How to Navigate the Buyer's Journey

The buyer's journey describes a buyer's path to purchase. Buyers don't wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service. The process can be broken down into three stages that describe how they advance along their path to purchase: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage.

Awareness

The 5 Levels of Awareness is a copywriting framework popularized by Eugene Schwartz in his 1966 book called Breakthrough Advertising. The basic premise is that it’s not enough to have a great product—or service—to sell. You also need to meet the potential customer where they’re at, in their current frame of mind.

The way you engage your prospects will depend on their level of awareness,

• Is your solution addressing a new problem people didn't know they had?
• Do your prospects have a specific problem, but not know how to solve it?
• Are there similar solutions to yours that prospects are considering?
• Do prospects even know what your product does?
• Is your market educated about your offering?

To move prospects through your buyer's journey, they must first become educated about what exactly you offer and why it solves their problems.

Consideration

After raising problem/solution awareness, we can turn to a heuristic popularized by Sticky Branding called The 3% Rule.

The 3% Rule divides your marketplace into five buying segments:

• 3% are active buyers. These are the people and companies that have a need and are actively shopping for vendors. They want to make a purchase in the next thirty to ninety days. These are sales leads.
• 7% intend to change. These prospects have a need, but aren’t proactively searching for options. A well timed cold call or marketing campaign can be very effective on this segment, because they are receptive to new ideas.
• 30% have a need, but not enough to act. This group is not buying. They may look like and act like prospects, but they won’t make a commitment. They have other priorities. Until the need becomes more pressing, they won’t make a purchase.
• 30% do not have a need. This segment of the market do not have a need for your products and services, and are not receptive to any marketing messages. They may have just made a purchase, they may be too small, or they may not be ready for your services.
• 30% are not interested in your company. There is a segment of the market that do not fit your brand. Basically, these companies are never going to choose you. They may be loyal to the competition. They may have had a bad experience with your firm. They may use alternative options. Don’t sweat it. Just recognize that this dynamic occurs, and your brand can’t be all things to all people.

With this market segmentation, our customer acquisition strategy falls into two categories,

1. Top 10%: Marketing to people and companies who have a need for your services right now, typically described as “inbound marketing.”
2. Lower 90%: Marketing to people who don’t have a need for your services, but will some day.

The trap being that most businesses allocate the lion's share of their budget to the Top 10% and much of that investment is ineffective, because it falls on deaf ears.

Rather than trying to engage people when they have a need, a more efficient strategy is to engage them earlier in the Lower 90% - establishing the relationship and developing rapport before they’re ready to buy.

Create an opportunity where your customers know, like, and trust your company long before they have a need. That way they’ll skip right over the consideration of other vendors, and call your company first when they have a need.

Decision

When a prospect is making a final decision about how they are going to solve their identified problem, the winning vendor is the one with the best positioning.

Positioning can be defined as how you frame your business's offering.

Effective positioning can only be accomplished by creating an offer based on some non-commonly known industry insight. Further the best businesses constantly test and iterate tweaks to their offer in order to stay ahead of competition.

Positioning is communicated in the Awareness & Consideration stages. And when prospects are ready to make a final decision, they run one last internal calculation (relative benefit - total cost),

Adoption happens only if the added value (benefit delivered by the product compared to alternatives) exceeds the total cost (cost in terms of that price plus all the other changes customers need to undertake in order to use the product)