The Buyer’s Journey
A) What is the Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey is the path before purchasing a product or service. This process varies according to the business or product you are affiliated with. Still, it typically consists of five phases, from awareness through retention, and is often represented as a funnel.
When targeting an audience, it’s critical to assess where this audience is in the buyer’s journey. Are they already familiar with your product? Have they previously attempted it? Have they ever bought a product or service from a competitor’s brand? What are their perceptions of your brand and product? What are the pain points to this audience acquiring your product?
An effective digital marketing plan requires understanding your audience’s context and the items needed to drive them along the funnel. The goal is to uncover insights and use them in your digital marketing plan to drive your audience through the funnel phases. Their stage in the buyer’s journey will affect the media you connect with them.
You should try to create your unique buyer’s journey based on research, which will provide further accuracy to the generic model. This is ingrained in the inbound technique — in other words, how to attract a highly-qualified audience by equipping them with the resources they need to make an informed choice.
The buyer’s journey is divided into stages.
To simplify the customer decision-making process, we can simplify it down to three primary consumer touchpoints:
• Awareness: Being aware of your business.
• Consideration: Conducting research into how your business fits into their lives.
• Conversion: Purchasing a product or service or taking action
Each level has unique problems and objectives that will inform a marketing strategy. We may further develop this three-stage journey into a five-stage funnel to enable even more accurate customer targeting.
Awareness: To communicate a benefit and educate people about a business, product, event, or offer
Interest: To increase emotional connection
Consideration: To push your business to the top of the list of options
Conversion: The process of transforming intention into action.
Retention: To make the customer feel unique and improve the chances of referrals.
1) Awareness
The Awareness stage occurs when a customer becomes aware of an issue they want to solve in their lives and view your product advertisement as a possible solution. Marketers should concentrate their efforts at this level on increasing exposure and awareness. This is a vital stage for developing new goods, branding, or enhancing current products with new features. This stage will focus on promoting your product and integrating it within a larger scope of existing solutions to a problem.
2) Interest
The Interest stage represents the time when the customer is on the lookout for solutions to their issue. At this point, the customer has a few ideas but will want further knowledge and expertise to make a choice. This is a search for knowledge that, in the context of digital marketing, includes reading reviews, blog entries, social media posts, and ad product websites in order to get as much information as possible.
3) Consideration
The Consideration stage is the point at which the customer is aware of your brand and believes it may be a suitable match for their requirements or goals. They may have other brands in mind, but your business is considered. At this point, inbound methods are very powerful since they guarantee that the brand or product shows more often in the consumer’s search results and social media feeds when designed correctly.
4) Conversion
Conversion refers to the point at which a customer is ready to purchase your product or take action on your website. Based on their requirements and motives, the customer has done background research and has determined that a certain product is the best solution to their issue. At this phase, the customer has not yet made a payment for the goods or service, and the marketer’s responsibility is to establish a point of contact to promote conversions. This is often achieved via targeted and retargeted advertising, special offers, and the creation of a feeling of urgency.
5) Retention
Although the retention stage is sometimes overlooked, it is critical for maintaining recurring income and building a community of engaged brand advocates. After the customer has utilized the product and expressed satisfaction, it is essential to offer value and establish a genuine relationship. At this point, you’re dealing with a customer who is already convinced that your product is beneficial to them, but you still need to keep them satisfied and build a desire to return to your product. The more information you have about your consumers, the more opportunities you will have to provide value and please them, not only with your product but also with your brand experience and personality.
The Buyer’s Journey Summary
Awareness and Interest
The Awareness and Interest phases are driven by discovery, as the customer gradually gains awareness of their issue and its solutions. This level is determined by the connection between your material and the primary theme. Because a user may not do a deep search, putting your product on a broad subject and providing information that stands out (video or advertising) can help your product join the discussion. In an ideal scenario, your material would be engaging and interesting, offer value to the dialogue, and give answers to the consumer’s issue. Establishing a strong social media presence and engaging with your audience is suggested for naturally advancing your product and achieving your target timeline.
