Key takeaways:
- A clear buyer journey ensures that marketing efforts have a defined path and goal, preventing aimless strategies.
- Social media is a significant marketing platform, but attention garnered must translate into tangible sales.
- The buyer journey focuses on interactions after initial introduction and aims to convert interested parties into customers.
- Simplifying the buying process and providing clear information are essential to improving the buyer journey.
- Strategies to encourage return visits, such as social media followings and retargeting campaigns, are crucial for customer retention.
- Not all marketing efforts directly convert customers but serve as initial points of contact; a clear path to move customers along the buyer journey is necessary for these strategies to be effective.
We don’t want terminology to confuse us throughout the article, so let’s make it clear outright:
Customer journey is the whole interaction a customer has with your company from the moment he hears about it, ideally to the point of becoming your brand advocate.
Buyer journey is basically a part of the customer journey which begins right where the customer journey does, but ends when the customer makes a first purchase.
Now that nothing stands in our way of describing why a clear buyer journey is so important, let’s get into it.
Every company conscious of the importance of marketing has many different strategies and channels in place. What is crucial though is that these efforts have a clear path and goal. Without a clear understanding of their work together as a unit, marketing becomes shooting into the dark and hoping something will come off it. Even if some strategy is so good that it works independently without being integrated with others, it’s almost always the case it would work even better if it was a part of a broader plan.
For obvious reasons, social media became literally a bedrock of marketing for many companies. If a company is able to produce interesting content and the social media managers know what they are doing, it’s not unusual to get so much attention that it dwarfs any other marketing channels many times over.
But companies are able to reach their target customers even beyond their scrolling sprees. Depending on the nature of the business and target demographics, there are various strategies and types of marketing that can be employed to get a proverbial foot in the door with potential customers.
So getting the attention of a target demographic is not that big of a problem, especially for more established companies. But the attention is pointless if it doesn’t convert the reached audience into real customers who come and buy. There are many examples of companies with significant social media presence that just aren’t able to capitalize on it.
This is the area with a big room for improvement – the buyer journey. How companies interact with the customer AFTER they are introduced.
The first step to improving a buyer journey is to make it as simple as possible to convert those who are ready to buy. Remove all obstacles that can stand in the way of the sale. Especially with social media, the content that got the product or a service so much attention is so good and engaging that viewers forget they can actually buy it or aren’t even aware of this option in the first place. It’s crucial to inform the audience how or where they can get it, mainly in industries where the products or services can’t be simply ordered over the internet.
Sometimes the deficiencies are so big that the customer isn’t sure how the sale or ordering process works or how long it would take, but it can be even subtle details that contribute to a low number of converted customers – insufficient information about products or services that require further clarification before a customer can make a purchase, slow or unhelpful support, order form that’s so long that the potential customer would rather fill his new doctor’s questionnaire again, and so on.
But people aren’t always ready to spend the money immediately after something catches their attention. In this case, think about how you can ensure they will come back. Encourage them to follow you on their favorite social media, prepare a special newsletter where you promise to get back to them only once after some period so they don’t have to keep it on their mind, or use a cleverly designed retargeting PPC campaign where the users who interacted with your website will be reminded of their “unfinished business” with you.
Also remember that not all marketing strategies are meant to directly convert the people they reach – they can merely serve as the first points of contact that will introduce customers to your company or to the problem you’re solving. These wouldn’t make sense investing in without a clear path to move people they engage further on the buyer journey. After they read your blog article, watch your video, or ask a question, there has to be a plan to keep them going.
When all the buyer journey dots are properly connected, your marketing is firing on all cylinders without any shot going into the dark – every single one has a purpose.
