HubSpot Academy: Buyer's Journey for Your Business (PDF)

Transcript: Developing the Buyer’s Journey for Your Business Video 1: What is the Buyer’s Journey? Hey there! I’m Courtney. Think about how you make a purchase—the research you do, the engagement and evaluations you have with companies prior to that purchase. Just like you, your customers go thr...

Transcript: Developing the Buyer’s Journey for Your Business Video 1: What is the Buyer’s Journey? Hey there! I’m Courtney. Think about how you make a purchase—the research you do, the engagement and evaluations you have with companies prior to that purchase. Just like you, your customers go through a similar process before purchasing a product or service. This process is called the buyer’s journey. Before making a purchase and becoming a customer, a person will go through the buyer’s journey as they make their way toward a purchase.. The buyer’s journey is defined as the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. It’s called a journey because each one of your prospective customers will be at different points in their journey towards a purchase. Every potential buyer is focused on identifying their problem, understanding what options could alleviate their problem, or comparing their top choices when they’re ready to make a purchase. By understanding your buyer’s journey, you can help give those prospects the information they need to move towards making a purchase. Every interaction your persona has with your business should be tailored to where they are in their buyer’s journey. Using the buyer’s journey will help you attract, engage, and delight your prospects and customers by meeting them where they are and providing the needed guidance and value they’re seeking. The buyer’s journey consists of three stages. the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. These are the three main stages every buyer goes through. These stages are connected to the inbound methodology. To attract, engage, and delight, you need to know where your potential customers are in their buying process. The buyer’s journey is an essential component of your inbound business. Let’s review what each stage means for you and for your buyers. Each stage focuses on different buyer behaviors and actions. The awareness stage is when your prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. They’re doing research to more clearly understand, frame, and give a name to their problem. The consideration stage is when your prospect has clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity. They’re committed to researching and understanding all the available approaches or methods to solving their defined problem or opportunity. And the decision stage is when your prospect has decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. This is where they might be compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their given solution strategy.  Transcript: Developing the Buyer’s Journey for Your Business At this point, they’re researching to whittle down the long list to a short list and ultimately make a final purchase decision. By meeting your prospects where they are, you can reduce the friction leading up to making a purchase. Now that you know what each stage of the buyer's journey means, let's revisit the three stages of the inbound methodology: attract, engage, and delight. Remember that the inbound methodology is a circle because it represents the flywheel that will drive your business’s growth. To keep your business's flywheel spinning smoothly, you want to reduce friction as much as possible. By using the buyer's journey to meet your prospects where they are, you can reduce the friction leading up to making a purchase. The buyer’s journey is a powerful tool you can use to personalize your prospects’ experiences with your business. And the buyer’s journey isn’t something only one of your teams can use. It should be used across marketing, sales, and services teams. Marketers can use the buyer’s journey to create different content at every stage—creating educational content that aligns with the current state of your buyer. Use the buyer’s journey to outline your content and make it relevant to your prospect. You’ll want to have content offers that answer their problems and needed solutions, as well as content about your product or service. The education you provide with your content can help your prospects solve their problems and continue to grow their business. You can also use the buyer’s journey to segment and nurture your leads. Sending them relevant content at specific points in their journey with you. This is an example of how marketers can use the buyer’s journey. Let’s explore how your sales can use the buyer’s journey to engage with prospects. Salespeople can use the buyer’s journey to better understand how to sell to your prospects and guide them through the buyer’s journey. If you know someone’s in the awareness stage, you’ll have a different conversation with them than with someone who’s in the decision stage and has already recognized possible solutions to their problem. And service professionals can think of customers as having their own type of buyer’s journey. When you’re looking to upsell, resell, or cross sell, you don’t want to send your customer back through an entire buyer’s journey. Use this as a way to understand what your customer journey looks like. Your marketing, sales, and service teams need to be aligned on the different stages of your buyer’s journey. Because the buying journey your customers go through will be unique to your business. Knowing the buyer’s journey for your personas will be key to creating the best marketing, sales, and service experiences possible. The buyer’s journey is your model to help keep the buyer’s behavior, information needs, and problems central to anything your business does.  