As a business, it is important to tailor your marketing content to suit your target audience. This also depends on the funnel stage your audiences are at. For example, you’ll not use the same marketing technique for first-time visitors as you would use for re-purchase customers. This guide explains 7 effective marketing techniques for understanding the buyer’s journey better. You can use this guide to improve your business’s marketing strategies.
What is the Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey–also called customer’s journey, represents the stages a customer goes through before making a purchase, from initial contact with your brand to post-purchase interaction. These stages include:
- Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a problem or need.
- Consideration: They actively research solutions.
- Decision: They decide on a solution and make a purchase.
- Post-purchase: Ongoing engagement and support to foster brand loyalty.
Generally, you will want to nudge your prospect along the different stages of the buyer’s journey until they convert to paying customers and complete your sales funnel stages.
However, during the process of converting prospects to customers, you need to be careful so you don’t make them disinterested. You need to properly understand the buyer’s journey and know how to implement the right marketing techniques.
Also read: 8 Budget Hacks for Entrepreneurs to Save Money and Grow
7 Marketing Techniques for Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
Up to 60% of respondents to a 2019 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Survey assigned a failing grade to their lead nurturing programs. This is a clear indication that marketers can find it difficult to nail down the right marketing techniques and strategies for their buyer’s journey. However, understanding the buyer’s journey is not rocket science. You can fully delight your customers through every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Mastering the buyer’s journey requires a strategic approach to identifying, engaging, and nurturing prospects. Here are 7 effective marketing techniques to help you better understand and optimize the buyer’s journey and nurture leads.
Research Audiences, Prospects, Leads, and Customers
Most effective marketing strategies are always data-driven. When you know more about your audiences and customers, you can better understand how to improve the buyer’s journey.
Use the following tips to research your prospects, leads, and current customers adequately.
- Conduct regular surveys and polls to gather insights on customer preferences and challenges about your brand and products
- Interview customers to gain deeper insights into their motivations.
- Leverage existing data on leads and prospects and seek answers to relevant questions from new leads and prospects.
- Use comprehensive research methods to gain insights into the background, job roles, responsibilities, challenges, shopping preferences, and interests of target prospects and customers.
- Use these insights to segment audiences for more personalized marketing.
Create Buyer Personas
The next step after audience research is to create buyer personas. Creating buyer personas is crucial for personalizing your marketing strategies. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. To create a buyer persona, you need to think about the details of those who are most likely to patronize your product.
This process naturally helps you to understand the buyer’s journey better because you have to provide details on various aspects of your ideal customer specifically.
- Outline demographic details such as age, gender, job role, and pain points.
- Identify their preferred communication channels and decision-making processes.
- Tools like HubSpot’s Make My Persona can help you streamline this process.
Define Your USPs and OVPs
You should be ready to differentiate your brand from competitors by clearly communicating your competitive advantage to leads and prospects. This involves clearly defining your Unique Selling Points (USPs) and Online/Offline Value Propositions (OVPs).
Consider that leads, prospects, and customers want solutions, not just products. You should, therefore, be ready to communicate the tangible and intangible benefits your product provides. For a start, you can;
- Itemize the tangible and intangible benefits your product and services provide. Clearly communicate the price and additional things they tend to gain.
- Show how your brand offers a superior customer experience compared to competitors.
- Identify gaps in the market to make your USPs stand out.
Meanwhile, a review of your competitor research and analysis should be a basis that you can build on to make your offerings unique. It also makes it easier to craft unique messaging content. Remember that you can make use of competitor research tools to help you understand your competition better.
Implement Targeted Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing should be tailored to suit different stages of the buyer’s journey. Your audience research should have given you insight into where your prospects and customers are and where they visit. It’s now time to put that insight to use by crafting targeted content and presenting it before them. Note that content marketing has gone beyond mere selling. You have to create content that evokes emotional reactions from your audience.
In addition, you should aim at building relationships and trust. Thus, your content should educate, inform, inspire, and entertain your prospects and customers.
You can also create a content map to help you plan your content ideas and tailor them to suit each stage of the buyer journey and your various unique buyer personas.
