it’s the right one. You can only assist buyers on their trip by having the required content ready and available. So, here we are binding up the guide on the stages of the buyer’s journey.