Having an online presence is no longer enough if you don’t keep your buyer journey marketing in mind.
Your web marketing strategy must always consider the buyer journey or customer journey.
It is about the journey of a potential customer (potential buyers), from the first contact with your brand to the decision to buy (and possibly even into loyalty!).
It usually consists of three stages: each stage is a step in the decision-making process.
In this article, we will delve into the importance of the buyer’s journey and suggest KPIs you can use to monitor whether everything is working to the maximum, or whether you can do more.
Have a good trip!
Buyer Journey Marketing: what is it?
The buyer‘s journey, or “buyer’s path,” refers to the path that takes a potential customer from simply being aware of the existence of a product or service, to actually purchasing it.
The 3 stages
The buyer’s journey can be divided into 3 stages, which may vary slightly depending on the context and industry. However, the most common stages are as follows:
- Awareness: at this stage, the potential buyer comes into contact with your brand and becomes aware of the existence of a product or service.
He may have ended up on your website thanks to a well-ranked page on search engines. Or he saw a post on social media, or maybe he got a tip from a friend; - Consideration: in the second stage of the buyer’s journey, the potential customer, after becoming aware of the product or service, begins to examine the available options.
At this stage, he considers whether the product meets his needs or solves a specific problem; - Decision: finally, your potential buyer makes the final decision to proceed with the purchase.
He or she might evaluate different options, compare offers, read testimonials or opinions from other customers, and consider factors such as price, quality, after-sales support, warranties, etc.
Buyer Journey Funnel: why it is important to monitor performance
The buyer journey may vary depending on the type of product or service, industry, and individual customer preferences.
Some buyers may go through the different stages more quickly, while others may need more time and extensive research before making a decision.
Just as buying a T-shirt requires a quicker decision than buying a car, etc.
You should always keep an eye on the buyer journey to optimize your marketing and sales strategy.
By monitoring the performance of all touchpoints you can identify ways to improve your content anduser experience. You will increase the trust of your potential customers and help them along this path smoothly.
To do this, you need to know the people you are targeting well. As we have suggested many times on the Factory blog, always start with buyer personas.
Also draw the customer journey map, imagining the path of your potential customer, all the touchpoints where they will meet your brand, etc.
If you choose an inbound marketing it will be easier to deliver the right content at the right time along the way.
In fact, this methodology consists of creating ad hoc content for your customers at various stages of the journey.
You can combine it with the use of tools for marketing automation to get better results in a shorter time.
Last but not least: the beating heart of this article. Always monitor the results you are getting.
Leverage analytics to understand what works and what doesn’t. Consistently optimizing performance will help you increase sales.
Quantitative KPIs to monitor each stage of the buyer’s journey funnel
Monitoring results is most important. KPIs are metrics that allow us to quantify the effectiveness of our work, reduce expenses, improve ROI. In short, do marketing better.
You can use Analytics embedded in social media, or platforms such as Google Analytics.
If you are familiar with BI, you can try tools like Looker Studio to get a single view of data from different sources.
The more (accurate) data you have, the more reliable the insights will be-they will provide you with an incredibly useful basis for making the right decisions and improving your marketing strategy.
What are the KPIs to consider for each stage of the journey? Here are some suggestions.
1. Awareness phase
- impressions (how many times your content has been viewed);
- Cost per impression (how much each viewing cost you);
- Organic Reach (how wide an audience you can potentially reach);
- Search engine positioning (SEO ranking);
- Bounce rate (how many users leave your site without taking any action);
- Time on page (how much time on average users spend on a page of your site);
- Visitors per page (how many visitors viewed the page on the site).
2. Consideration stage
- Site clicks (how many actions were taken by users on your site);
- Click through rate or CTR (ratio of clicks received to impressions);
- Cost per click (how much did each click on a piece of content cost you);
- Engagement rate (how many comments, reactions and shares a piece of your content has received);
3. Decision stage
- Conversion rate (how many conversions were completed by users? E.g., newsletter sign-up, downloads, form submissions, purchases, etc.);
- Completed transactions (how many sales did you actually complete?);
- Cost per conversion (how much did each conversion cost you?).
It’s not over yet: watch out for customer retention
Now mark this tip well: you must monitor the buying process-that is, make sure that your buyer’s journey continues after the purchase. How? By building customer loyalty.
The so-called “customer retention” and that is the ability of a brand to retain and retain customers is much more profitable and beneficial than the entire buyer’s journey. Every customer is a valuable asset for your company.
To monitor how well you are doing with customer retention you can calculate Customer Loyalty by calculating the percentage of repeat customers out of the total.
Or you can send satisfaction questionnaires, which will give you not only quantitative but also qualitative feedback.
B2C & B2B buyer journey: some tips for interpreting data
To correctly interpret the data that emerged from monitoring, you need to use some critical sense.
For example, if you record a significant increase in awareness and engagement rate metrics, you should also expect an increase in conversions.
Within how long is it reasonable to assume it will occur? It depends on your industry, length of buyer’s journey, etc.
But between increased visibility and increased conversions and sales there should be a constant correlation over time.
How to identify a problem at one stage of the buyer journey funnel
If this does not happen, or if it happens in too long a time, there is probably a hiccup along the buyer’s path in the awareness stage.
Check the touchpoints and marketing channels you are using for this phase, both from a technical and content perspective.
I a/b tests on pcc campaigns and e-mail marketing are very useful here to understand what performs well and what does not. Also carefully curate call-to-actions, which can make a difference in performance and increased conversions.
In other cases, however, through monitoring the buyer’s journey you may detect a decline in user engagement metrics.
In this case, either you’re looking for your buyer personas in the wrong place (e.g., on TikTok instead of Instagram), or the content you’re offering isn’t in line.
Latest useful tips
Always remember to use the results of monitoring to enrich the buyer persona even further: the more data you have, the more effective your subsequent actions will be.
One last tip: Always create reports of results, perhaps helping with visual reporting tools such as Looker Studio, or creating charts with Excel.
On the one hand they will help you better understand the big picture and make appropriate decisions. On the other, they will help you justify your choices to your superiors or clients.
Buyer Journey
Are you interested in learning more about Buyer Journey and Customer Experience? Also read these articles:
- Want to improve the customer experience? Make like Kinder
- Marketing QRcode in your business strategy
- Homer Simpson-style marketing lesson: what (not) to do absolutely
- Customer experience and customer satisfaction! What does the Customer think about you?
- Customer retention: 7 strategies for Business
- Those who do Community Marketing build an empire
- Emotional Marketing: when the brand puts its heart into it