Consideration and Conversion
Consideration and Conversion are more concentrated phases for the customer. At this point, clients are aware of the different options. They are discussing which one to choose by searching further information, experience, and reviews, as well as compiling a mindmap of the optimal quality/price/value ratio. As customers are likely to seek extra information about a product by asking specific questions, you must optimize your content for search engines and invest in sponsored advertisements for keyword translation to guarantee that the ‘Consideration’ stage of your approach is well-integrated. The more often your product or brand is connected with a certain subject or term, the stronger the connection becomes in the consumer’s mind. This may greatly enhance content discovery and engagement.
Retention
Retention leverages increasingly personalized components, such as email marketing automation and analytics to provide a consistent customer experience by reaching out, following up on a purchase, and using the relevant information to foster intimacy between the consumer and the brand. By using information such as a customer’s birthday, membership start date, or favorite topic or product, interesting content may be created that generates an emotional reaction from the consumer.
B) Integrated or 360-degree marketing
Both traditional and digital marketing offer distinct advantages that may be used throughout the buyer’s journey to achieve larger marketing objectives. By thinking in this way, you can see the value of coordinating with marketing departments other than the digital marketing team. Collaboration is critical for driving prospective clients through the funnel and converting. Utilizing all marketing strategies is referred to as a 360 or integrated marketing strategy since it tries to engage customers at all points of contact throughout their day. A 360 marketing strategy, by definition, is a marketing plan that is both online and offline, that includes all digital channels, social media platforms, and wherever else your consumer spends time. It is a comprehensive campaign that covers all touchpoints. In short, to be genuinely 360, a campaign must use all of your consumer’s preferred channels — mobile, internet, search, and social — as well as any relevant conventional media like television, radio, or print. If your audience is digital natives, you may be able to avoid using offline or conventional media. However, if you do, let’s examine the advantages of a 360-degree marketing approach that incorporates both conventional and digital marketing.
The advantages of a 360-degree marketing strategy
It covers the entire buying cycle
To begin, it encompasses the full purchasing cycle. Each channel of communication, whether offline or online, is effective in achieving various marketing goals. When channels are combined, they may span the whole of the customer experience, assisting in the effective progression of the consumer along the funnel toward the purchase, Conversion, and retention.
Uses all points of touch
A 360-degree integrated campaign reaches out to each audience member at each point of interaction with your business. Your audience is not limited to a single kind of media in today’s media ecosystem. They will be distributed through the internet, television, print, and other media outlets. Being present at the most critical and impactful touchpoints enables your brand to engage and move with potential customers as they go about their daily lives. Integrated marketing strategies enable you to respond to seasonal and daily patterns in media consumption.
Scalability and relevance are maximized.
A 360-degree integrated campaign maximizes both scale and relevance. Traditional media forms are advantageous for scalability since they reach a large number of people quickly. Simply be aware of the cost and time involved in creating and producing advertisements and content for conventional media. Digital media channels are advantageous for increasing relevance and attracting targeted customers since they have reduced production costs and shorter lead times for creating the assets. A 360-degree strategy will help you attract the ideal customers who are most likely to convert while also increasing the likelihood that your brand will be found by new client prospects.
Utilizes both conventional and digital marketing strategies
360 marketing programs offer the audience with a comprehensive marketing experience. A complete brand experience is a plus for the audience. If they’ve previously seen the brand online, they may choose to encounter it offline via a shop visit or a chance encounter with the brand on the street or on television. This is an excellent cyclical process for companies; it builds audience familiarity and assists in memory. Additionally, we should explore the concept of dual screening. This is when advertisers target an audience while they are consuming conventional mass media such as television and simultaneously get tailored messaging online, as is the case with popular Twitter hashtags during live television or breaking news events.
