What is Buyer’s Journey & Why it matters for your business?

If you want to succeed in any business, whether it’s online or offline, it’s essential to understand the buyer’s journey. This is something that occurs in all transactions. Identifying the various stages of this process allows you to refine and improve your marketing. Let’s take a look at the buyer’s journey and why it plays […]

  • If you want to succeed in any business, whether it’s online or offline, it’s essential to understand the buyer’s journey. This is something that occurs in all transactions. Identifying the various stages of this process allows you to refine and improve your marketing. Let’s take a look at the buyer’s journey and why it plays such a crucial role for your business.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

With every sale, no matter how simple or complex, there are a certain series of steps. These vary according to the type of transaction. The buyer’s journey consists of the various stages that take place before, during, and after a sale. These are the typical stages:


  • Awareness – At this initial phase, the potential customer is aware of either a problem or desire. Either the customer identifies this need himself or the idea occurs to him because of something external. If you’re walking down the street, for example, and you see a pizza place, you may suddenly realize you’re hungry. Or you see a TV commercial for a car and you think that maybe it’s time to buy a new car.
  • Consideration – The potential customer is already aware of either a need or a specific product. He or she then thinks about whether or not to buy something. The more serious, expensive, or complicated the item, the more thought and research go into the decision. For example, if you are hungry, you may stop in the first restaurant you pass without thinking much about it. You’ll do more research, however, before buying a car or home.
  • Decision – This is the actual transaction. With a physical business, customers buy products at the cash register. If it’s an online store, items go into an online shopping cart and submitting payment information. Customers order services online using their credit cards or PayPal.
  • Delight – What happens after the sale is also part of the journey. The customer is either pleased or displeased with the purchase. He or she may ask for support. Experiences at this stage determine future behavior. A happy customer may develop loyalty and return in the future.

Depending on your business model, the buyer’s journey is either a simple, linear process or an ongoing loop where buyers return and the “journey” repeats itself.


How to Improve the Buyer’s Journey

Recognizing the buyer’s journey is the first step. What really matters, however, is knowing how to improve it. This means making each stage of the buyer’s journey easier, more comfortable, and more educational. Let’s return to each stage and see how this works.


  • Awareness – This is where advertising, marketing, networking, and content are so crucial. In order to make the most of this stage, it’s especially important to target the right customers and to understand their needs, problems, and desires.
  • Consideration – Your job at this stage is to convince customers that your business offers the best solution. Offering a USP (unique selling proposition) is important to differentiate yourself from the competition. Social proof in the form of reviews and testimonials are also powerful.
  • Decision – Make the actual buying process as convenient as possible. Remember, until the buyer actually submits the payment, there’s no sale. With online sales, shopping cart abandonment is a fairly common issue. This occurs for many reasons. One issue, however, is that customers find the process too complex. Similarly, a customer in a store may choose items and then decide to leave without buying them because the line is too long. That’s why it’s so crucial to present a simple and convenient buying experience for customers.
  • Delight – Offer high-quality support to make sure the customer is completely satisfied. If you’re using a sales funnel, an initial sale hopefully leads to upsells – more expensive products.

The buyer’s journey is always changing. Even if you stay the same, markets, competitors and customers change. That’s why it’s important to adapt and evolve. Test and track to identify areas where you need to improve. For example, customers at the awareness stage might need more information. Or your customer support at the post-sale stage may need an upgrade. Always look for ways to make each stage of the buyer’s journey easier, more informative, and more pleasant.

If you want to learn how to get more leads and sales from your business website, contact us.

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4 Reasons why your Marketing efforts are not paying off or converting?

Marketing looks simple from the outside, but it’s never as simple as it seems. After all, what do you need besides a great product or service, a catchy slogan, and a good deal? Well, sometimes that’s all you need… other times you need a bunch of other factors on your side. So if you, like […]

Marketing looks simple from the outside, but it’s never as simple as it seems. After all, what do you need besides a great product or service, a catchy slogan, and a good deal? Well, sometimes that’s all you need… other times you need a bunch of other factors on your side. So if you, like me, were wondering why your marketing efforts weren’t getting you slew of sales and new customers, these might be some of the reasons.