You can take advantage of a marketing automation platform when you wish to identify, segment, and target buyer personas.
Read up on 5 Secrets to Becoming a Successful Ghostwriter
Use Multi-Channel Strategies to Nurture Leads and Drive Traffic
Don’t limit your lead nurturing efforts to one channel. A multi-channel approach can significantly increase your reach and lead conversion rates. Email drip campaigns may have been enough to sustain you in the past. But your competitors may outstrip you today if you do not go beyond email nurturing and execute multi-channel marketing strategies. For example, you can execute a combination of email marketing, social media, direct sales outreach, paid retargeting, and marketing automation strategies. Here are some things to keep in mind when executing multi-channel strategies:
Also read: Google PPC vs. Organic SEO: Striking the Right Balance for Business Success
Aligning Sales and Marketing Strategies
Align your sales and marketing strategies to improve retention rates and nurture leads. In other words, both teams should know at what points of the buyer’s journey they should hand prospects and customers over to the other team.
Using Good Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing To Drive Traffic
After you must have researched your audience, created buyer personas, and defined your product, USPs, and OVPs, you should take time to nurture clients and drive traffic through content marketing and social media engagement.
Good content marketing makes it easier to access qualified leads and acquire customers at a lower cost. You can also engage potential customers on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. From these platforms, you can also drive customers to your website and blog to address their questions and pain points and also provide solutions. In the same vein, you can take steps to build their trust and foster relationships.
Do not forget to actively join relevant groups and discussion platforms and build engagements while you’re at it.
Leveraging Personalization and Email Marketing
Do not restrict your personalization to email marketing only, but extend it to your general sales and marketing efforts. In fact, you should personalize your approach at all touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. This is a fundamental approach to better understanding the buyer journey. You will gain insights into customers and prospects, their pain points, and the best ways to offer them value.
Being empathetic with customers and prospects and stepping into the shoes of the ideal buyer before crafting sales and marketing strategies has multiple benefits. You will understand them better and be more able to craft effective messaging.
Ultimately, personalizing your strategies and focusing on delivering value according to the needs of customers help you to increase sales and nurture lifetime relationships.
Related: 5 Secrets to Implementing Hyper-Personalization in Email Marketing
Use Multiple Touches to Nurture Leads
Research shows that prospects require up to 10 marketing touches to nurture leads from the awareness stage before converting into paying customers. You can;
- Mix content types (blogs, whitepapers, emails, and social media posts) to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey. Again, you should aim to address their questions and concerns
- Follow up with leads quickly, especially after they engage with your website or content.
- Use recent browsing behaviour data and other analytics to tailor follow-up emails or calls based on a prospect’s specific interests.
Assess Qualified Leads and Analyze Performances
Having a well-set-up sales and marketing funnel is not all you should do to nurture leads. To refine your buyer’s journey, you need to assess the quality of your leads and evaluate the performance of your nurturing efforts.
One way to assess qualified leads is to use a lead scoring methodology that ranks your prospects according to their perceived value. For example, you can assign numeric values to interactions such as website visits, social media engagement, and email opens. Thereafter, you can determine what leads should be further nurtured.
Finally, regularly analyze your lead nurturing efforts, marketing automation, and strategies and look for ways to optimize them as you better understand the buyer’s journey.
Related: Harnessing Data Analytics for Smarter Marketing Decisions
Mastering the Buyer’s Journey for Marketing Success
When you fully understand the buyer’s journey, you can create tailored experiences that guide customers smoothly through each stage. By applying these seven marketing techniques, you can align your content, strategies, and outreach to the needs and expectations of your prospects and customers, driving long-term business success.
Effective lead nurturing is an ongoing process. To sustain growth, continuously refine your strategies, measure your performance, and adapt to changing customer behaviour.
For more insights on the buyer’s journey and other marketing strategies, visit Exclusive Blueprint.
Our digital marketing blog offers expert advice, trends, and tools to help your business thrive. Explore topics on E-commerce, marketing automation, technology, and more today!
