A.I.D.A, Purchase Funnel, R.E.A.C.H whatever you personally call it, every single one of your customers have moved through some form of process before they got to the stage of purchasing your product or service. 100%, without fail.
It might take them seconds, it might take them years the point is there is an inherent process and framework behind the choice to commit or not.
In inbound marketing our framework is the Buyers Journey.
Core to its premise is that every single visitor to your website is at one of three stages of their decision making process:
- Awareness
Early stage, the visitor has realised they have a problem and are figuring out what exactly that is. They want to read eBooks, whitepapers, and general educational content.
- Consideration
The prospect has now put a name to their problem and decided they need to find a solution. They are probably ready to speak to a sales person or expert for guidance. Consideration stage visitors like expert guides, live interactions (calls from reps, consultations etc.). These guys are open to all suggestions in solving their issues.
- Decision
These visitors understand clearly their problem, have outlined their solution and have a shortlist of viable routes to solve it.
This, for example is typically where someone would request a trial of your software and is generally where the decision maker is more likely to be involved. Side by side comparisons, live demos, free trials are all examples of some of the content offers they are interested on your website.
Why does it matter?
To start, the stats should be compelling enough:
- 70-90% of the buyer’s journey is complete before engaging a vendor (Forrester)
- Consumer engages with 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase (Forrester)
- Consumers are 5x more dependent on content than they were 5 years ago. (Nielsen)
Understanding the buyer’s journey in its entirety and realizing its impact is crucial for content marketers in the current landscape as it provide key insight into the following:
- What type of content best matches the visitor’s needs?
- What mix of content is needed on their website to capture as many conversions as possible?
- Where the prospect is in their journey, as they effectively self-identify where they are by the content they consume. For example someone who requests a product trial (Decision Stage) is somewhat more interested and sales ready as someone who downloaded a 10 Step Guide to X. (Awareness Stage)
6 Steps in Using the Buyers Journey for Lead Generation
- Define your buyer persona.
You can’t create content for your prospect if you don’t understand them. Personas are a mix of demographics (the Who) and psychographics (the Why) that make up your perfect customer. Its essential to understand what their pain points are, what they are searching for online and ultimately how you can help them solve these challenges. To get started with personas use our workbook.
- Map content ideas to the stages of the buyer’s journey.
This content is persona centric, focused on solving their pains, making their lives easier and is of high enough quality that it compels them to want to download and become one of your leads.
Tip - Stop talking about your company. No-one cares how many awards you have won, how 'synergistic' or 'scalable' or 'revolutionary' your product or service is, was, might be... These are buzzwords that we have learnt to ignore. Humans are selfish, we only want solutions to our problems. You have to shift from vendor centric marketing to customer centric marketing.
- Create a mix of content
Once you understand your persona and their journey you should have a mix of ideas of content that you either already have or can easily create.
For example, almost all software companies offer a free trial. It’s the standard go to lead generation offer on any tech company’s website. This is a classic Decision Stage offer and these guys are ready to speak to sales guys. You’re also likely to get less of these leads versus if you were to create a 10 Tips for solving X offer (Awareness content) that had a broad appeal and identifies more prospects at the early stages of interest.
You need to create a mixture of all types of content. Whitepapers, eBooks, guides, webinars, trial offers, demos, info-graphics, podcasts, the list is endless, it’s all dependent on how your persona likes to consume information. This is the hardest part for any company, large or small and take a lot of time and effort.
- Make your headlines compelling.
Pick your headlines/titles carefully, remember everyone gets to see your title - not everyone sees the actual content unless you have a 100% conversion rate in which case I want to speak to you!
- Create conversion paths for lead capture
Ensure each piece of content is on its own landing page and you have a lead capture form to get the lead details - this is your conversion path and is essential for inbound marketing.
- Publish and gate your content on your website.
All of it.
Multiple content offers for each stage, at least 3 offers per page if possible.
Give your visitor every opportunity to convert on your site - if your website isn’t producing leads it’s a brochure site - it’s not a sales asset to your business.
Most companies are probably converting less 1% of visitors to leads.
Dont be most companies.
What kind of impact would doubling this to 2% or even higher have on your revenue potential this year?
Invest in your content, understand your customers and start being of value to them, you will see the results.