  • 1. You Don’t Know Who You’re Aiming At : If you run a business, you want to keep it as open to the public as possible. Anyone, young or old, men and women, from all walks of life, are potential clients. But when you’re marketing yourself and your business, you need to know who you’re aiming at. Because if you’re crafting a message, you have to ask who’s going to hear it. Are you aiming at older homeowners who need help around the house? Does your product appeal to teens who want to be in on the latest trend? Or are you talking to young, single professionals?

    What you say is important. Who you’re saying it to can make the difference when it comes to customer conversion.


  • 2. No One Is Listening : If a tree falls in a forest, and no one’s around to see it or hear it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still lying on the forest floor. What it does mean is that, for all intents and purposes, the tree may as well not exist.

    The same is true of your marketing, if no one is actually seeing it.

    You can create the most perfect video ad, but if it’s going to have an effect, people have to watch it. Flyers need to be seen, blogs need to be read, etc., etc. That’s why it isn’t enough to come up with a great marketing idea; you need to make sure you get it in front of potential clients’ eyes. That means promotion, and the search to figure out which venues net you the best results.


  • 3. You Have Competition : Every business has to deal with competition. Whether it’s that chain restaurant on the other side of town, the big box bargain store, or the corporate heavyweight, there’s always someone trying to do the same thing you’re doing. Your job, in this instance, is to do something your competition doesn’t do.

    That extends to your advertising, as well.

    Whether it’s offering a deal for new customers, pushing the fact that you’re a local business instead of a chain store, or making your service seem more personable and professional, your marketing has to make you seem different. And you need to deliver on the promises you make.


  • 4. You Need A Better Call to Action : A call to action is when you tell your audience what you want them to do. Whether it’s following your Facebook page, calling to make an appointment, or coming into the store to shop, you need to be clear with what you want your audience to do. Pick a single call to action, or two at the most, and put your emphasis on that. Because once you have your audience’s attention, you need to direct it to a specific end. Otherwise they’ll wriggle away, and continue on with whatever they were doing.
These are just a few of the reasons your marketing might not be getting you the results you expected. If you’re looking for more advice on how you can correct your course, and start getting the attention and conversions you’re looking for, simply contact us today!

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The Benefits of Buyer Personas and How to Get Started?

Unless you’re completely new to marketing, you know about the importance of defining your target audience. A cross section of your average customer helps you better target your efforts, and focus your messaging. Still, a simple demographic profile of your current customers may not be enough to help you succeed in creating a marketing strategy […]

  • Unless you’re completely new to marketing, you know about the importance of defining your target audience. A cross section of your average customer helps you better target your efforts, and focus your messaging.

  • Still, a simple demographic profile of your current customers may not be enough to help you succeed in creating a marketing strategy that actually resonates with your audience. That’s where buyer personas enter the equation.

What are Buyer Personas?

In many ways, buyer personas are derivative of your target audience. Rather than consisting of numbers, they take your audience research and present it in the form of a hypothetical, ideal customer. Here’s how one marketing platform defines the concept:

“A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. [It is built on] customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.”

Think of your buyer persona as the personification of your target audience. Rather than simply trying to target your marketing for females, 25-34 years old, with an income between $50,000 and $70,000, you’re looking to target Liz, a 29 year-old accountant. And as it turns out, personifying your audience research comes with a number of considerable benefits.


3 Benefits of Buyer Personas for Your Business

  • Buyer Personas Help You Understand Your Audience Needs – Putting a face to your target audience helps you better understand the situation in which your audience needs your product or service. If your goal is to create and communicate actual value, consider that 82% of companies using personas have improved their value proposition as a result.
  • Buyer Personas Help You Create More Personalized Content – Naturally, a better understanding of your audience helps you create content more personalized to their needs. Considering the significant advantages of marketing personalization, buyer personas can play a crucial role in helping you cut through the clutter and increase the effectiveness of your messaging.
  • Buyer Personas Increase Your Lead Generation Effectiveness – Research shows that B2B marketers who use buyer personas are 4 times more likely to exceed their lead generation goals. One case study saw a 97% increase in total leads, and 126% increase in qualified leads simply by utilizing the concept. In short, personas can (and should) play a vital role for any company looking to optimize their lead generation.

