As you reopen for business, it may be your instinct to try to turn every potential customer from a “prospect” into a “buyer” as quickly as possible. What we need to remember is that people don’t actually think this way. They work hard for their money and want to make absolutely certain that it’s going to the right place before they ever even think about pulling out their cash or credit card.
Creating content that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey — regardless of how many stages there are — is your best chance at doing exactly that.When it comes to actually leveraging the full power of the buyer’s journey to your advantage, you first need to understand the intention behind each individual stage. Consider ones like:
- The Awareness Stage. This is when a prospect is experiencing some type of problem (or is looking for some type of opportunity) and has begun to search for a product or service to help them meet their needs. To take advantage of this, you could create content that expresses sympathy. You understand what they’re going through and you understand what they want. You’re not necessarily trying to “sell” to them with marketing videos at this point, but are merely showing them that you understand their plight better than anyone else.
- The Consideration Stage. This is when your prospects have clearly defined (and given a name) to their problem and are now researching and trying to understand all available approaches and methods for solving it. In this stage, you would craft content that not only reaffirms that you understand the problem in question, but that also outlines how you and you alone can solve it.
- The Decision Stage. This is when a prospect has decided on exactly how they want to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity, and now they’re just looking for the right solution to meet those needs. Here, they’re comparing and contrasting different products and services and the content you create to capitalize on this should now make your own offerings look as enticing as possible.
For the Awareness Stage Content, create educational resources to help people answer some questions and address many of the concerns that they have. For the Consideration Stage, create content that positions you as an expert in your industry — think things like marketing videos, customer reviews, case studies and even FAQ articles.
For the ever-critical Decision Stage, provide people with as much content as you can like free trials, consultations and articles that further their education.
If you have content for every stage of the buyer’s journey, you therefore control the pace at which that journey unfolds. You remain at the top of someone’s mind all during their decision process and, at the end of the day, you go an incredibly long way towards guaranteeing that the partner they choose to meet their needs and exceed their expectations is YOU.
If you’d like to find out more information about creating better customer engagement for your brand through content that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey, or if you just have additional questions that you’d like to discuss with someone in a bit more detail, please don’t delay — contact us. Take a look at some of our content here.
