The buyer’s journey is how a customer interacts with your brand’s products or services while searching for solutions to fulfill their needs. This path can begin with becoming aware of your brand, including it in their consideration options, and ideally leads to consumption. Technology is starting to dominate commerce, and this journey is shifting to the digital landscape. The digital customer journey can start with a simple web search that beings to open them to touchpoints with brands that offer products they’re looking for. As the customer moves to the next stage of consideration, your brand must stay in the pool of possible companies to purchase from. While in this phase, the consumer is comparing competitors, and your business must keep “In touch” with them by appearing in top places on the search page. This can be done with paid search and display ads, organic search rankings, or paid social media ads. In the purchasing stage, consumers begin more focused search activity by looking for specific brand name products. This signifies that the customer is close to making a purchase.
Throughout this path, brands must try to stay in front of the consumer to win the conversion by appearing on the screen in the form of digital ads, blog posts, and social media ads or activity. This process takes careful planning and comes with financial investment. The first step is drawing out the digital ecosystem a customer would take part in. This includes keywords they would use to search in each stage of the process. Followed by setting the types of touchpoints like search ads and organic links. Next, determine where the touchpoints lead and what actions the customer takes to complete the stage. The next step is to create your ideal customer persona that would take this journey. You would need to determine who they are, how they think, their interests, and how they search for products. After getting to know your customer, you can map out every touchpoint along the journey they take to reach a purchase. It’s imperative to forecast the costs associated with moving your consumers through the journey. This is done by setting budgets, determining how many leads are captured at each stage, and calculating customer acquisition costs. Upon completing this, you can establish the campaign’s return on investment to indicate if your plan would generate positive results.
Next Step
Think about your customers and how they would interact with your business. Begin to map out how you would reach them and which touchpoint would make or break a sale if an outstanding experience wasn’t had. Make sure that these touchpoints are optimized to decrease the chances of losing customers along their purchasing paths.
If you haven’t yet, read my last post on the Theory of Planned Behavior.