Of course, these are just a few of the many benefits that embracing buyer personas can bring for your business. Your marketing, sales, and even product development efforts can all benefit from the concept. The only thing you need to do is understand how to build your own.



buyer's persona

How to Get Started in Building Your Buyer Personas

Generally speaking, your business should build (or model) more than one persona. Even if your target audience is relatively homogeneous, some variations typically do exist and are important to account for. Most businesses focus on 3 to 4 individual personas to cover about 90% of their existing customers and leads.

The first key to success, of course, is comprehensive audience research. Put simply, you need to have a comprehensive quantitative understanding of your target audience. But qualitative aspects are important as well; try to use focus groups, surveys, and interviews to gauge your audience’s deeper-lying needs and wants.

Use our Free Persona Template to create buyer personas for your own business. Ultimately, you’ll want your efforts to result in a single sheet for each persona that sums up both their demographics and their desires.

Creating buyer personas is a complex process. But as outlined above, the benefits for your business can be significant. For help in optimizing your marketing and sales strategy through the use of personas, contact us.

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Why We Don’t Sell Any Project Without Discovery?

To us, our process is everything. It defines our work, and sets the course for us to produce results that will not just make our clients happy, but that we are proud of as well. Our core values remain the same for every project we take on, and one element remains steadfast: Discovery. Truly the […]

  • To us, our process is everything. It defines our work, and sets the course for us to produce results that will not just make our clients happy, but that we are proud of as well. Our core values remain the same for every project we take on, and one element remains steadfast: Discovery.

  • Truly the heart of our process, we stand by our principle that we don’t sell any project without discovery. This is for several reasons, and we will delve into these so you can get to know us and our work process a little better.

What Is The Discovery Process?

Clients and customers often find the discovery process tedious and boring, but it is absolutely vital for success. For example, take a doctor-patient relationship as a comparison. When you have a physical ailment, you turn to the doctor (an expert) with your problem.

You describe the symptoms, because that is all you are currently aware of but you often do not have a solution in mind. Doctors, on the other hand, are trained in processes to find the solution to your ailment. They have their own methods of diagnosis, and ask you specific questions to get to the heart of the matter.

In the same vein, we operate in a similar manner. When we are approached with a problem, whether it is a sales, conversion, or productivity problem, we understand what we need to do. To us, it is a description of symptoms plaguing your organization and we understand what questions need to be asked to get to the core issues.



What Is Our Discovery Process?

Simply put, we do a deep dive into your business. But we do not stop there because for us, it is about creating a holistic picture of your business. This means understanding the market and your position within it, the key competitors, major stakeholders and your business process.

We examine each aspect carefully and deliberately to make sure we have the full information needed to provide solutions that will ensure long-term success and sustainability. During this process, complacency is not an option and we know how much power lies within the information gained during the discovery process. Fully examining the market, key demographics and who the target audience is are just parts of the puzzle we put together to find solutions to your pain points.



Why Is The Discovery Process Necessary?

The discovery process is necessary for several reasons.
  • It increases project success – A project is only successful when all parties communicate, and are aware of what the problems are, what solutions may be used and how to go about the process. The discovery process is the first step in laying the groundwork to ensure a successful project where each party is happy with the results.

    Ultimately, much of the project’s success will lie in how robust the findings are from the discovery process. The latter informs many of the decisions made, and it is imperative that all of the information is available and provided in order to maximize time and resources.
  • It helps you understand the competition – The discovery process is also an opportunity to understand your competition, and what to learn from them (or what not to do). The findings from a discovery project can be leveraged in many different ways, especially in understanding your place in the market.

    It is also imperative because it helps you set yourself apart from the competition. By learning what other players in the space are doing, your business can use the information found to decide what needs to be done to separate yourself from the rest. Use that information to inform the rest of your project, and as a way to grow and evolve as a business.
  • Understanding buyer persona, customer journey, and business process is a key to success – Running a successful web business requires a great deal of thought, and a vast amount of data. Luckily, the discovery process will cut most of the work in half for you. One of the key drivers of successful web businesses is understanding the customer from start to finish, and how to make your processes more efficient.

    Not only does the discovery process help you understand who you are selling to, and what appeals to them but it also demonstrates how this target demographic makes purchasing decisions.

    Once you have successfully understood how to position yourself to be as appealing to your buyers as possible, that is half the work done. The discovery process will also shed light on your business process, and where there are redundancies and inefficiencies and how best to mitigate these problems.

To learn more about how our discovery process sets web businesses up for long-term success, please contact us.



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