Allows for effective measurement of results
Finally, an integrated 360-degree campaign allows you to monitor results efficiently. Traditional media options are difficult to quantify in terms of return on investment. Thus, using digital tactics may give insight into how the audience engages with and responds to the campaign, as well as assist in quantifying the influence of conventional media. For instance, if a company airs an advertisement on television at 8 p.m. and the associated website analytics show an increasing trend during that time period, we may make certain assumptions about the ad’s success based on online behaviors. The difference between typical online activity and traffic or sales increase around the time of a television advertisement is an excellent indicator of the television advertisement’s effect.
C) Aligning the buyer’s journey with the distribution channels
Digital marketing is comprised of a number of major components or channels that are used to accomplish the marketing objectives established for each purpose. These will overlap due to the fact that multiple components might perform multiple roles. Collaboration is critical to advancing your leads down the funnel and converting them.
Content
According to the inbound technique, content is king. Your content attracts interested customers and encourages them to learn about, educate themselves about, and investigate your product and brand. Content marketing should be the primary focus of your inbound strategy since it will serve as the foundation for all activities and campaigns aimed at establishing trust with consumers and ultimately converting them to customers.
Display and Video Advertising
Marketers and brands may increase awareness and consideration via the use of compelling banners and audio-visual formats that are delivered to consumers that meet a certain profile on channels throughout the web. This may be accomplished via targeting interest groups programmatically or through the use of retargeting techniques to guarantee that you are always targeting the correct audiences. The objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) for video and display are often awareness-raising rather than direct conversions through the channel.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing helps you to establish a real relationship with customers, keep them informed, and make it simple for them to visit your website, request information, and offer feedback via content distribution and social interaction. Social media enables you to demonstrate your brand’s personality and ties to other businesses, influencers, and causes, therefore increasing your brand’s relatability.
Search Engine Marketing
This channel is inextricably linked to Conversion and revenue generation. Because people use search engines to discover information, being at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) provides a competitive advantage. Given that customers will click on the first links given and seldom browse beyond the first page of results, it is critical to be visible when they are ready to purchase.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is particularly beneficial for discovery and research activity on search engines. Effective SEO implies that search engines will consider your material to be more relevant and will likely display your website towards the top of the page in the organic, non-paid search results.
Email Marketing
The customer does not always come to your website or locate you through Google. However, email marketing is the route via which you may communicate with subscribers who want to hear from you.
Automation
By using specialized software, digital marketers may automate the engagement of prospects and consumers through email marketing and social media platforms. You may create a workflow, which consists of a series of rules for sending emails or distributing social material to various individuals on your prospect or customer list in order to keep them engaged with your brand as they approach a purchase decision. This is referred to as lead or prospect nurturing, and it has been shown to have a significant favorable effect on customer purchasing behaviors.
Analytics
This allows you to link individual campaigns, visits, and conversions and see the customer journey via your marketing channels and sales funnel. Numerous social networking sites, search engines, and email service providers all provide different campaign analytics tools. Additionally, you may monitor website visits using web analytics to see what occurs once a person clicks on a campaign advertisement and lands on your site. Both campaign and website analytics are critical for channel optimization because they provide marketers with the data necessary to make informed decisions.
D) Tools for digital marketing
The channels you choose to use will establish your digital marketing approach. The channels are shown below also correspond to the courses covered in this program. The training covers all of the major digital mediums.
Website Optimization
To begin, let us discuss website optimization. This is the art of developing — and continually refining — websites with the goal of optimizing the visitor experience, resulting in increased visitor happiness, a better user experience, and increased return visit and conversion rates. Having a helpful and effective website is critical since an unoptimized website may result in a negative client experience or make it harder for the consumer to make a purchase from you. As such, web optimization is the process of building your website in such a way that the user flows from your content, from your blog to your product page, to your e-commerce, and finally to purchase. Crucially, it is essential that the website be suited for shopping on a variety of devices. People now surf on a variety of devices, which means they may look for a product on their mobile phone to verify some facts and then complete the purchase on a desktop computer. As a result, you want to ensure that the mobile experience is just as fantastic as the desktop experience.