Transcript: Developing the Buyer’s Journey for Your Business Video 2: How do you create the buyer’s journey for your business? Just like your customers are unique to your business, your buyer’s journey can look very different depending on factors like your industry, business model, product, pricing, and audience. It all depends on your business. Your buyer’s journey will be personalized to your personas to create a buying experience that will build trust and be human and helpful. To create the buyer’s journey for your business, you’ll need to do two key things: Understand your buyer persona and develop each buyer’s journey stage around your business’s specific needs and persona’s intent. Because audiences can vary so widely based on industry and intent, understanding your buyer persona is the start of developing the buyer’s journey. By understanding their unique process of becoming aware of their problem, considering solutions, and deciding on the right solution, you’ll be able to create an effective inbound strategy, packed with personalized experiences that best support their journey towards making a purchase. Let’s take a look at each stage and how you can develop personalized experiences for your personas to help aid in their purchasing decision. The awareness stage is when your prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. They’re doing research to more clearly understand, frame, and give a name to their problem. For example, let’s say someone has recently joined a company as the Director of Marketing. They’re looking for a content management system to house all company content such as website pages, landing pages, and blog posts. So they might research what a good content management system is and review examples or reviews. Or if someone is having constant headaches at work, they might research common causes for headaches to later discover they need glasses. The awareness stage does not mean that your prospect is now aware of your business. At this point, they’re just aware that they have a problem. They want to improve, prevent, start, stop, or optimize something. In the awareness stage, you want to establish yourself and more specifically your brand as a reliable source of information for the buyer. And be able to set you and your business up for success by following up with additional context in the second stage of the buyer’s journey – the consideration stage. In the consideration stage, your prospect has now clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity. They’re committed to researching and understanding all the available approaches or methods to solving their defined problem or opportunity. The consideration stage isn’t the point that your prospect is considering your business, though. They’re considering the different solutions they have available to solve their problem.  Transcript: Developing the Buyer’s Journey for Your Business Remember the Director of Marketing trying to find a solution to manage all that company content?. They might be considering a few different content management systems, looking at examples or reviews of the product. In the consideration stage, engagement is key. By engaging with your potential customer, you can create personalized experiences and begin to develop a relationship. Your buyer is looking at all the ways to solve their problem. This research will help them decide on a solution and move into the decision stage. In the decision stage, your prospect has now decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. This is where they might be compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their given solution strategy. At this point, they’re researching to narrow down the long list to a short list and ultimately make a final purchase decision. They’re looking for confirmation that their decision is the correct one. They want reassurance that once they make this decision, they’ll be able to solve their problem and continue to grow. Your customer service team can play a huge role here. By publishing knowledge documents, they’ll enable people to self-serve, finding the information they need to answer their own questions and address their concerns. These articles can be very reassuring to a prospect in the decision stage. Providing examples or reviews from your current customers can also be beneficial in this stage. Let’s zoom in on your content for a moment. While the experience you provide is just as important as your content, your content is a great source of force for your flywheel and business overall. Your content can serve each stage of the buyer’s journey. For the awareness stage, create content focused on the problem your buyer persona is experiencing. For example, you could develop blog posts or pillar pages that describe the problem and show your knowledge and understanding of it. For the consideration stage, create content about the solution to a problem. As for the decision stage, create content that answers questions about your product or service. You want to be creating content for all the different stages of the buyer’s journey. You can determine where your piece of content fits into the buyer’s journey based on the topic, not the format. Use the formats that are best suited for you and your business. This could be video, blog posts, pillar pages, or webinars. The buyer’s journey is a critical part of your content strategy but also your overall inbound strategy. The buyer’s journey is not just about the content you produce but the experience you provide. Your buyers might come into the buyer’s journey at different stages. By having your buyer’s journey defined for your business, you can personalize their experience at each stage regardless of when they come in.  Transcript: Developing the Buyer’s Journey for Your Business Remember that inbound is all about building trust and creating human and helpful experiences throughout the stages of the inbound methodology. Develop a buyer’s journey, and this process will have the greatest possible impact on your customer relationships – fueling your inbound strategy and helping your business grow better.