A couple of weeks ago, we revealed the five key stages of the consumer purchasing journey:

1.     Establishing the consumer’s pain point

2.     Introducing your brand to the consumer

3.     Encouraging the consumer to see that your brand holds the key

4.     Building trust

5.     Showing that your brand is the best option

Today, we want to show you how simple it is to make sure that you are optimising your campaigns to meet your target audience at each stage of this journey.

Using the consumer purchasing journey as a checklist, here’s how you can guide a customer (let’s call him Bill) to making a purchase.

Let’s get started!

1.     Making an introduction

 A ‘pain point’ is any problem that a consumer may face which could be rectified with the right product or service.

For marketers wanting to meet consumers at this stage, they only need to answer two questions:

1.     What value does your product or service provide?

2.     What pain point would this address?

From here, brands should use their campaigns (especially paid media) to create and share a narrative for their brand and engage with their target audiences – not in a salesperson role, but as a provider of entertainment and educational resources.

2. Making a connection

Once Bill has encountered a problem and has become aware of your brand, your campaigns must show Bill how your products (and/ or services) could be the answer to his problem.

One way to do this is through using consumer-focused terminology.

Having conducted thorough research into your target audience, what problems of theirs do your products or services solve? What language does this group use?

For example, if Bill is looking to purchase a violin so that he can fulfil his lifelong dream to learn how to play, will he be looking for a ¾ standard violin, or will he be looking for a beginner-friendly one?

As a beginner, he is unlikely to be familiar with most violin-related jargon. It is the marketer’s responsibility to clarify that for Bill, the best place for ‘beginner-friendly violins’ is their brand.

From here, the marketers could create content online that engages and educates people like Bill about their products. This will also result in growth…

3.     Trust

Privacy and ethical concerns are two huge methods through which marketers can nurture consumer trust.

By ensuring that consumers are fully aware of any information that they share and can review the way that their data is used, customers will feel at ease and trust that their information is not being misused.

Similarly, brands can build trust with their consumers by aligning their views with that of their audience.

But getting to know the exact concerns of your audience requires further research.

For some brands, your target audience may want to know how you help people or causes in their community, while others may be concerned with environmentalism.

Through running brand awareness surveys or observing how consumers interact with your brand on social media (including the discourse surrounding your brand), marketers can get a clearer insight into how consumers like Bill view their brand, what could be improved, and how they can show the steps they are taking to address these concerns in future campaigns.

To keep rolling out bigger and better campaigns, marketers must make sure that they are listening to customers like Bill and tailoring their campaigns to truly meet customers on each step of the purchasing journey.

To learn more about Consumer Purchase Journey, get in contact today.