Outbound
Following that, let’s have a look at social media marketing. This is a well-known kind of outbound digital marketing since it makes use of social media platforms to promote brand or product awareness and create connections with customers. Social media marketing is all about increasing your audience’s exposure and involvement. This is one of the most, if not the most, critical channels for outbound communication with your audience. When your audience participates, the dynamic shifts to one of inbound communication; they may contact you back, actively seek out and share your material, repost, like, and comment, as well as ask questions. The ultimate objective of digital marketers is to transition their communications on social media from an outgoing media platform where they push their content to an audience to a two-way outbound/inbound conversational channel.
Display and video advertising are outbound, awareness-building digital channels that combine the science and accuracy of online audience targeting with the emotional connection provided by audio/video and creative visual forms. It increases brand affiliation, remembers, and traffic from a highly focused demographic. There are several ad formats and tactics for engaging your target audience on channels such as YouTube, throughout the internet, and on social media, all of which will be examined in-depth in this lesson.
Inbound
Now, let’s examine some inbound channels. As we begin, we have paid search or PPC as it is often referred to. PPC is a kind of inbound advertising in which you pay only when a searcher clicks on your ad on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine. Paid search is critical for gaining visibility when consumers are actively seeking items or solutions. In essence, when a customer becomes aware of your goods via display or social media, for example, they are compelled to act at the appropriate moment. The value of sponsored search lies in user intent — that is, the searcher is seeking a product and is likely to act upon discovery — and this form of traffic is very competitive. Paid search enables you to quickly and simply reach the top of the search results page for the sorts of queries you want to be associated with.
In addition to sponsored search, digital marketers may use SEO, or search engine optimization, tactics. This is the process of generating inbound traffic from search engines’ free, organic, or natural search results. These are the search results that display behind the PPC results, on local search on Google Maps, or in dynamic results such as expanding dropdowns that appear when someone searches on Google. SEO is all about optimizing your website’s appeal to search engines like Google. After that, the search engine will match the websites that provide the correct answer to the user’s search query. In the most effective digital marketing strategy, SEO is used in conjunction with sponsored search to give searchers various channels for accessing your content and purchasing your items online.
Content marketing is a very successful inbound strategy that includes the production, publication, and distribution of content with the goal of increasing brand reputation, awareness, and affinity. You must create an effective content strategy in order to boost your brand’s personality and likability. Nowadays, you cannot just be a product; you must be a brand with values and an active presence in daily life; a brand that posts about ordinary occurrences occurring in places near where your consumer lives, or a brand that publishes stories about a fantastic new artist they want to encourage. You must be more than a commodity. You need to pique people’s attention since everything you do reflects your beliefs and principles. The fundamental value of content marketing is in developing an effective brand personality.
Following that, there is email marketing. Email marketing is a subscription-based inbound channel for delivering adverts, offers, education, and other marketing information straight to the mailbox of an interested user. You can efficiently generate inbound traffic and conversions from your subscribed audience based on the kind of content in your email broadcasts. An email marketing campaign is a genuine chance to getting your content, news, or information into your customer’s hands. The material should compel them to click on any relevant links, visit your website, and take action.
Web analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing, and reporting on web data to understand better and optimize web use. This is where we leverage data to understand better our website visitors and the channels via which they interact with our content, convert, or purchase on our site. Additionally, it helps us understand who they are; for example, their location, the languages they speak, the devices they use (mobile, desktop, or tablet), and whether they have previously visited the site, among other data points that we can use to report on the success of our digital marketing activity and improve future performance.
Finally, digital strategy is the formation of a set of practices and goals that drive your long-term digital objectives and apply to all digital channels that your customers use. The strategy section compiles all of the information you have about your audience — accessible channel choices, budget, and timings — into a plan for using digital media to accomplish a business purpose. Any digital marketer’s digital strategy serves as their road map to success. It will serve as a roadmap for executing the numerous activities necessary to effectively target your audience and eventually accomplish your objective within your budget and timetable. Throughout this program, these nine channels and modules will be addressed in more depth. After completing this course, you will have a firm grasp on how to use them in the numerous digital marketing strategies you will develop for your organization.