Why Knowing Your Buyer's Journey is Important

The methodology of inbound marketing includes attracting strangers on the Internet, converting them into leads, and eventually into delighted customers. But how do you attract these strangers, earn their trust, and form long-term customer relationships? With great content. Great content acts as a magnet to capture your prospects' attention so they come to you.

Before you create this great content, you'll want to know who exactly you’re creating it for. These are your buyer personas – the people you are targeting with your product or service. Once you have a buyer persona, you’re ready to create your buyer’s journeys.

WHAT IS THE BUYER’S JOURNEY?

The buyer’s journey is the path each persona takes in order to become a customer. HubSpot defines the buyer's journey as the active research process potential customers go through leading up to a purchase. In simpler terms, what questions, problems, or opportunities do your potential customers come across that you could help them with? The content you create should target the problems your particular personas are experiencing or any needs they may have. To keep things organized, there are three very important lifecycle stages to consider in the journey:

1. Awareness Stage:

2. Consideration Stage:

3. Decision Stage:

Using the BUyer's Journey

Most companies and marketing teams are guilty of focusing the bulk of their online content on the decision stage (Buy Our Products, Join Our Club, etc.), instead of focusing on the why of their product or service. I know I’ve been guilty of it in the past, but I’ve learned that inbound encourages you to create content for each stage of the buyer's journey because it’s critical to long-term success. Why? It helps build trust and frames your company as a thought leader in your field of business.

Let’s take a look at this through an abbreviated version from one of our own client’s buyer’s journeys:

Client: Video Production Company
Persona: Marketing Molly

Awareness Stage:

Molly is Asking: What type of online marketing solutions will move my company forward?

Content That Could Benefit Her: Checklists, whitepapers, and eBooks on the different ways to market your business online. For example, Tips for Creating Engaging Content.

Consideration Stage:

Now, Molly knows a little more about engaging content through video, and she wants to explore options.

Molly is Asking: Video could be a great solution for telling our company story. What types of video options are there? What is the video process?

Content That Could Benefit Her: Case studies featuring client successes, webinars, and infographics. For example: The Video and Production Process Explained.

Decision Stage:

Molly is Asking: Why do you do video best? Are you right for me?

Content That Could Benefit Her: Culture-focused blog posts by internal employees, video demos, and checklists. For example: How to Prepare For a Video Shoot checklist.

As illustrated above, understanding the questions your buyer persona has at each stage of the buyer's journey helps you better map out the content for each stage. This exercise ensures that your potential customer will be guided through the sales process as they receive answers to their questions at each stage of their journey. HubSpot has simplified this process by providing a free downloadable Content Mapping Template.